Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
Also in Surely You’re Joking, Mr.Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency.Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas–which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it.This method became organized, of course, into science.And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age.It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked–or very little of it did.
But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth.And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.
Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did.And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed.First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences.I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that.Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place;you should go visit there).Then I became overwhelmed.I didn’t realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean.One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her.Right away I began thinking, “Gee!How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?”
I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, “I’m, uh, studying massage.Could I practice on you?” “Sure,” she says.They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.I think to myself, “What a nifty line!I can never think of anything like that!” He starts to rub her big toe.”I think I feel it,” he says.”I feel a kind of dent–is that the pituitary?” I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!” They looked at me, horrified–I had blown my cover–and said, “It’s reflexology!” I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That’s just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me.I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger.So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys.He didn’t do any mindreading that succeeded;nobody can read my mind, I guess.And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened.Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger.Nothing happened.So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe?(And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate.There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down–or hardly going up–in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods.There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work.It ought to be looked into;how do they know that their method should work?Another example is how to treat criminals.We obviously have made no progress–lots of theory, but no progress–in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific.We study them.And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience.A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way–or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one.Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science.In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land.They’re doing everything right.The form is perfect.It looks exactly the way it looked before.But it doesn’t work.No airplanes land.So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing.But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system.It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones.But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science.That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly.It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards.For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it:other causes that could possibly explain your results;and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it.If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.There is also a more subtle problem.When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory;but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution;not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
Read more http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
