Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Michael Crichton’s last book: Micro

 

[I sent this from the iBooks app from my iPad]

From the first chapter, in a discussion about how children now are raised without an appreciation for how little science actually knows about the world:

Perhaps the single most important lesson to be learned by direct experience is that the natural world, with all its elements and interconnections, represents a complex system and therefore we cannot understand it and we cannot predict its behavior. It is delusional to behave as if we can, as it would be delusional to behave as if we could predict the stock market, another complex system. If someone claims to predict what a stock will do in the coming days, we know that person is either a crook or a charlatan. If an environmentalist makes similar claims about the environment, or an ecosystem, we have not yet learned to see him as a false prophet or a fool.

EXCERPT FROM

Crichton, Michael. "Micro." HarperCollins, 2011-12-01. iBooks.