Hard on Soft Science: Difference between revisions
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** For an MD and a Scientist, Crichton spent an awful lot of time writing [[Science Is Bad|against type.]] e.g. [[Jurassic Park]].
* Shows up repeatedly in the works of [[Greg Egan]]; most notably in [[Schilds Ladder|Schild's Ladder]]
* This is played straight as a central trope of ''[[The Space Trilogy|That Hideous Strength]]'' by [[C. S. Lewis|CS Lewis]]
** One minor character is an eminent chemist. He has a brief conversation with the (currently bamboozled) sociologist protagonist: Sociologist: "I can quite understand that it [the villains' scheme] doesn't fit in with your work as it does with sciences like Sociology, but--" Chemist: "There are no sciences like Sociology." The chemist is then murdered by the villains, the sociologist framed for the murder, and blackmailed into running propaganda for them. Lewis's objection to sociology (within the book, at least) was that it, like the other soft sciences, invites the scientist to treat people as specimens, without compassion. His chemist says, "I happen to believe that you can't study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing."
* Averted with [[Isaac Asimov]]'s [[Foundation]] series. Hari Seldon is (posthumously) considered to be one of the most brilliant scientists in the history of the Galaxy, and his work in psychohistory is considered not only seminal but absolutely necessary for the survival of civilization. While psychohistory is presented as a mathematical science, it is still considered to be a branch of psychology, a "soft" science.
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