“Let’s 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 it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
While other kids my age were caught up reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, I turned my attention toward Michael Crichton
. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t wait to grow up, but I was immediately drawn to his more adult-oriented science fiction novels and, to this day, I still believe Crichton is one of the best authors of our time.
You might know him from his work with the Emmy Award winning show ER, but his real claim to fame is as a writer of fiction, particularly in the near “science fact” realm. In books like Jurassic Park
Instead of diving into biographies and political discussions, I found these slight stretches into imagination to be positively thrilling and engaging. It was great learning about neural manipulation in The Terminal Man and biological engineering in Next
This is partly why the quote from Michael Crichton
You could almost say that it is partly from this philosophy and from Crichton’s storytelling prowess that I was inspired to take on a career in freelance writing in the first place. I’ve always considered diving into fiction writing, but I don’t think I have the knack for it. Perhaps this ambition is worth revisiting.
And there is a problem with Hardy Boys? They are quite fun to read, as I have the whole collection from over 40 years ago when I was 10. As I got older I began to enjoy Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke and Solzhenitsyn.
Hell, my daughter has read my Dick and Jane books from when I was first learning to read. All books and writings have their place and time in one’s reading development. I hope you did not skip the Hardy Boys and other classics just because you liked one author.
Nothing wrong with Hardy Boys; it just wasn’t for me.
There is nothing wrong with those books they just were not for him. I remember reading books way beyond my level. It wasn’t that I was too good for them or they were bad it was that I was more advanced than them. I grew up reading Rudyard Kipling and the Brothers Grimm. I didn’t understand the grimm till later I just read it cause i wanted to see if I could.
Another great quote from Crichton:
“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”