Crichton on Charlie Rose

An hour long conversation with Charlie Rose from early 2007 that covers Crichton's thoughts on biotechnology, global warming, and Jasper Johns, among other topics. Charlie Rose is at his most animated when the subject turns toward global warming. When he brings up the number of scientists who agree with predictions about catastrophic global warming, Crichton mentions Einstein's response when he was told about the hundreds of German physicists who signed a letter claiming his "Jewish physics" (i.e., Relativity) was false: "It only takes one scientist to prove me wrong".

Crichton also uses analogies to investing that he also used in his "Aliens Cause Global Warming" speech, about the need for doing due diligence and of being skeptical of long range projections.

James Fallows on Michael Crichton

From his Atlantic blog ("A thought for Michael Crichton"):

In the car this afternoon I turned on the radio and heard a news report ending ".... Crichton was 66." Was? That Michael Crichton has died in his 60s shocked me not simply because I'm now concentrating on the mortality of my father[¹], in his 80s, but also because he always looked at least 20 years younger than his chronological age. I'd corresponded with him recently and didn't know he was sick.

Crichton had his enemies, especially after his recent anti-global-warming book (which I chose not to read). That he was married five times suggests that his personal life was not entirely tranquil. And he was hyper, hyper aware that in America he was regarded as a "genre" writer whereas in Italy, for example, he would be listed among the big names of Quality Lit.

But I was honored to have met him 20 years age, when I was living in Japan, and to have been a friend since then. He seemed unassuming, funny, charming in every way -- the unusual famous person who was genuinely considerate of one's spouse and kids. Very earnest about his political causes, including a very prescient argument fifteen years ago about the impending decline of the "Mediasaurus," now known as MSM. And, there is no way around it, incredibly talented. At one point in the 1990s, he was responsible for the #1-rated TV show (ER), the #1 box office movie (Jurassic Park), and the #1 best selling-novel -- and I'm not even sure now which of his novels it was. He must have been the only person in history to have paid his way through medical school by writing successful novels.

[...]

He will be missed.

¹Sadly, Fallows wrote two days later that his father passed away this week as well.

Michael Crichton Passes Away

Sad news, and a shock to those of us who hadn't known he had been battling cancer. The Associated Press's obituary quotes John Wells, the executive producer of the long-running TV drama Crichton created, ER, on the breadth of Crichton's interests:

"No lunch with Michael lasted less than three hours and no subject was too prosaic or obscure to attract his interest. Sexual politics, medical and scientific ethics, anthropology, archaeology, economics, astronomy, astrology, quantum physics, and molecular biology were all regular topics of conversation."

Michael Crichton's website is down now, but here is a link to the Michelin Lecture he gave at Cal Tech in 2003, reproduced on a Harvard website, "Aliens Cause Global Warming". Below are two brief excerpts from the lecture, but it's worth reading in full.

On Science and Consensus:

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 you're being had.

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.

On Predictions:

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport.

[...]

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future.

They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.

The photo of Michael Crichton above is from the Notable Biographies website.