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Nature Physics 5, 451–452 (1 July 2009) | doi:10.1038/nphys1316

Cargo-cult science redux

Michael R. Norman

In his commencement address at Caltech in 1974, Richard Feynman talked about how, after the Second World War, South Sea Islanders built imitation runways, and then waited for the aeroplanes to come with all the goodies they had seen during the war. Of course, the planes never came, despite the increasingly elaborate attempts of the 'cargo cult' to mimic the runways in greater and greater detail.