Feynman and Stephen Schneider

Cover of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynm...

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One of the men that I admire is the late, great Dr. Richard Feynman. He was a great physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics and invented the Feynman diagram, which helps to visualize and calculate the interactions between sub atomic particles. Feynman was also quite a character in his personal life and relished being unconventional both in his scientific work and in his day to day life.  He was eager to promote science and loved teaching at Caltech. One of his most famous speeches was the commencement address he gave at Caltech in 1974. In this speech he discussed the meaning of science and the difference between real science and what he called. “cargo cult” science. You can find the whole speech here, and also in the last chapter of his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. Here are some excerpts I want to bring up.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s
the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but
they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some
wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling
feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science.
hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other
tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.

information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or


the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to

Now, I want to contrast these sentiments with the ones expressed by Dr. Stephen Schneider. Dr Schneider is most famous for certain remarks he made concerning the problem of global warming.


Dr. Schneider claims that this is a misquote from Discover Magazine, and it would be only fair to take him at his word. He discusses this quote and the difficulty of balancing science and activism here. Read the whole thing.

I think that Dr. Schneider was not, in fact, misquoted. That is to say that the words may not have been quoted entirely accurately, nevertheless, the words above do reflect his attitude regarding the necessity of scientific accuracy. Consider his complaint to Jonathon Schell.

I expressed my frustration to Jonathan Schell, a Pulitzer-prize-winning writer doing a story on the contentious climate debate for Discover magazine. I guess my first mistake was to be a bit tongue-in-cheek — I painted a stark picture of the opposing viewpoints in the climate change debate: gloom-and-doom stories from deep ecology groups and others versus pontifications on uncertainties from big industry and others, who used that to argue against preemptive action. I complained that even though I always make a point in my interviews to discuss the wide range of possibilities, from catastrophic to beneficial, media stories rarely convey the entire range. All too often, a scientist’s viewpoint is boxed into one extreme or the other. Usually, but not always, I am put in the “it is a big problem” box rather than the “it is too uncertain to do anything” box, even though I acknowledge both perspectives have some plausible arguments. (See the opening paragraph in my review of Lomborg for Scientific American).

I tried to explain to Schell how to be both effective and honest: by using metaphors that simultaneously convey both urgency and uncertainty, and also by producing supporting documents of all types and lengths (see the “scientist popularizer”). Unfortunately, this clarification is absent from the Discover article, and this omission opened the door for fifteen years of subsequent distortions and attacks. Ironically, this is the consummate example of my grievance about problems arising from short reports of long interviews.

Read what Dr. Feynman says above one more time. There isn’t any conflict between being honest and effective. The scientist, speaking as a scientist, must always err on the side of honesty. He must be willing to say “I don’t know” or “the data is uncertain” even if he believes that the fate of the Earth is in question. This is a matter of scientific credibility. If a scientist fudges, makes up data or scenarios, then he damages the credibility of every scientist in the world.

There is more. Karl Popper was a philosopher of science who introduced the idea of falsification in science. That is to say, a scientific hypothesis is only valid to the extent that it can be falsified, that is, proven wrong. If a hypothesis can not be falsified either by experiment or observation, then it is not really scientific. Now, a problem is that climate change hypotheses can be difficult to falsify. You have to do a lot of painstaking observations of past temperature changes using methods that are not always very reliable. There is a lot of guesswork involved. When you consider how complex the interactions in the Earth’s atmosphere are, any calculations concerning long term climate changes can at best be expressed as probabilities. It may seem obvious that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the greenhouse effect and lead to global warming, the matter is far more complicated. They are many circumstances that may mitigate or even aggrevate the effect. With that in mind consider this.




He seems to admit the difficulties. And yet, he seems to be saying that the usual procedure is not good enough. Note, he laments the fact that politicians and political bodies favor the objective approach, that is to say, want actual proof that there is a threat before committing resources to fighting it.


I am not sure I am following Dr Schneider here. First he admits the certainty of climate science, laments that people in charge of resources want some degree of certainty, then, states that contrarian opinions are based on fictional assumptions. He complains that scientifitcally-based climate change claims have been weakened, but what scientifically based claims? He said before how difficult it is to make any claims. He accuses the Bush administration of misusing climate science, but what of his peers, who feel it is necessary to make matters more certain that they actually are.

I may be more than a little unfair picking on Stephan Schneider. Reading through this piece, shows he does have a good grasp of the uncertainties of the subject and he does sincerely want to educate the public without condescension, and yet, I can’t help but think that he lacks the rigorous integrity that Feynman spoke of in his Caltech address. He seems too willing to set aside doubts to promote action, or to be an activist rather than an observer. I can’t help but wonder if that is the case with the researchers involved in climategate. And, by not being careful, they are doing their cause, and science, a great disservice.

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