Quotes by Michael Crichton

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it cant be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterflys wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon-- you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks.

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.” He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu. But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory.

Friendships are nice. So is competence.

He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. And sooner or later the spouses found out. It always happened. Slammed doors, divorce lawyers, child custody.

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.

You know whats wrong with scientific power? Its a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.

A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. Theyll say, You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly? Theyll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? Thats the sea. Thats real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? Thats all real. Life is wonderful. Its a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isnt really anything else.

But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways---air, and water, and land---because of ungovernable science.

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like seeking truth.

They didnt understand what they were doing.Im afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because youre being had.Lets be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.There is no such thing as consensus science. If its consensus, it isnt science. If its science, it isnt consensus. Period.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.

Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isnt a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. Thats a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist behaving as if it were not true.

In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.