Here is a contribution in the form of an adress from a distinquished professor of physics; I wish to put this here as a reply because today I had a discussion with a professor who needs the advice badly, its a great address and useful, so we can all enjoy it.
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of 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 that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.
At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.
One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"
I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.
That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mind reading and bending keys. He didn't do any mind reading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe?
continued at link below;
continued at link below Political and Sociological essays;
contine by selecting item 2 all others are excellent as well.
gasresources.net
1. The Collision of Science and Junk-science:
The distinction between modern petroleum science and the nonsense about a "biological-origin-of-petroleum" [BOOP].
2. "Cargo Cult Science":
Richard Feynman, Commencement Address, California Institute of Technology, 1974, [an extended comment on BOOP].
3. "Cognitive Processes and Suppression of Sound Scientific Ideas":
J. Sacherman, 1997, [An interesting essay on the herd behavior of academic scientists, and an explanation for the anomalous toleration for BOOP among American scientists].
4. "Conduct and Misconduct in Science."
The abuses of anonymous peer review in American academia, Goodstein, D., (1996), Conduct and Misconduct in Science, in The Flight from Science and Reason, P. R. Gross, N. Levitt, and M. W. Lewis, New York, New York Academy of Sciences, 775: 31-38.
5. Rebuttal of article in Nature Reports (12 August 2002):
A typical example of misrepresentation of modern petroleum science by the British/American geo-media.
6. The Plagiarism of Modern Russian Petroleum Science:
An abbreviated review of the attempted plagiarism the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins.
gasresources.net |
