Science Is Best When The Data Is An Open Book

Editor's Blog





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Data needs to be an open book if science is to be made more reliable. Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr, CC BY-SA

It was 1986, and the American space agency, NASA, was reeling from the loss of seven lives. The space shuttle Challenger had broken apart about one minute after its launch.

A Congressional commission was formed to report on the tragedy. The physicist Richard Feynman was one of its members.

NASA officials had testified to Congress that the chance of a shuttle failure was around 1 in 100,000. Feynman wanted to look beyond the official testimony to the numbers and data that backed it up.