FEYNMAN ON ELIMINATING ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS.

FEYNMAN ON ELIMINATING ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS. It seems apparent to me that there are a variety of factors which might affect the jam experiment (for example, is choosing among jams different from choosing hamburgers or cars?). Circumstances surrounding choices are very important, as is evident from the enormous sums of money that are spent by marketing experts in investigating how to influence consumer choices. Richard Feynman (the great physicist who wrote SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN) , in a commencement address at Caltech in 1974, emphasized the importance of replicating experiments and of eliminating alternative explanations. He told how he had advised a psychology student investigating alternatives to an experiment that somebody else had done to begin by repeating that experiment in her lab— “to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.” He singled out for praise an experiment by a man named Young in 1937. Young was trying to train rats to open the third door on a corridor. Feynman describes how Young painted the doors carefully to make sure the textures of the doors were the same; he applied chemicals after each run so that the smell of food couldn’t influence the rats; he put his corridor on sand so that the sound in the corridor could not influence the rats. Feynman says that “from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment.” But, says Feynman, this wonderful experiment and Young’s papers “are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats.”