"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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their scientific integrity demands. All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, 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 wherever 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 covered 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 Anumberone experiment. That is the experiment that makes ratrunning experiments sensible, 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 ratrunning. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, 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 not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science. Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated that you can do again and get the same effect statistically, even. They run a million rats no, it's people this time they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science? This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous
to have such a policy in teaching to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity. So I have just one wish for you the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. Scan Notes, v4.0: Proofed carefully, italics intact.
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
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Preface The stories in this book we
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He Fixes Radios by Thinking! Part 1
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could act like a microphone, and yo
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whole afternoon to find a burnedo
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For logarithms it was a big L exten
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very sharp knife into the table at
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and be more relaxed, and vice versa
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One time I danced with a certain gi
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same waitress all the time. I notic
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"Cut it out, Feynman; this is seri
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could find. Before I tell you what
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observations were made while I was
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I decided there must be an "interpr
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company. His father was the one who
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we could do. Our process was pretty
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out of me, because I didn't like fo
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In the Princeton cyclotron lab they
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When it was time to get up and go o
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and animal, are made of little bric
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some other experiment. I said, "Hel
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We figured if we could get rid of t
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do?" I said I didn't know, and he s
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always something I could find in th
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Atlantic City, where they had vario
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though it was a microscope of forty
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lowing" it occurred. I followed eig
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I asked the Bell Labs if they would
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the fuse won't burn! I decided that
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that he wanted to try to develop. H
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Mexico," the man says, "Oh, so all
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meantime, what instructions go down
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said, "No codes." So I wrote back t
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I looked at it and said, "That look
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people that I wanted were there, an
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different where you go first t
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concentrate on this one. So they st
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it was very difficult. Now, us
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was radioactive. It was plutonium.
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One guy tries to make something to
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Everybody was amazed. It was comple
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it appeared, depends on the same li
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Hoffman is just the kind of guy to
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mathematical constant?" "Oh, no!" d
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of little cubbyholes that contained
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himself! So I turn around, and sure
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"No. Do you?" "Well, I'm keeping an
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partly in the strength of our futur
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have any room either. I say to the
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answered the questions. Everything
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around faster than the wobbling. I
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ar, with all its "temptations," and
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level. . . "Excuse me, sir," I say,
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I liked to imitate being drunk, so
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you been?" At this moment the guy t
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"What?" "That's right," he said con
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After that, I tried to do those thi
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He was completely washed out, and l
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Monday, at the latest. I got all up
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The people from the airlines were s
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The boss said, "Where're you from?"
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eaches, where most people felt thei
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super: He answered everything nifty
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y first learning to pronounce the l
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Certainly, Mr. Big! I used to cross
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We were eating breakfast in the din
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"That must have been it," I said. I
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some kind of big pain, and it start
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the two piles of hay, with the extr
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I must refuse. The reason I have to
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hotel. I pushed open the doors and
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"Well, yes. . ." "Hoompf." And that
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something like, "May I observe your
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in fact, a prediction on top of wha
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"The one from SoandSo's book."
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government, or else I can't talk in
Page 153 and 154: et Jerry that he wouldn't be able t
Page 155 and 156: at the paper. Don't take your eyes
Page 157 and 158: She told me this story: She and her
Page 159 and 160: were these fluorescent colors on bl
Page 161 and 162: they came back and bought it. So th
Page 163 and 164: with the artists from time to time
Page 165 and 166: understand," and everybody else wou
Page 167 and 168: way to understand ethical problems
Page 169 and 170: families all the time, so that if a
Page 171 and 172: that they called "new math," and si
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Page 175 and 176: then there was something else. And
Page 177 and 178: one. Then the question came up, "Wi
Page 179 and 180: I got that shock about three or fou
Page 181 and 182: had been brought up by my father ag
Page 183 and 184: She turned to me and said, "Oh! You
Page 185 and 186: astronomy. *When I was a young prof
Page 187 and 188: After the colloquium at UCLA Profes
Page 189 and 190: So the fella who'd been talking to
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Page 193 and 194: who had come out at the beginning o
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Page 197 and 198: my way down again. At first it took
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Page 203: think to laymen. For example, I was
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

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