Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Crichton's other major excursion into cutting-edge science involves the trendy field of complexity theory, as translated by the author's mathematician caricature, Ian Malcolm. Building on chaos theory, the big thing of the 1980s, complexity theory argues that groups of randomly operating independent units--amino acids floating in primordial seas, humans acting in their own interests, populations of animals--can spontaneously and without outside direction organize themselves into complex systems--self-reproducing DNA molecules, functioning economies, social groups...
...Lost World, Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, a group of scientists travel to a remote island to investigate reports that live dinosaurs are once again running loose. In this excerpt, mathematician Ian Malcolm (a leftover from Jurassic Park) and animal behaviorist Sarah Harding face the consequences when two tyrannosaurs drop by their trailer-laboratory to reclaim an injured baby dinosaur that the scientists have been nursing...
...least firmly rooted in biology. But you don't have to be a biologist or a neuroscientist to play the consciousness game: the mystery is intriguing enough so that researchers from a wide variety of scientific disciplines have jumped in with their own ideas. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose, for example, argues that consciousness may arise from quantum mechanics, of all things, the same process that governs the behavior of subatomic particles...
After two years as a mathematician andcommissioned officer in the U.S. Public HealthService, Lewis spent another year traveling inEurope on Harvard's Sheldon Traveling Fellowship...
...mountains. Consider, for example, the Alps. To sobersided moderns, these vast, snowy protuberances are no more than vertically enhanced scenery--awesome to be sure, but devoid of greater meaning. Earlier generations were more impressionable. As proof that the mountains were possessed by the devil, the learned physicist and mathematician Johann Jacob Scheuchzer in 1702 compiled an encyclopedic list of dragon sightings in the Alps. (Mons Pilatus was said to harbor a particularly hideous monster, with a head "that terminated in the serrated jaw of a serpent...