Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) is one of my heroes. Like my late father (another one of my heroes), Feynman was born in the then largely Jewish neighborhood of Far Rockaway, in the New York City borough of Queens. Feynman, one of history’s greatest theoretical physicists, was a genius and an iconoclast. Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII and shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics. He was famous for his lectures to freshman year physics students at Caltech (his lectures were often attended by other Caltech professors and graduate students and were transcribed and compiled into a series of books and recordings; I own sets of both). Feynman also played the bongos and wrote some very funny books.1
Feynman first used the term cargo cult science during his 1974 commencement address at Caltech.2 The term refers to anthropologic observations of the behavior of certain primitive South Pacific islanders who witnessed and experienced first hand the arrival and build up of American might during the U.S. military’s island-hopping campaign toward the eventual defeat of Imperial Japan. The islanders observed the construction of runways, radio shacks and control towers and the arrival of cargo-laden military aircraft (C-47s, I would think), bringing all sorts of never before seen wonders. At night, the islanders noticed the lighting of bonfires alongside the runways, which, it turned out, were used to guide pilots to safe landings in the dark.
After the war, American forces abandoned their island airstrips, leaving behind the islanders, now bereft of the wondrous material goods which the wartime aviators and their giant cargo planes had previously brought to the islands in once unimagined abundance. Believing in their innocent ignorance that recreating the wartime appearance of their island would bring the return of the cargo planes and their bounty, the islanders set about rebuilding runways, radio huts and control towers, using nothing but their native materials. Of course, despite their beliefs and best efforts, no cargo planes returned. The unique conditions that existed during wartime were not to exist again, and no amount of primitive belief, wishful thinking, or self deception would change reality.
Feynman used the term cargo cult science as an admonishment to beware the risks of faulty thinking and the dangerous deceptions of pseudoscience. In today’s highly politicized atmosphere, cargo cult science is all too common.
- “Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
- See https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html and be sure to read the whole thing. Feynman had an unmistakable way with words and ideas.