The First Rule Is Don’t Fool Yourself

And We Are the Easiest to Fool

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

—Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was a rare combination of being both a Nobel Prize winning physicist and an excellent science communicator. Not only has he had a legitimate impact in the field of physics (I still remember learning Feynman diagrams in my undergraduate particle physics classes), but his work as a science communicator has made him a well-known popularizer of physics.

In the book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—a collection of life stories told by Richard Feynman—he tells an anecdote of how scientists measured Coulomb’s constant, a value used to calculate the force between electric charges. As scientists performed experiments and published their results, there was a trend over time where measurements of Coulomb’s constant smoothly converged from whatever the accepted value at the time was toward the true answer. This seemed innocuous at first, but actually demonstrated how even scientists can fool themselves.

With independent measurements being made across different labs, you would expect that measurements would be close to where the true value of Coulomb’s constant is. What happened instead was that scientists would assume their apparatus or method was wrong whenever their measurements were far from the accepted value at the time, and rerun their experiments. They would ultimately publish a value closer to the true value but still close to the accepted one. The process would repeat until finally consensus converged to the truth.

That story was a lesson in how everyone—including scientists—can easily fool themselves, and how we must all be mindful in not fooling ourselves, no matter who we are.

Food for Thought

In the introduction to The Feynman Lectures on Physics—which are freely available online—Feynman makes an important point regarding scientific theory:

We are not concerned with where a new idea comes from—the sole test of its validity is experiment.

He expands on this by saying:

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.”

In classic Feynman manner, he explains in a different lecture how new scientific laws are found.