The events of the novel Solaris repeatedly suggest that scientists’ tendency to interpret the world through the lens of human values and humanity’s importance limits their ability to understand the universe scientifically. The novel follows a scientist named Kelvin as he lands on a distant exoplanet named Solaris, whose single massive ocean is widely (though controversially) believed to be a living organism. Shortly after Kelvin lands on Solaris’s research station, he learns that the ocean has been sending mysterious “visitors,” replicas of people drawn from the researchers’ memories, into the station. Kelvin’s own “visitor” is a replica of his ex-lover Rheya, a young woman who died by suicide 10 years prior after she and Kelvin had a vicious breakup. The replica of Rheya has no knowledge of her origins and no idea that she is not an ordinary human being. Kelvin and the other researchers, Snow and Sartorius, incessantly speculate about the ocean’s nature and “motives” for sending the visitors, but they are unable to make headway or come to any consensus, implicitly because they cannot help but anthropomorphize (ascribe human characteristics to) the totally alien ocean.
The novel suggests that a combination of anthropomorphism and overvaluing humanity’s importance is the problem through books that Kelvin discovers in the research station’s library. Some of the books, for instance, unhelpfully and inaccurately name the ocean’s alien topographies after Earth’s geological formations (indicating that the scientists naming the topographies draw from what Earth has to offer as inspiration, rather than coming up with totally new names for totally new oceanic forms). Another explicitly argues that “anthropomorphic” science will always prevent human scientists from fully understanding the nonhuman world. Notably, the novel ends without Kelvin and the other scientists having solved the mystery of Solaris’s ocean or the “visitors,” emphasizing the limits of science focused on humans and on Earth to understand radically nonhuman life in the wider universe.
The Limits of Science ThemeTracker
The Limits of Science Quotes in Solaris
Chapter 2: The Solarists Quotes
In the empty corridor I stood for a moment in front of the closed door. I noticed a strip of plaster carelessly stuck on one of the panels. Pencilled on it was the word “Man!”
Compared with the proliferation of speculative ideas which were triggered off by this problem, medieval scholasticism seemed a model of scientific enlightenment.
Chapter 5: Rheya Quotes
As she tried to take off her dress, an extraordinary fact became apparent: there were no zips, or fastenings of any sort; the red buttons down the front were merely decorative.
Chapter 6: “The Little Apocrypha” Quotes
“We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds.”
Chapter 7: The Conference Quotes
The sight of the two identical dresses filled me with a horror which exceeded anything I had felt hitherto.
“It is natural enough to assume, in the first instance, that we are the object of an experiment. When I examine this proposition, the experiment seems to me badly designed.”
Chapter 8: The Monsters Quotes
This geocentrism might have been amusing if it did not underline the dilemma in which he found himself.
Chapter 10: Conversation Quotes
“You don’t love her. You do love her. She is willing to give her life. So are you. It’s touching, it’s magnificent, anything you like, but it’s out of place here—it’s the wrong setting. Don’t you see? No, you don’t want to. You are going around in circles to satisfy the curiosity of a power we don’t understand and can’t control, and she is an aspect, a periodic manifestation of that power.”
Because there may be thoughts, intentions and cruel hopes in my mind of which I know nothing, because I am a murderer unawares. Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Chapter 12: The Dreams Quotes
“Who is responsible? Who is responsible for this situation? Gibarian? Giese? Einstein? Plato? All criminals . . .”
Chapter 13: Victory Quotes
“Suppose, I’m capable of reproducing the architecture of a symmetriad, and I know its composition and have the requisite technology . . . I create a symmetriad and I drop it into the ocean. But I don’t know why I’m doing so, I don’t know its function, and I don’t know what the symmetriad means to the ocean . . .”
Chapter 14: The Old Mimoid Quotes
I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.



