“We really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes 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 for 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 percepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
--Richard P. Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science,” in
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!":Adventures of a Curious Character, (Norton, 1985)
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