Cargo Cult Science

In the Solomon Islands, as many people know, the natives didn't understand the airplanes which came down during the war and brought all kinds of goodies for the soldiers. So now they have airplane cults. They make artificial landing strips and they make fires along the landing strips to imitate the lights and this poor native sits in a wooden box he's built with wooden earphones with bamboo sticks going up to represent the antenna and turning his head back and forth, and they have radar domes made of wood and all kinds of things hoping to lure the airplanes to give goods to them. They're imitating the action. It's just what the other guy did. Well, a hell of a lot of our modern activity in many, many fields is that kind of sicence. Just like aviation. That's a science. The science of education, for example, is no science at all. It's a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to carve those things out, those wooden airplanes. Penology, prison reform-to understand why people do crimes; look at the world-we understand it more and more with our modern understanding of these things. More about education, more about crime; the scores on the tests are going tdown and there's more people in prison; young people are commiting crimes, we just don't understand it all. It just isn't working, to discover things about these things by using the scientific method in the type of imitation which they are using now.

Richard Feynman, Mr. Feynman builds a Universe

• pseudoscience
• science
• scientific method