One thing you may pick up as you go along in life is this notion that if you want to know what’s going on in the world today, rewind a few decades and see what really bright people were worried about.
Yesterday we discussed the massive dollar cost associated to great leaps in technology, as evidenced by The Manhattan Project (which will be depicted in the upcoming film, Oppenheimer, from director Christopher Nolan).
One name that popped up in the comments was Richard Feynman, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists of his time (he died in 1988) and a Nobel Prize winner. Here’s famed scientist Kip Thorne sharing stories of his genius; here’s his daughter Michelle talking about ‘Growing Up Feynman’; and here’s a mildly unsettling “super projection” of him delivering a lecture in the most Star Wars way possible.
This morning I revisited his commencement address to Caltech in 1974 on “Cargo Cult Science.” You can hear the transcript read aloud here:
Let’s glean some wisdom that may serve us:
“During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it.
“This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did.
“But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.
“Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk to talk about that I can’t do it in this talk.
“I’m overwhelmed.”
In his address, Feynman observes while things like reading comprehension in classrooms are extensively “studied” (and as another example, crime on our streets), very little of this so-called analysis has led to improved outcomes any more than witch doctors could:
“Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience.
“A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
“So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.”
Feynman compares this type of science to the infamous “Cargo Cults” that sprung up among South Pacific Islanders following World War II:
“During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.
“They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.
“So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
“Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system.”
This brief clip found on the Trilo Byte YouTube page does a good job of summarizing this -- though you might notice something odd where it lands at the very end.
Yep -- it’s aliens, man! This clip was pulled from the “Chariots, Gods, and Beyond” episode of the “History” Channel’s Ancient Aliens. If that that doesn’t sound like what Feynman was concerned about in 1974, I don’t know what would.
Lest you think Feynman was simply dunking on obvious pseudoscience in his address, let’s get to the real meat of his argument, because here’s where Elon Musk and SpaceX come in:
But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards.
For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
This is a good time to point out I have never heard Elon Musk referred to as a leading mind in physics. Here’s Snopes.com, which dug through the murky cloud around his undergraduate degree:
The University of Pennsylvania considers Musk to be a graduate of both the economics department and the physics department. Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career.
This cloudy issue of which exact year he graduated is unsurprising. The more you read about Elon, the more you’re likely to trip over examples of him appearing to hypebeast for some future reality more fungible than he at first made it appear.
Of course, Elon famously dropped out of Stanford after two days.
What catches my attention here isn’t Elon’s lack of a graduate degree (or patents), it’s the increasing level of junk science he purports to believe, and the at-times ludicrous plans he has suggested will happen during a future Mars Mission.
(You might view the “purports” in that sentence as legal cover, but it’s also perhaps impossible to know what Elon really believes when one can plainly observe a drooling thirst to share things his fans want.)
In that 1974 lecture, Feynman told us they can’t teach scientific integrity. You earn it through scientific rigor and peer analysis:
“But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
One could grab any number of examples of Elon fooling himself, but how about the time he thought he knew better than over 60 years of NASA experience around rocket pad design, trenches and flame diverters and instead destroyed the launch pad and torched perfectly-fine support vehicles?
(And yes, I know they’re fixing it as fast as they can — It still appears they’re lucky the launch didn’t crash into the too-close fuel farm).
Elon’s 4/20 launch also sparked concerns of an environmental disaster, something Elon laughed off as insignificant during a Twitter Spaces post-mortem:
“Yeah, I think, you know if you say, like, for practical purposes… I think if you were to say, like, like, like at this point, like, you know, look at an aerial picture of the area, and apart from the area around the launch stand, tell me where things are damaged. It’s actually… you can’t even see it at this point. So it’s not like the rocket, you know, uses non-toxic propellants, um… And you know, so it discounted [sic] a lot of dust, but to the best of our knowledge there has not been any meaningful damaged environment... uh, that we’re aware of.”
One could say a comment like that ought to set off more alarm bells.
Here’s how Feynman concluded his address in 1974:
...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.
Gives you quite a lot to think about when reflecting on the privatization of the Space industry, and SpaceX’s increasing dominance even as many of the company’s long-term goals (like colonizing Mars) seem further away than ever.
Tax Musk. Fund NASA. Get a different result.
Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.