Page 76 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Richard P. Feynman

be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and
your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not
lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong,
that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our respon-
sibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend
who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and as-
tronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications
of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but
then we won't get support for more research of this kind " I think that's
kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you
should explain to the layman what you're doing—and if they don't want
to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to
test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide
to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a
certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both
kinds of results.
I say that's also important in giving certain types of government ad-
vice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a
hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in
some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're
not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to
come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can
use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they
don't publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I
was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department.
One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went
something like this—it had been found by others that under certain cir-
cumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if
she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her pro-
posal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they
still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory
the experiment of the other person—to do it under condition X to see if
she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed.
Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought
she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor.
And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has
already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about
1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to
repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and
see what happens.
Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even
in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment

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