Excerpt from the novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

     Lying in bed, soaked in sweat, Malcolm listened as the radio crackled.
     “Anything?” Muldoon said. “You getting anything?”
     “No word, Wu said.
     “Hell,” Muldoon said.
     There was a pause.
     Malcolm sighed. “I can’t wait,” he said, “to hear his new plan.”
     “What I would like,” Muldoon said, “is to get everybody to the lodge and regroup. But I don’t see how.”
     There’s a Jeep in front of the visitor center,” Wu said. “If I drove over to you, could you get yourself into it?”
     “Maybe. But you’d be abandoning the control room.”
     “I can’t do anything here anyway.”
     “God knows that’s true,” Malcolm said. “A control room without electricity is not much of a control room.”
     “All right,” Muldoon said. “Let’s try. This isn’t looking good.”
     Lying in his bed, Malcolm said, “No, it’s not looking good. It’s looking like a disaster.”
     Wu said, “The raptors are going to follow us over there.”
     “We’re still better off,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go.”
     The radio clicked off. Malcolm closed his eyes, and breathed slowly, marshaling his strength.
     “Just relax,” Ellie said. “Just take it easy.”
     “You know what we are really talking about here,” Malcolm said. “All this attempt to control… We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old. They began at the time when Florence, Italy, was the most important city in the world. The basic idea of science—that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational—that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn’t really work anymore. It didn’t work economically, it didn’t work intellectually, and it didn’t fit the new world that was emerging.”
     Malcolm coughed.
     “But now,” he continued, “science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world anymore. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land–because of ungovernable science.” He sighed. “This much is obvious to everyone.”
     There was a silence. Malcolm lay with his eyes closed, his breathing labored. No one spoke, and it seemed to Ellie that Malcolm had finally fallen asleep. Then he sat up again, abruptly.
     “At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn’t make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Gödel’s theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some special inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know that what we call ‘reason’ is just an arbitrary game. It’s not special, in the way we thought it was.
     “And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old—the dream of total control—has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn’t true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.”
     “This is very extreme,” Hammond said, shaking his head.
     “We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now. Fifty years ago, everyone was gaga over the atomic bomb. That was power. No one could imagine anything more. Yet, a bare decade after the bomb, we began to have genetic power. And genetic power is far more potent than atomic power. And it will be in everyone’s hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question—What should I do with my power?—which is the very question science says it cannot answer.”
     “So what will happen?” Ellie said.
     Malcolm shrugged. “A change.”
     “What kind of change?”
     “All major changes are like death,” he said. “You can’t see to the other side until you are there.” And he closed his eyes.
     “The poor man,” Hammond said, shaking his head.
     Malcolm sighed. “Do you have any idea,” he said, “how unlikely it is that you, or any of us, will get off this island alive?”