John Lanchester

John Henry Lanchester (born 25 February 1962) is a British journalist and novelist.

Quotes

• Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of stem (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”). When it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern world—as the supercomputers in our pockets communicate with satellites—science and technology are indeed hand in glove. For much of human history, though, technology had nothing to do with science. Many of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific method behind them. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and ships’ masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been crucial to human and economic development, and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science. Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method.
  • The Case Against Civilization (September 18, 2017), The New Yorker.

• Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.
  • The Case Against Civilization (September 18, 2017), The New Yorker.

External links

• Links to articles available online by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.
• Lanchester's articles on The New Yorker.
• Whoops Video presentation on YouTube.