Three Famous Scientists Believed in the Scientific Method
Although these famous men did not use the term scientific method extensively in their writing, they did believe in its existence.
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988). Feynman, often called the greatest physicist who ever lived, was a Nobel Prize winner. In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985), he tells of the “cargo cult of people” who, during World War II, “saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.” The natives duplicated the runways, fires, etc., and waited for the planes to land. Of course, they didn’t. Feynman calls this “cargo cult science,” a type of scientific investigation that, while following precepts and forms, misses something essential. The missing element is the scientific method. In his famous lectures on physics, Feynman says, “. . . observation, reason, and experimentation make up what we call the scientific method.”
Carl Sagan (1934-1996). Sagan was a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of America’s most visionary astronomers. He helped popularize science for the public. He wrote in Broca’s Brain (1979), “Scientists are, of course, human. When their passions are excited they may abandon temporarily the ideals of their discipline. But these ideals, the scientific method, have proved enormously effective. Finding out the way the world really works requires a mix of hunches, intuition and brilliant creativity; it also requires skeptical scrutiny of every step. It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.”
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). Asimov was one of the world’s premier science fiction writers, with 477 published titles, all detailing the information of the age. In the introduction to Science Fare (1986) by Saul and Newman, Asimov says, “In fact, it is to children that the scientific method should be taught, for it must be instilled early. If a child grows up without this mental discipline and becomes an adult without having learned how to think in a systematic way, it may be too late to begin then.”
