Page 75 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Cargo Cult Science

certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will—
including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed,
not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other
experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were
wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with
your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and ex-
citement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't
tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity,
this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in
much of the research in cargo cult science.
A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject
and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Neverthe-
less, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why
the planes don't land—but they don't land.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of
the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge
on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer
which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he
had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at
the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan.
If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger
than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the
next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a
number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's
apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that
was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—
and they would look for and find a reason why something might be
wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't
look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off,
and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and
now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having
utter scientific integrity—is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't
specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope
you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the
easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After
you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just
have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but
something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the lay-
man when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what
to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or some-
thing like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to

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