On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds into its flight, killing all seven people on board. It was a major setback for NASA and the Space Shuttle program. In the months that followed, NASA underwent a full investigation by the Rogers Commission.

Among the scientists who studied the shuttle disaster was Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics. Feynman was a vocal critic of NASA, and he was not swayed by politics or public pressure.

During the Rogers Commission’s inquiries, NASA officials denied that faulty gaskets and a below-freezing launch temperature caused the disaster. Feynman, however, disagreed. During a public hearing, Feynman took a small piece of the gasket material, crimped it with a small clamp, and deposited the clamp in ice water. In front of NASA officials and multiple news reporters, he explained, “I took the stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, [the material] doesn’t stretch back, it stays the same dimension. . . . I believe that has some significance for our problem.”

Feynman cut through the complexities of NASA and showed, in a very simple way, that sub-freezing temperatures degraded the gaskets used in the shuttle. His demonstration was played repeatedly on national news programs and has been cited countless times by experts in many fields. At a time of high complexity and uncertainty, Feynman brought simplicity and clarity in a way that no one else had.

Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur, investor, and founder of the Virgin Group, said it this way, “Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.” The Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of skill acquisition suggests that people are not experts, or at least they are not the best experts, until they can effectively manage the complexity of their field of expertise.

All human progress can be summarized as a process of bringing order out of chaos. The best experts are masters of order, masters of clarity, and masters of simplicity.