Definition of Science

To lead off my post, I have to comment on a statement made in the back of the book under author notes. The statement appear on page 717, first full bullet-point: After explaining that we will shift away from fossil fuels in the next century Crichton states "so far as I know, nobody had to ban horse transport in the early twentieth century." There are many things wrong with this statement, the the thing that I take issue with is Crichton's lack of acknowledgment that technological advancement leads to greater depletion of resources. Today's technology is drastically different then the definition 200 years ago. That being said, no body knows what future technological advancement will have in store for the world, but I can only assume that it will come directly or indirectly from fossil fuels in some way.

Another problem that I have is concerning the ideas of global warming. I am going to take a different approach than the approach that I think most are going to take. I am going to agree with Crichton (for the moment). Here is why:

Science is a process that seeks to understand the unknown. It accomplishes this by forming theories and developing hypotheses to test those theories. By definition, science can never prove something right, only prove a hypothesis wrong. Science can only provide support in support of a hypothesis. Science also works to disprove evidence that is supposedly supported. On pages 124-125, when Evans is talking about global warming being an established fact, he goes on to say, "Maybe there is something wrong with the data." According to the professors of my biology class, Evans is not conducting science. He is looking for information in search of an answer that we wants to find. A proper scientist would never search for data with a intention of finding something. Why would the experiment be conducted if a scientist was only going to skew the data to either be insignificant or a "major breakthough?"

In this sense, I do not think that Evans is properly looking at the paradigm of global warming in the correct way. A paradigm shift is supposed to evolve through the discovery or new facts or invention of new theory. Evans is looking at the global warming data (seeing device) in only one way. He should analyze it in another, different way, but even then he would be going against science to look for an answer he wants to find.

Another interesting concept in this book is the the use of seeing devices. Without the graphs, numbers, equations, and measurements about global warming, our observations are useless. Without these seeing devices, global warming would not even exist. I think that Crichton places a good amount of light on the dependency of humans and scientists on seeing devices, and how the discovery of new seeing devices leads to the discovery of new "facts."

With regard to the easy of read of this book, Crichton frequently uses foreshadowing to show whats next to come. For example the boyfriend/girlfriend quarrel that ultimately leads to the physicist's death in the beginning of the novel appears again on page 145 with the appearance of a very similar fight between two similar characters. The attractive women comes on to Evans, similar to the previous example, but Sarah "saves him." This leads me to thing that these two will appear again in a similar fashion later in the story.