In a commencement at Caltech in 1974,
Richard Feynman spoke of the need to relate integrity to our search for
truth. “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.”
We are the greatest obstacle to
truth, Dr. Feynman suggests. Our
theories take on a momentum as we invest ego, money, and time. And sometimes the most difficult thing we can
do—but the one essential thing we must do—is to be utterly honest with
ourselves as we look for reasons as to why our theory is not valid. “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“
