The End of Science

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

Author: John Horgan

Publisher:  Abacus, 2009 (First published 1996)

ISBN: 978-0-349-10926-8

Pages: 281

John Horgan was a senior writer at Scientific American for several years. With an impressive resume of summing up and balancing scientific literature, he moves in to the field with a sizeable contribution from his own pen. Horgan places before the reader the essence of what he has learned reading through all kinds of varied knowledge put forth through the pages of the venerable scientific journal. This book is a collection of wisdom gleaned from interviews with prominent academicians in the respective fields like physics, evolutionary biology, chaos theory and others.

Science made the modern human society. It gave durable insights into the nature of things. In fact, the author wonders whether we are reaching or have reached the ultimate frontiers of science and whether we will soon discover what is there to discover and what the direction science would be taking in the new millennium. Pure science, which is the quest for knowledge about what we are and where we come from, has entered an era of diminishing returns. The era of great inventions or discoveries are long past. Nothing comparable to the theory of gravity, natural selection, relativity or quantum mechanics are likely to adorn the walls of future science, Horgan argues. Science’s greatest drawback is its past success. Like the economists say, returns expected of investment in science is diminishing at a fast rate. Public funds may not last if such diminishing returns persist.

Nothing illustrates better the apprehension that the end is near as in physics. He interviewed noted physicists like Steven Weinberg and philosophers like Feyerabend and concludes that the scholars share the gloom caused by reaching at the ‘Theory of Everything’, or the final theory, or the Answer. After it is discovered (or invented, depending on how you view it), there would be nothing more for theoretical physics to ponder over. As a suggestion about the nature of the final theory, he proposes superstrings, an idea which gained much prominence in the 90s, but soon proved to be untestable with current technology. Cosmology is also beset with problems. Horgan elaborates on Fred Hoyle, the noted physicist who followed maverick ideas a bit too deep. Hoyle opposed the big bang theory, it was in fact his coinage, to make fun of the theory. This is a major issue with Horgan and his book. Whenever a chance presents itself, the author goes after long discredited scientists whose ideas verged on the crazy. In the end, the era around 2000 may appear to be the golden era of cosmology. As more data flood in the years to come, it may become more like botany, a vast collection of empirical facts only loosely bound by theory.

Evolutionary biology is the field where the practitioners seem to have reached the consensus that the most basic ideas about how life evolved has been successfully resolved. Darwinist theory of evolution and natural selection has withstood the test of time and new ideas like no scientific theory has ever done. Even though modern scientists like Stephe Jay Gould criticizes Darwin, they don’t dare to claim that Darwin was wrong. The most the credible opponents can come up with is that the theory is incomplete. However, science has still to do a lot to explain how life originated in the first place. Chaos theory is another branch whose growth is stunted due to the lack of perceptible breakthroughs either theoretically or empirically. They have created some potent metaphors: the butterfly effect, fractals, artificial life, the edge of chaos and self-organized criticality. That’s about the size of it all.

We would be astonished to see a serious science journalist speculating about the end of science already achieved when in fact a whole slew of discoveries are just beyond the horizon. This brings to mind the consensus among leading physicists in the 19^th century that physics will be over by about 1900. With the benefit of hindsight, we should not fall in such a self-congratulating honeytrap. Author’s selection of experts is not rational. Introducing Stuart Kauffman as the biochemist who is a radical challenger of Darwin is a case in point like “Kauffman began to suspect that Darwin’s theory of evolution was seriously flawed, in that it could not account for the seemingly miraculous ability of life to appear and then to perpetuate itself in such marvelous ways” (p.132). Wow! The two magical words, miraculous and marvelous appearing in one sentence and you still call it scientific?

The contents are a little outdated, being published in 1996. Nanotechnology, which would obviously present an opportunity to reap great benefit has not had any place in Horgan’s narrative. He maintains a disdainful attitude to technology as a whole. Many parts of the book are plain boring. Readers would be happy to see the end of the book, rather than the end of science.

On the other hand, there are certain passages in the work which are illuminating examples of the supremely interesting and humorous aspects of the journalist in Horgan. Descriptions of the interviewees and their attitudes enhance the author’s stature as a journalist in no uncertain terms.

Rating: 2 Star