From ZeroHedge:
What do real scientists have to say about sciences that are not so real?*There is no way his IQ was the self-reported 125. Besides the insatiable curiosity of the journalist he had a 'magic' mind.
Born in 1918, Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in a variety of fields where he made an immeasurable contribution, including quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and particle physics. He was also credited with introducing the concept of nanotechnology, a breakthrough that holds so much promise today.
A professor at the California Institute of Technology, Feynman helped popularize physics through lectures and books which he made more accessible to the general public. He received many honors for his work throughout his life. He was elected to the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Science and the Royal Society of London. He was recently ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.
Many insights he left us with go beyond the world of physics. And we would be wise to pay close attention to them.
A Critique of the Social Sciences
Looking back at his own experience, Feynman was keenly aware of how easy our experiments can deceive us and thus of the need to employ a rigorous scientific approach in order to find the truth. Because of this, he was highly critical of other sciences which did not adhere to the same principles.
The social sciences are a broad group of academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups and individuals, including anthropology, geography, political science, psychology and several others. Here is what he had to say about them in a BBC interview in 1981:
“Because of the success of science, there is a kind of a pseudo-science. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science. They follow the forms. You gather data, you do so and so and so forth, but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere – yet. Maybe someday they will, but it’s not very well developed.
“But what happens is, at an even more mundane level, we get experts on everything that sound like they are sort of scientific, expert. They are not scientists. They sit at a typewriter and they make up something like ‘a food grown with a fertilizer that’s organic is better for you than food grown with a fertilizer that is inorganic’. Maybe true, may not be true. But it hasn’t been demonstrated one way or the other. But they’ll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become experts on foods, organic foods and so on. There’s all kinds of myths and pseudo-science all over the place.
“Now, I might be quite wrong. Maybe they do know all these things. But I don’t think I’m wrong. See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have about checking your experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.
“And therefore, I see how they get their information. And I can’t believe that they know when they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know and that they are intimidating people by it. I think so. I don’t know the world very well but that’s what I think.”
To be fair, such disciplines seek to uncover and understand very complex relationships involving a volatile and even unpredictable human element. But the point that Feynman was making is that, rather than acknowledging this limitation, experts in these fields present their findings as truths, without employing the same rigor as in the physical sciences.
In the interview, Feynman singled out nutrition as an example, which has actually made progress in recent years as far as the scientific method is concerned (although everyone is still getting fat). There is, however, another social science whose “experts” have come to influence, directly or indirectly, generations of millions of people around the world. And this one fits perfectly with what he was describing....MORE
Some previous posts on Feynman:
Thinking About Science
For guidance I often seek out a bongo drummer-slash-raconteur.Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online
We post this once a year, usually around Nobel Prize time.
Here's the musician riffing on science...
To Celebrate Today's Award of the Nobel Prize in Physics Here are Twenty Physics Jokes
Economists and Econophysics
3-D Printing and Nano and Robots, Oh My
"Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields"
How to Tell Crazy From Brainpower Intensive
Richard Feynman: "THE RELATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION"
