This speech is arguably the greatest speech on science ever presented. - Julius Sanks"...Dr Feynman...In 1974 he gave the CalTech commencement speech. This speech is arguably the greatest speech on science ever presented.
- Why?
- Because in it, he examines completeness...
For those who are unfamiliar with the Cargo Cult, it appeared in various forms in Melanesia during the early to mid-20th Century.
The best known, and the one to which Dr Feynman refers, was the John Frum Movement.
During World War II, these cultists observed the belligerents using aircraft to move cargo, either by air-drop or landing on airstrips.
Wanting this wealth for themselves, though knowing nothing about aviation, they tried to replicate factors they had observed.
As Dr Feynman put it:
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.
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
