Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park

by

Michael Crichton

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Jurassic Park makes teaching easy.
John Arnold is Jurassic Park’s chief engineer. His career, before John Hammond hired him, included working on many world-famous amusement parks like Disney World and Land. It also included working with dangerous technologies, including a submarine-launched nuclear missile. Arnold’s experience with long-term and complicated projects has made him into a worrier and he has more concerns about the park’s chances of running smoothly and safely than either Hammond or Dr. Henry Wu. Nevertheless, he expresses confidence in the ability of the park’s sophisticated computer system—and by extension its operators, including himself—to ultimately control all of the many variables at play in running Jurassic Park. Even after Dennis Nedry sabotages the computer programming, once Arnold reboots the machines, he feels that he has regained control. But in the end, this arrogance costs him his life: the computer systems are still vulnerable to human error, and one of his errors ends up cutting power to the park and requiring a restart of the main generator. While he attempts this hazardous task, a raptor attacks and kills him.

John Arnold Quotes in Jurassic Park

The Jurassic Park quotes below are all either spoken by John Arnold or refer to John Arnold. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Chaos, Change, and Control  Theme Icon
).
Third Iteration: Control (II) Quotes

“What you see here,” Arnold said, “is an entirely separate counting procedure. It isn’t based on the tracking data. It’s a fresh look. The whole idea is that the computer can’t make a mistake, because it compares two different ways of gathering the data. If an animal were missing, we’d know it within five minutes.”

“I see,” Malcolm said. “And has that ever actually been tested?”

“Well, in a way,” Arnold said. “We’ve had a few animals die […]”And in each case, once the animal stopped moving, the numbers stopped tallying and the computer signaled an alert.”

Related Characters: John Arnold (speaker), Dr. Ian Malcolm
Page Number: 143-144
Explanation and Analysis:

Yes […] Look here. The basic event that has happened in Jurassic Park is that the scientists and technicians have tried to make a new, complete biological world. And the scientists in the control room expect to see a natural world. As in the graph they just showed us. Even though a moment’s thought reveals that a nice, normal distribution is terribly worrisome on this island […] Based on what Dr. Wu told us earlier, one should never see a population graph like that […because it] is a graph for a normal biological population. Which is precisely what Jurassic Park is not. Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world. In that sense, it’s a true park, rather like a Japanese formal garden. Nature manipulated to be more than the real thing, if you will.

Related Characters: Dr. Ian Malcolm (speaker), Donald Gennaro, John Arnold, Dr. Henry Wu
Related Symbols: Island
Page Number: 149
Explanation and Analysis:
Third Iteration: Control (III) Quotes

“Let’s keep it in perspective,” Hammond said. “You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place. After all, they’re trainable.”

From the beginning, this had been one of the core beliefs of the planners. The animals, however exotic, would fundamentally behave like animals in zoos anywhere. They would learn the regularities of their care, and they would respond.

Related Characters: John Hammond (speaker), John Arnold
Related Symbols: Raptors
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:
Fourth Iteration: Control (I) Quotes

Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. […]

But screaming didn’t make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn’t care if it was screamed at. The power network didn’t care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn’t coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job; he’d need to be calm and careful.

Related Characters: Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, John Arnold, Dennis Nedry
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:
Fourth Iteration: The Park (I) Quotes

“Malcolm’s models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. That it had inherent instability.”

“Inherent instability,” Gennaro said. “And what did you do when you got his report?”

“We disagreed with it, and ignored it, of course,” Arnold said.

“Was that wise?”
“It’s self-evident,” Arnold said. “We’re dealing with living systems, after all. This is life, not computer models.”

Related Characters: John Arnold (speaker), Dr. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, Donald Gennaro
Page Number: 274
Explanation and Analysis:

Malcolm’s just another theoretician. […] Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missile, we dealt with something called resonant yaw. Resonant yaw meant that, even though a missile was only slightly unstable off the pad, it was hopeless. It was inevitably going to go out of control, and it couldn’t be brought back. That’s a feature of mechanical systems. A little wobble can get worse until the whole system collapses. But those same little wobbles are essential to a living system. They mean the system is healthy and responsive. Malcolm never understood that. […] Look, the proof is right here. […] In less than an hour, […] the park will all be back online. […] And that’s not theoretical. That’s a fact.

Related Characters: John Arnold (speaker), Dr. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, Donald Gennaro
Page Number: 276-277
Explanation and Analysis:
Fifth Iteration: Aviary Quotes

Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”

“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see an immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t’ see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”

Related Characters: Dr. Ian Malcolm (speaker), Dr. Ellie Sattler, John Arnold, Dr. Henry Wu
Related Symbols: Island
Page Number: 317
Explanation and Analysis:
Fifth Iteration: Control Quotes

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 […] 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 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.

Related Characters: Dr. Ian Malcolm (speaker), John Arnold
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Jurassic Park LitChart as a printable PDF.
Jurassic Park PDF

John Arnold Quotes in Jurassic Park

The Jurassic Park quotes below are all either spoken by John Arnold or refer to John Arnold. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Chaos, Change, and Control  Theme Icon
).
Third Iteration: Control (II) Quotes

“What you see here,” Arnold said, “is an entirely separate counting procedure. It isn’t based on the tracking data. It’s a fresh look. The whole idea is that the computer can’t make a mistake, because it compares two different ways of gathering the data. If an animal were missing, we’d know it within five minutes.”

“I see,” Malcolm said. “And has that ever actually been tested?”

“Well, in a way,” Arnold said. “We’ve had a few animals die […]”And in each case, once the animal stopped moving, the numbers stopped tallying and the computer signaled an alert.”

Related Characters: John Arnold (speaker), Dr. Ian Malcolm
Page Number: 143-144
Explanation and Analysis:

Yes […] Look here. The basic event that has happened in Jurassic Park is that the scientists and technicians have tried to make a new, complete biological world. And the scientists in the control room expect to see a natural world. As in the graph they just showed us. Even though a moment’s thought reveals that a nice, normal distribution is terribly worrisome on this island […] Based on what Dr. Wu told us earlier, one should never see a population graph like that […because it] is a graph for a normal biological population. Which is precisely what Jurassic Park is not. Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is intended to be a controlled world that only imitates the natural world. In that sense, it’s a true park, rather like a Japanese formal garden. Nature manipulated to be more than the real thing, if you will.

Related Characters: Dr. Ian Malcolm (speaker), Donald Gennaro, John Arnold, Dr. Henry Wu
Related Symbols: Island
Page Number: 149
Explanation and Analysis:
Third Iteration: Control (III) Quotes

“Let’s keep it in perspective,” Hammond said. “You get the engineering correct and the animals will fall into place. After all, they’re trainable.”

From the beginning, this had been one of the core beliefs of the planners. The animals, however exotic, would fundamentally behave like animals in zoos anywhere. They would learn the regularities of their care, and they would respond.

Related Characters: John Hammond (speaker), John Arnold
Related Symbols: Raptors
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:
Fourth Iteration: Control (I) Quotes

Hammond was like every other management guy Arnold had ever seen. Whether it was Disney or the Navy, management guys always behaved the same. They never understood the technical issues; and they thought that screaming was the way to make things happen. […]

But screaming didn’t make any difference at all to the problems that Arnold now faced. The computer didn’t care if it was screamed at. The power network didn’t care if it was screamed at. Technical systems were completely indifferent to all this explosive human emotion. If anything, screaming was counterproductive, because Arnold now faced the virtual certainty that Nedry wasn’t coming back, which meant that Arnold himself had to go into the computer code and try and figure out what had gone wrong. It was going to be a painstaking job; he’d need to be calm and careful.

Related Characters: Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, John Arnold, Dennis Nedry
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:
Fourth Iteration: The Park (I) Quotes

“Malcolm’s models tend to have a ledge, or a sharp incline, where the drop of water will speed up greatly. He modestly calls this speeding-up movement the Malcolm Effect. The whole system could suddenly collapse. And that was what he said about Jurassic Park. That it had inherent instability.”

“Inherent instability,” Gennaro said. “And what did you do when you got his report?”

“We disagreed with it, and ignored it, of course,” Arnold said.

“Was that wise?”
“It’s self-evident,” Arnold said. “We’re dealing with living systems, after all. This is life, not computer models.”

Related Characters: John Arnold (speaker), Dr. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, Donald Gennaro
Page Number: 274
Explanation and Analysis:

Malcolm’s just another theoretician. […] Sitting in his office, he made a nice mathematical model, and it never occurred to him that what he saw as defects were actually necessities. Look: when I was working on missile, we dealt with something called resonant yaw. Resonant yaw meant that, even though a missile was only slightly unstable off the pad, it was hopeless. It was inevitably going to go out of control, and it couldn’t be brought back. That’s a feature of mechanical systems. A little wobble can get worse until the whole system collapses. But those same little wobbles are essential to a living system. They mean the system is healthy and responsive. Malcolm never understood that. […] Look, the proof is right here. […] In less than an hour, […] the park will all be back online. […] And that’s not theoretical. That’s a fact.

Related Characters: John Arnold (speaker), Dr. Ian Malcolm, John Hammond, Donald Gennaro
Page Number: 276-277
Explanation and Analysis:
Fifth Iteration: Aviary Quotes

Ellie said, “You don’t think much of Arnold, do you?”

“He’s all right. He’s an engineer. Wu’s the same. They’re both technicians. They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see an immediate situation. They think narrowly and call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t’ see the surround. They don’t see the consequences. That’s how you get an island like this. From thintelligent thinking. Because you cannot make an animal and not expect it to act alive. To be unpredictable. To escape. But they don’t see that.”

Related Characters: Dr. Ian Malcolm (speaker), Dr. Ellie Sattler, John Arnold, Dr. Henry Wu
Related Symbols: Island
Page Number: 317
Explanation and Analysis:
Fifth Iteration: Control Quotes

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 […] 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 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.

Related Characters: Dr. Ian Malcolm (speaker), John Arnold
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis: