Customer Reviews

End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

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.

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]

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!

If it's not already obvious from the title of my review, I do not believe that the persuit of knowledge is ending. The author overlooks many important fields of technological research, such as nanotechnology and bioelectronic interfaces, as well as emerging fields of psychology and philosophy, such as transpersonalism and integral theory. These fields promise to open up the range of human cognition and perception of reality, taking us into new realms of understanding, control, and being that goes far beyond his limited view. Scientific rationalism is only one of many worldviews- it's more advanced than mythic ignorance, yet it is only part of our intellectual journey. Emerging paradigms (Horgan doesn't seem to have much of a grasp on this concept either) present endless frames in which we can understand the kosmos- and all of these new paradigms will be built upon the foundations of reason, not in opposition to it.

However, I'd argue that this book is a worthy read for the insightful interviews with numerous prominent scientists and philosophers of the late 20th century, and to expose yourself to some of these new ideas (many of which Horgan has a very weak understanding of). If you want a glimpse of the future and a coherent philosophy, however, I'd pick up a copy of K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" and Ken Wilber's "A Brief History of Everything"... both books are much more insightful in those respects.

Horgan turned to science from literature in the hope that it would lead him to "TRUTH" and is disappointed that it has not fullfilled his needs. This is a foolish biased book. One of the most annoying things is Horgan's statement that in essence only the "details' are left to be discovered. What he fails to realize is that the "details" are what interests most of us who do "science". I do not expect to win a Noble Prize or change the world. I was attracted to science (neuroscience) by the opportunity to ask and answer finite questions that I find personally interesting. With few exceptions, most great science is done by people interested in the details. The big advance the paradign shift comes when some detail can only be explained by a new hypothesis.

Horgan's description of his interview with Karl Popper is a pure hatchet job. He ridicules a man because he is old and self-important. Popper may have had his faults as a human being and many of his notions may be out of favor but his notions of what science is remain powerful and at least in part true.

What a waste. Talking to all these highly intelligent people and framing them in such a narrow-minded structure. A more suitable subtitle would have been: "How John Horgan Borrowed Big Names to Spread his Limited Positivist View on the World". The book really tells more about the writer than about the people who have been interviewed. The conversations are flimsy, lack any depth and turn knowledgeable people into flat characters. Putting aside the issue of insights and content (Horgan just doesn't know his stuff, esp. not on philosophy) the book is not nice to read. The plot is predictable and rigid. Horgan's gospel is boring to read.

This book was interesting, well argued and passionate. However, it was ultimately handicaped by what seemed to me to be a ludicrous premise!

I'm not a professional scientist but I just find it hard to imagine how anyone could possibly think that all the big questions are close to being answered. As an amateur historian, however, I have seen this idea expressed many time before... and I don't see why this latest assertion won't end up on the same pile as the others.

This book consists mostly of interviews with scientists and some philosophers who have been prominent in the last few decades. While some of these interviews have entertaining moments, Horgan clearly cannot hold a candle to most of the people he speaks with. One result is that he appears to consider his own questions deep, but he shows the perceptive and analytical abilities of, perhaps, a bright college sophomore. What I find most offensive in the book, however, is Horgan's frequently snide and derisive tone. Those whom he wishes to favor he quotes in polished, articulate English, but those whom he wishes to ridicule he quotes with all the "ums" and "okays" that all but the most consistently formal of people are inclined to use colloquially. His deliberate lack of even-handedness in this regard is very unprofessional. At times he goes beyond a mere sneer: there is wicked delight in relaying a mishap suffered by Mitchell Feigenbaum (one of the pioneers of chaos theory), followed by a patently stupid non sequitur. His treatment of Edward Witten, too, is unforgivable; however remote and abstruse Witten's theories may be, he is an absolutely outstanding figure in his fields and deserves more respect than Horgan gives him.

What about the science part? There is really not much. He states an astonishingly naive definition of science and attempts to coin a term "ironic science," which he uses too frequently and which seems ultimately to mean little beyond scientific fields or theories he is not sympathetic to. There is grindingly repetitious cheerleading for pet theories. And he seriously misreads, I think, the current predicament with regard to chaos theory, implying that the field will soon come to a hopeless standstill if it has not already, because over 30 competing definitions of "chaos" have been proposed. On the contrary, there is much work to be done in seeing which definitions are equivalent, how inequivalent definitions are related, and which ones are most fruitful. I am arguing that the situation here is much like that in the early days of computation theory, when Turing, von Neumann, and Post had all proposed apparently different definitions of "computable" that turned out to be equivalent; no one can doubt that the field has flourished since then.

But Horgan thinks scientific research has "Been there, done that, and got the T shirt." It may, indeed, be true that the broad mapping out of major scientific theories has occurred, but the author does little to address this alleged point of the book because he is too busy indulging his own prejudices.

At the end of his discussion of Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's recent work in "chaoplexity," John Horgan asks "how is the fact that the world unfolds according to a nonlinear, probabilistic dynamics supposed to console a Bosnian woman who has seen her only daughter raped and slaughtered?" (p .221) How indeed? one wonders. Might she not be more consoled by, say, a short lecture on Newton's Principia? Or by remembering the second law of thermodynamics? (We're all doomed to inevitable "heat death" in another couple of billion years anyway . . . ) Or by reflecting on what the theory of evolution has to teach about Man's descent from the Apes (admirably encapsulated, descent and all, in the spectacle she has just witnessed)? Might she not, for that matter, find supreme consolation in John Horgan's bold thesis that the golden age of empirical science is over, and that the best we can expect from the world's brightest minds from here on out is a pale, derivative "ironic science" of ever-diminishing returns? (Perhaps Horgan is in Kosovo even now, spreading the good word!) This reader started out with high hopes for The End of Science. Horgan's thesis indeed is bold and interesting, and deserves consideration. Unfortunately, Horgan relies far too much on his (admittedly wonderful) rhetorical and journalistic skills to make his case. Doubtless Prigogine was being a bit fatuous when he described the goal of his research as the "reenchantment of nature" . . . but all the same it's hard to imagine that he intended it to cover such contingencies as rape, murder or "ethnic cleansing." If Horgan had stopped for a moment's sober thought he might have seen that, and avoided making such an embarassingly inane comment. Alas. The sentence quoted above marks just one instance among many where Horgan skips an opportunity for substantive argument in favour of a cheap rhetorical flourish. Glib nay-saying and ad hominem caricature of one's opponents do not add up to a particularly convincing presentation. So . . . three stars for the wicked laughs, and for the warts'n'all who's-who of contemporary science. But the best thing in the book, in the end, is the bibliography. I think I'll read the scientists themselves now, and form my own opinion, thank you.

For the science afficionado, either professional or amateur, this book is a great read. Its got a tremendous amount of entertainment value for the scientifically-literate: interviews with past and present legends of science, discussions on cutting-edge science topics (superstrings, for example), and tons of speculative and challenging ruminations on science, both by Horgan and his interviewees.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the belligerent and vitriolic statements that this book has prompted some people to make, but I am. I'm firmly convinved that even if you don't buy into Horgan's main precept, that the biggest and most fundamental discoveries in science are behind us, you can still get a great deal of enjoyment from the book. I view this book as a fantastic example of how "the marketplace of ideas" can be kept alive in written form, and thus the sustain healthy debate and discussion.

My main takeaway from this book was not a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether "science is dead," and then a crowning of Horgan as insightful pundit or short-sighted fool, as so many readers wish to do. Rather, my main takeaway was that we, as taxpayers, consumers, citizens and scientific amateurs, must continually challenge science and scientists in the legitimacy of their ideas and actions.

For example, I thought the whole discussion on superstring theory was fascinating - how this highly arcane, almost-infinitely detailed and esoteric field is predicted by a cadre of scientists to be the unifying foundation of matter and time. Given that the current state of superstring theory can best be described as a house of cards, and that the number of people on the planet that claim to understand it completely is less than 10, its completely legitimate for us to ask questions, like, "How are my tax dollars funding superstring research?" and, "How could scarce research resources be better utilized?" and, "WHy should the public even care about superstrings?"

I love challenging statements, and as a die-hard amateur science fan, I found my laissez-faire attitudes about the governance and guidance of basic science to be strongly challenged. This book gave me a lot to think about.

And finally, I think its very legitimate to ask the question "is this the end of science?" You may disagree with Horgan, but it is a great unanswerable question.