The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age [Paperback]

John Horgan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 5, 1997

As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts?In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, ”are rarely so human...so at ther mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge.”This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final ”theory of everything” that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories?Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx’s view of progress, Kuhn’s view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindles Horgan’s smart, contrarian argument for ”endism” with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise.Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights acitivists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike.As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls ”ironic science.” Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world’s leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In a series of interviews with luminaries of modern science, Scientific American senior editor John Horgan conducted a guided tour of the scientific world and where it might be headed in The End of Science. The book, which generated great controversy and became a bestseller, now appears in paperback with a new afterword by the author. Through a series of essays in which he visits with such figures as Roger Penrose, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, and others, Horgan captures the distinct personalities of his subjects while investigating whether science may indeed be reaching its end. While this book is in no way dumbed down, it is accessible and can take the general reader to the outer edges of scientific exploration.

From Publishers Weekly

Scientific American columnist Horgan here interviews an impressive array of scientists and philosophers, who seem sharply divided over the prospects and possibilities of science. Among the pessimists, molecular biologist Gunther Stent suggests that science is reaching a point of incremental, diminishing returns as it comes up against the limits of knowledge; philosopher Thomas Kuhn sees science as a nonrational process that does not converge with truth; Vienna-born thinker Paul Feyerabend objects to science's pretensions to certainty and its potential to stamp out the diversity of human thought and culture. More optimistic are particle physicist Edward Witten, pioneer of superstring theory (which posits a universe of 10 dimensions); robotics engineer Hans Moravec, who envisions superintelligent creative robots; and physicist Roger Penrose, who theorizes that quantum effects percolating through the brain underlie consciousness. Other interviewees are Francis Crick, Noam Chomsky, David Bohm, Karl Popper, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, Ilya Prigogine and Clifford Geertz. Despite the dominant doomsaying tone, this colloquium leaves much room for optimism.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 322 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Books (May 5, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553061747
• ISBN-13: 978-0553061741
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #684,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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83 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, wrong title, misguided criticism, November 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age (Paperback)

I'm a young scientist doing chemical physics research in graduate school. I bought this book with the intention that I would like to criticize it-- after having read the thing.

Despite being fully ready to rip it to shreds, I found that I really enjoyed this book. This revelation doesn't cause me discomfort, but the violent reaction to the book within the science community does. It was really bad in Physics. This is odd, indeed: Physics is a particularly arrogant field. We can calculate almost anything, we can come up with some explanation to almost any phenomenon. To think that we actually haven't figured it all out is completely contradictory to our attitude about how much we already know.

The main problem is that the criticism is not actually on target. Horgan is not writing the eulogy for Science, he is lamenting the fact that there aren't going to be any obvious, cataclysmic revolutions that Discovery Channel producers can turn into week-long mini-series. There aren't going to be any headlines that read, "Einstein was wrong! " Maybe he's right. So what?

Most science is involved in narrowly-focused, penetrating investigations of, well, rather trivial details. No one suffering from the 1918 flu could care less about the hydrogen atom spectrum. Rydberg, Lyman, and, yes, Bohr were also muddling through basically minute details as far as pandemics are concerned. So they got lucky, and found out that "Newton was wrong! " The spectrum of hydrogen was well-known long before 1926, when Schrodinger came up with his eponymous equation. Even more time elapsed between the discovery of quantum mechanics and its most important application--the microprocessor. So who are we to say that great discoveries won't be made in 50 years?

Horgan does a magnificent job of collecting the thoughts of his interviewees, however out of context they may be. He shows us that Crick might believe that some aliens flew by the Earth and dropped life seeds. Horgan weaves a rich fabric of hypocrisy into which the famous giants are a bit too eager to snuggle. Then he springs the trap. He delights in leveling the structures of arrogance many renowned scientists construct to insulate them from criticism. These are necessary gambits in his field.

Horgan does, however, rely upon the most disingenuous tactic, one which is endemic to the field of "science writing"--he makes the reader feel as if he has actually learned some science from the author. Some pop-sci books are better than others, but, in this regard, this one is the worst I can remember. If you think you have learned any science from this book, I can assure you that you have not. His coverage of philosophy is fine, as good as you're going to find in a science-oriented piece, but the rest is pure vapor. This is a very important point for the non-scientist (the primary audience, I presume, for this work). Horgan nut-shells the science and then presents the scientist--who you are inadequately prepared to judge since you really know nothing about his (or her, mostly his) work.

Most physicists, not to mention all non-scientists, barely understand the fundamental priciples of string theory. It's not taught to students, and there are very few graduate courses, at any institution, on the subject. There is a very simple reason for this lack of dissemination: the math is hard. Whatever you think about quantum mechanics (QM), or relativity, the mathematics is straightforward for the typical physics undergraduate. The bulk of math involved in the study of QM is from the 19th century, and it is covered in the first year math courses taken by most science students. The mathematics involved in any remedial understanding of string theory (or, to be more current, M-theory) is insanely advanced. I don't claim to understand it, and I don't think most physicists do either. So you think, "Ah! String theory, that sounds like some sort of weird, goofy thing." And you're wrong. But Horgan doesn't take that approach. He mocks the subject as being untestable, thus it is ironic science. Penrose is ironic, Whitten is not. Penrose is another of these I-have-too-much-time-on-my-hands English guys who decides to take his fame and use it for outlandish musings. And the pop-sci-reading community eats it up.

So here it is, Horgan is a brilliant writer, and I enjoy good writing. He knows lots of famous people (the list is really a who's-who of modern science). He has a clever insight--that there aren't going to be any more catastrophic reinventions in science. But it's not that clever, really. More person-years have been spent in research areas which could potentially invalidate QM than any other theory, in any other era. Newton presented a revolution 300 years ago, and there were very few scientists for the next 200 years (as a fraction of the number working the second half of the 20th century). QM has withstood more scrutiny than Newton's Laws did, I submit.

If you open the book to the table of contents, and you recognize half the names, you'll like this book. If you recognize all the names, you'll love it. But if you finish the book and think that there really is an end to science, you've got more work to do. You need to enroll in some first-year science courses and find out that, while most of the basic principles of science are determined, almost any interesting phenomenon is completely mysterious.

Look at it this way: just because I know all the rules of grammar, does that mean I know all poetry? A brilliant physicist, P. A. M. Dirac, once said that chemistry has been reduced to solving a differential equation (a linear one at that, which is funny if you know math). In principle, of course, he is correct. But for almost every practical chemical reaction, the equation is not solvable. From Schrodinger's equation I cannot derive DNA and how it functions in a cell. Likewise, from a complete grammar of English I cannot derive Hamlet.

44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dream of a final arbiter?, January 14, 2004

By 

Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Hardcover)

There's much to learn from this book. Horgan's Grand Tour of scientists' homes, laboratories and their conferences, including personal histories and researchers' theories is comprehensive. You will learn ideas in physics, cosmology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology - in short, nearly every aspect of basic science comes under his scrutiny and assessment. A wide-ranging book in time and topics, it is almost possible to read it selectively. Major personalities in every field have their work, publications and personalities examined, revealed and commented on. In short, Horgan takes an Olympian stance on nearly all science.

As much as he tries to teach us, you come away with only one conclusion. John Horgan is the sole arbiter of the worth of science being undertaken today. And science, as an enterprise, is through - in his eyes. Horgan's theme is that empirical research has achieved its limits. Particle physics is delving so deeply into the atom that evidence can no longer be discerned, only inferred. Biology has no grand pronouncements pending about life. Even cognitive science, perhaps one of the fastest growing areas of research, foresees no "breakthrough". All future science, he contends, will be but picking out niggling details that reinforce the great conceptions of Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein. Science, he argues, has gone from empirical to "ironic". It is no longer grandiose, but petty and "not converging on the truth".

Horgan struggles to bring lofty scientific figures into your lounge room. He visits Karl Popper, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick and countless [but not nameless] others. Dress and grooming are carefully scrutinised. I lost track of the number of "khaki pants" his victims wore. And make no mistake, Horgan's approach is firmly predatory. Behaviour traits - chin rubbing, stair skipping, prolonged silences - are entertaining and sometimes informative. But it's clear that Horgan relates them only in attempting to erode whatever status these figures have achieved. His quest is simplistic and focussed - to each subject he posits The Question: "Do you have The Answer?".

"The Answer" is a "final theory". The advances made by particle physics and cosmology during the last century suggested a unifying formula might tie the universe together. Realisation of the concept has brought physicists deeper into the atom in search of evidence. These depths have proven beyond our perception, says Horgan, and the cost of further penetration is too high for
the public to bear. Besides, the quest may be futile. There's no indication that a Final Theory would emerge from such probing, Horgan argues.

The Final Theory has implications in the other direction. Can quantum physics explain the mechanisms of the mind? Is the scope of human conception so great that it can someday interact with the mythical Creator? Horgan challenges philosophers and neuroscientists to show their work is leading to new, more fundamental, understanding. His approach is sly and disarming. While he contends science is no long searching for the truth, he really means they're not divulging The Truth, an expression scorned by nearly all scientists. The distinction is important, almost overwhelmingly so in this book. Horgan, it turns out, isn't really interested in the status of science. His real quest is for personal certainty. It's a valid quest, but hardly worth the price of demolishing so many scholars. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Helpful book: whether it's correct is irrelevant, September 10, 2001

By 

The Blue Man (Oxford, OXON England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age (Paperback)

I doubt very much whether any open-mided person will be convinced after reading this book that science has reached its limits, or is even close to. For this to have been achieved, the author would have had to draw together the material from his interviews far more carefully than he even attempts to.

However, the book has 2 significant strengths.

1. It presents many prominent scientists' opinions.

2. It has a good bibliography, so one can read the scientists first-hand if one wants.

One of the main criticisms of the book is that the character portraits Horgan paints of the prominent scientists he interviews are biased and unfair. I suspect that they are indeed both. This is perhaps regrettable. However, any reader who takes Horgan's portraits as the raison d'etre of this book is - in my view - missing the point.

The point is, this book examines a number of different sciences, and also the discipline of the Philosophy of Science, with the view to addressing a particular question: whether Science is "coming to an end". Thus, there is a certain cross-disciplinary methodological focus which I - for one - found very valuable indeed.

Although this book is unlikely to provide all, or even any, of the answers to a scientist or sophisticated layman, it at least poses the questions and goes a little way down a particular path of enquiry. If you want more, as I said, the bibliography is there!