Page 77 - The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

Cargo Cult Science

done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where
a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results
to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from some-
one else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different
apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time
on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive
apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus
because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of
programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more
money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are
destroying—possibly—the value of the experiments themselves, which is
the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters
there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands,
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For ex-
ample, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds
of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named
Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all
along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side
where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at
the third door down from where he started them off. No. The rats went
immediately to the door where the food had been the time before,
The question was, how did the rats know because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from
the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the
textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could
tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used
chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell.
Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the
arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he cov-
ered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded
when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor
in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally
was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If
he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experi-
ment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensi-
ble, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what
you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what
conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything
in an experiment with rat-running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experi-
ment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never
used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very
careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and
paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are

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