From Richard Feynman’s anecdotal autobiography, "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!":
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We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiement with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of the measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one's a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one is a little bigger than that, and the next one's a little bigger, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing scientists are ashamed of — this history — because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong — and they would look to find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's, they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
But this long history of learning not to fool ourselves — of having utter scientific integrity — is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
So the first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. […] I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
[H/T: Eloisa Lewis]
