Started reading this, its fun. Perfect for me, since its about medieval archaeology. It has something to do with quantum physics and I think time travel but I'm not too far in so we'll see... I'm interested to see how Crichton explains time travel. The whole "timey-wimey" thing. There are a couple quotes I really liked, especcially being a history major myself:
"The group's bustling sense of their own self-importance quickly got on Chris's nerves, and, like many successful business people, they tended to treat academics as if they were slightly retarded, unable to function in the real world, to play the real games. Or perhaps, he thought, they just found it inexplicable that anyone would choose an occupation that wouldn't make them a millionaire by age twenty-four." (pg. 70)
"One of the men frowned skeptically. 'What are you telling me? England used to own France?'
Marek sighed.
He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials - people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.
Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered and that anything that had occured earlier could be safely ignored....
Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times. These stockbrokers owed the very notion of a market economy to the Middle Ages. And if they didn't know that, then they didn't know the basic facts of who they were. Where they had come from.
Professor Johnson often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree." (pg.73)
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