Years ago I read and enjoyed a commencement speech by physicist Richard Feynman (one of my personal heroes). It was really about the importance of integrity in science, but in Feynman's clever style it contained references to the “cargo cult” of some Pacific islanders, rats running in mazes, Millikan's famous oil-drop experiment measuring the charge of an electron and more. I remembered that reading this speech, I thought it was the best essay on scientific integrity I'd ever read.
Thinking about the ClimateGate controversy reminded me of Feynman's speech – the behavior of the scientists involved would have made a great addition to the examples of bad science that Feynman used. So I went looking for it with Google, and quickly found it by searching for “cargo cult” and “Millikan”.
I enjoyed re-reading it just as much as I enjoyed it the first time. Here's a transcript of Feynman's 1974 CalTech commencement speech...
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