Scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and instruments, but in the ened your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.
Interpretation
Scientific research requires a combination of preparation, hard work, and a degree of luck.
This quote by Michael Crichton highlights the unpredictable nature of scientific research. While careful preparation and diligent effort are essential for success, ultimately, the element of luck plays a crucial role in determining the outcomes of research endeavors. It emphasizes that despite all the planning and intuitive insights one may have, unforeseen circumstances can shape the results in significant ways.
In practice
During a lecture on scientific methodologies.
In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.
Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.
The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.'
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 can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.
If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification-judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind-essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.
Necessity is the mother of all invention.
The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.
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