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

by John Horgan

In The End of Science, John Horgan makes the case that the era of truly profound scientific revelations about the universe and our place in it is over. Interviewing scientific luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins, he demonstrates that all the big questions that can be answered have been answered, as science bumps up against fundamental limits. The world cannot give us a “theory of everything,” and modern endeavors such as string theory are “ironic” and “theological” in nature, not scientific, because they are impossible to confirm. Horgan’s argument was controversial in 1996, and it remains so today, still firing up debates in labs and on the internet, not least because—as Horgan details in a lengthy new introduction—ironic science is more prevalent than ever. 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.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Physics, Popular Science, History Of Science, History

369 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

JOHN HORGAN is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. A former senior writer at Scientific American (1986-1997), he has also written for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Discover, The London Times, The Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, and other publications around the world. He blogs for the Center for Science Writings and for Bloggingheads.tv (see links at left).

His latest book is Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality, published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in January 2003 and in paperback by Mariner Books in March 2004.

Reviews

[J C]

The book is well written, there's no doubt about that. The author is sardonic, smart, yet somehow earnest. In my curiosity, however, I skipped to the prologue only to read an absolutely NUTTY conclusion, entirely divorced from the rest of the book. The author is right in suspecting that he is a bit mad. He draws on one of his 'mystical' experiences, draws parallels between the mysticism and the ambiguous relationship with 'ultimate' truth that scientists have, and calls this fear of ultimate knowledge the terror of god, meaning it literally -- yes, that we are projections of a metaphysical god biting at his fingernails, fearing his ultimate realisation, his telos, an immutable glob of nothingness beyond the joys of struggle, change and transformation. Really, I'm not kidding. And yes, I too thought it was a joke at first, some sort of badly played irony. Unfortunately I was wrong...

A very simple criticism of his thesis is that before quantum theory, there was only chemistry etc. There were large swathes of nature that still couldn't be explained coherently then, just as there are now.

In biology we have certainly established basic principles are and research is likely to be asymptotic. The same can't be said of physics. There is a lot we don't know about nature, and as long as there are things we can't explain, there wi be a possibility that we may one day explain it. Imagine this guy was writing a book like this in Newton's time.

His analysis of the sociology of scientists is compelling but a bit warped. Saying that scientists are delusional about their hopes about the future just because they are optimistic about the idea that the best years of science are ahead is a lame criticism. Everyone has hopes and dreams about the future with elements that are not extant in our present time.

Criticisms against him, that this book is just another 'end of' book, are right. There is nothing particularly special about our era of science or society. We are about as special as any civillisation in the past.

Postmodernist views of science all in all seem compelling to me. We only have a superficial contact with physical reality, and most observable things are limited by our senses and intuitions as well as physical instruments based on our physics, a physics we have constructed in our minds. There is nothing to say that in the future, we can't change our minds about this physics, and gain more sophisticated theories and more sophisticated instruments. There is nothing to say that the state of physics today is as far as we will get. In fact, this idea is absolutely ridiculous.

I think many scientists would agree that their object is not truth, but truth-seeking. I don't think much more should be said about it. It would be nice to discover more about the world, and there aren't any real limitations like what Horgan proposes. But I think many of us are content with the notion that we born and we die. Some of us like science because it is knowledge that accretes, which is something that is not going to stop happening. Fundamental discoveries or not, science is wrapped up in the idea that there are interesting questions we can hope to answer. Why is that not enough? Why is this delusional? There ARE interesting qns, fundamental qns, that may yet be answered through science. In fact, it is delusional to assert otherwise, which was the major affront of this book.

I do suppose, however, that many prominent scientists choose to believe that a golden age of science lies ahead because they like the idea that there is still work to be done. Somehow, we also tend to conflate this intrinsic joy of learning about the world with being profound narratives, mystical truths about our existence. At the same time, we feel that there is always something more to be known and felt, which we sometimes glimpse through feelings of beauty and rapture. This quote of Wittgenstein perfectly sums up this sentiment:

"6.52 We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are no questions left, and this in itself is the answer."

The author, however, believes that
1. we have already got to the point of answering most pertinent scientific questions and
2. such an answer of having no answer to the question of existence is not satisfactory,
and therefore we should turn to God to validate our existence. Of course, this is a matter of perspective, and I disagree with both the premises and the conclusion.

I suppose the idea that we are at a point where we can feel secure about our understanding of our place in the world through the facts of science is correct, and that further "fundamental discoveries" may not change this view too much. In this sense, the philosophical problems of science may have come to an end. Of course, one never knows. One day, we might be able to slip into parallel universes...

[Ushan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A senior editor at Scientific American interviews a bunch of celebrity scientists and philosophers of science, and tries to get their opinion on the thesis that science is about to end, which is to say we already know everything we can know within practical limits - we would learn a great deal about particle physics if we could construct a 1000-light-years-long particle accelerator, but we can't, so we won't. Unfortunately, this editor himself has no training in science, and so he is unqualified to critically present his respondents' answers. I am embarrassed to make a fool of myself in front of 100 bloggers when I make assertions about areas of science I don't completely understand; apparently John Horgan is not embarrassed to do it in front of what-is-the-print-run-of-the-book? 10000 readers?

Site PhysicsWeb.org has "highlights of the year" from 1997 on, which include graphene, nondestructive measurement of spin, negative-refractive-index materials, laser-induced nuclear fission, neutrino oscillations, quark-gluon plasma. Computer science has had Grover's and Shor's quantum algorithms, inapproximability using the PCP theorem, and derandomization. Of course, there was much more progress in physics in the 1920s and in computer science in the 1950s, but it looks like science hasn't ended after all since this book was written.

[Alex Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

At first I was excited to read this, as Horgan is able to write complex ideas clearly, but then about 1/3 into the book I got what he was doing. I found him disingenuous in how he presents these scientists, almost as caricatures. Much of his "take" on their theories are variated with rhetorical questions, and judgements that seek only to influence the reader into seeing that science may have a limit.

This may be needed to shake people from their firm belief in science, but the way Horgan goes about doing so is melodramatic and without integrity. For example, he will criticize standard theory in physics saying something like how the field is only 20 years old, and we haven't made any progress! (hinting that there is something wrong with the theory) but then a few pages later he will say something like how black holes have only been discovered for 20 years, the field is too new to say anything meaningful yet. Not exactly a contradiction but you see what I am saying; the judgements he cuts into the text about the scientists themselves, or about their theories or presentation is less than honest. He seeks to make us uncertain about everything in his own book so we can feel that well, maybe this science is crappy or misguided in some way.

This purely rhetorical way of attacking content given in good faith by interviewees is disgusting. For a book about complex ideas, there is some kind of philosophical naivete here, where we have expectations of progress that can be verified in some objective way. If Horgan was more honest, he would establish criteria in the book for what progress is, and how science can be measured as to "living up to" its potential. But he doesn't do this... although some of the interviewees do talk about this kind of criteria, Horgan seems more interested in finding their person odd than exploring their ideas.

I do like the book for its breadth of exploration. And Horgan can be very clear when he wants to be. But his deployment is less than honest.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in October 1999.

John Horgan originally set out to write a book of profiles of the most eminent scientists of the late twentieth century, based on interviews he had carried out as a journalist for Scientific American. But he became fascinated by a theme he perceived in these interviews, the question of whether we might have almost reached the end of what science can discover about the universe.

The first thing he has to do is to define the various ways in which science might end, to establish criteria against which the ideas scientists have about science can be measured, and it is rather unfortunate that this is the least clear section of the book. (This is really because Horgan does not separate this out and state it in an orderly fashion, in one place.)

There may be theoretical limits on what can be known, a physical equivalent of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. The problem with this is that attempts to apply this mathematical result to science are never very convincing, as Horgan points out. He goes on to argue for this point of view in certain branches of science, where the major theories discussed are not empirically testable. This is clearly the case in historical fields of study, such as cosmology and evolutionary biology, where we cannot prove that any particular theories of the origins of the universe and of life are wholly correct, because these were one off events (as far as we know) in the distant past. All we can do is see if the theories we have come up with match up with what we see around us now (the microwave background and the distribution of matter, the fossil record and Earth's ecosystems).

There may be limitations affecting science in general, if a final "theory of everything" is discovered. Then there would be no more fundamental revolutions to come in science; it would only be a matter of filling in the details. This is the attitude that nineteenth century scientists are accused of holding, though (again as Horgan points out) historical investigations have tended to disprove specific allegations (Kelvin's supposed speech in which he said that all that there was left to do was to discover physical constants to more decimal places; the patent office official who resigned because nothing was left to be discovered). There is of course the possibility that a revolutionary new discovery will be made, a new theory will be proposed, but even today, Horgan says, the evidence is against it. There has been a dearth of revolutionary ideas since the sixties; most of theoretical science since then has continued steady development of those of the first half of the century (relativity, quantum mechanics, subatomic structure, the synthesis of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolution) or from that decade (DNA, the standard model, the Big Bang). Theories currently touted as the next revolution (such as superstrings and various inflation scenarios) contain ideas that may be inherently untestable. This means that we may be moving into an era of what Horgan calls "ironic science", a term borrowed by analogy from Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, an analysis of poetry in the seventies. Lacking new discoveries to make, scientists move away from traditional science to reinterpret older theories and to discuss metascience. In other words, science loses its independent existence and becomes part of philosophy once again.

The third reason that science may end is that we no longer have the power to invent deeper theories; science becomes beyond human cognitive abilities. There is, after all, no obvious reason why human beings should be able to grasp the universe of which they form part; in fact, the vastness of the universe by comparison with our minds makes it unlikely. The universe is a complex object; why should it be governed by a simple set of rules? Evidence for this point of view comes from the difficulty of grasping current ideas, increasing specialisation and the length of time needed for becoming a fully fledged researcher in a modern scientific discipline.

The fourth reason is more mundane: scientific research is becoming too expensive. Governments, always parsimonious towards pure research, have become even more so since the end of the Cold War. Projects like the Superconducting Super Collider have failed to receive funding because the cost is perceived to outweigh the benefits, and the propaganda value gained from big science projects is less (would the US fund a moon programme today with the same urgency as granted the Apollo project?). In fields like particle physics, bigger and bigger experiments are needed if more fundamental discoveries are to be made, and even then there is no guarantee that they will be made (much of the last twenty years has been spent just confirming the details of the standard model rather than advancing any further). And then applications are not at all obvious; we may not be able to do exciting new things as a result of these experiments, and without applications (results, so far as governments and corporations are concerned), no one is going to fund the research.

The first three reasons are interesting philosophical speculations, but it is the fourth that is in my opinion most likely to bring an end to the scientific search for meaning in the universe. The scientific establishment has naturally attacked Horgan's book, because it is negative about the future of science. Yet we live in a world where science is still to some extent seen as the universal panacea that will bring enlightenment and truth, and eliminate all evils (even though some of these evils, such as pollution, are consequences of earlier scientific 'advances'). In this environment, a negative voice is perhaps a good thing; nobody is attacking science strongly enough to destroy public confidence in it in the way that scientific blunders are doing (through food scares like the BSE crisis, for example). There is a tendency towards arrogance among successful scientists, and many could do with thinking a little harder about what they are doing.

It is this arrogance which comes over most strongly from Horgan's book; the profiles (which still form the bulk of the material) stay in the mind a lot better than the philosophical argument. Either Horgan doesn't like eminent scientists, or they are a uniformly unpleasant bunch of people. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between. Scientists are not benevolent, absent minded, white-haired men in white coats; to be successful in the field can require many of the same qualities as it does to be successful in, say, high finance. The way that people look up to scientists, viewing them as a race apart, can breed arrogance; specialism can lead to an obsession with hobby-horses and blind misunderstanding of other fields. On the other hand, a few interviews with people like this are hardly likely to give you high expectations about meetings with others. So the interviews make the book more interesting, but they do present a rather one-sided view of scientists as a group of people.

[Daniel Toker · Rating 3 out of 5]

If nothing else, this book is a compelling argument for genetic engineering to make humans smarter. One passage which really captures the essence of Horgan's thesis:

"Humanity, Nietzsche told us, is just a stepping stone, a bridge leading to the Superman. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would surely entertain the notion that the Superman might be made not of flesh and blood, but of silicon. As human science wanes, those who hope that the quest for knowledge will continue must put their faith not in Homo sapiens, but in intelligent machines. Only machines can overcome our physical and cognitive weaknesses -- and our indifference."

And I must admit that his argument that *human* science is waning is quite compelling. But he constantly confuses the waning of human science with the waning of science in general. Horgan seems to oscillate between a conviction that we know almost everything there is to know, that all that remains for science is to fill in the little details, and a conviction that humans are just too stupid or disinterested to continue with scientific exploration.

One of my biggest qualms with this book was the ending. Horgan, who had until that point presented himself as a thoroughgoing monist, rationalist, and skeptic, does a double take and suddenly spouts a sort of mysticism totally detached from anything seen beforehand in the book. He even ends with an argument that once there is nothing else to discover, we must turn back to believing in God since we need something to believe in. That was a bit disappointing.

These problems aside, it was very interesting to hear from the scientists and philosophers themselves what they take to be the destiny of their disciplines. Horgan is a fantastic writer, and manages not only to truly capture the personalities of those he interviews, but records these interviews in such a compelling way as to read like a good fiction novel.

[D.M. Dutcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book asking a cross-section of specialists across fields about the limits of science. Horgan's main argument is that science is unlikely to see any more paradigm shifts-new theories in which we radically increase our understanding of the universe. This is because of a few reasons:

1. As science solves the low-hanging fruit, the cost of research rises exponentially and becomes impossible to justify.

2. There are often perceptual barriers innate in being human that prevent us from either seeing the problem well enough to understand it, like researching our own consciousness, or act as hard limits to prevent empirical verification, like universal distances in astronomy.

3. The lack of empirical verification tends to lead to what he calls ironic science: elegant theories which are closer to theology than scientific fact. String theory, for example.

There's more than these reasons, of course. It's an entertaining book that tends to drag towards the end, as they stretch out into more soft and even psuedoscientific fields like chaoplexity or machine theology. And it also dimishes many famous scientists, though not by his intention. Many really seem like elderly, distracted cranks, full of their own inconsistencies and eccentricities. Still an interesting book, but chances are like me, you'll skim through the last chapters.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Song and dance from start to finish. If Horgan were serious, then this book would evidence only a lack of imagination. But one or two passages, unless plagiarized, suggest that the author is sufficiently knowledgeable and intelligent that he can hardly be thought to believe what he proposes. True, he quotes scientists whose statements appear to support his view, but he must have omitted everything and everyone else who might suggest otherwise.

There is a story, untrue, that someone suggested a hundred years ago that the patent office should be shut down because everything already had been invented. Why does this book remind me of that?

[Avi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's easy to look back on this bit of prognostication from 20 years ago and see that it's mostly wrong about everything it says, but I feel like if I'd read it the day it was published I would still have recognized he basic journalistic dishonestly evidenced on almost every page. While it contains a few interesting insights into the philosophy of science, too much of the book is taken up with misrepresenting or simply denying the content of its interviews with prominent scientists in order to bolster the author's specious and spurious thesis.

[Nebuchadnezzar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't recall another book that advanced an argument I so disagreed with but found fascinating and informative anyway. Horgan stands in a long line of figures who have asserted an "end of science," though he handles his argument in a manner that doesn't distract from the meat of the book, which is the interviews with philosophers and scientists.

For many, the structure of the book will probably seem hodgepodge or scatter-shot. I found this to be an entertaining delivery, though -- as if you were suddenly thrust into a room filled with the big names of some of the century's major scientific debates, each one taking a brief opportunity to ramble, despair, or pitch their own Big Idea. Having worked in the lab and field myself, I know science is very much a human enterprise. If you spend time around scientists or read about their lives, I think you'll find that their life experiences and personalities very much shine through in their work. Horgan captures this incredibly well with a certain je ne sais quoi that is characteristic of much of his writing.

I get the sense that the "end of science" theme in the book was bigged up just a bit for commercial purposes ("The Probable Decline in the Rate of Scientific Discovery" wouldn't sell as well). I definitely agree that we are seeing diminishing returns in certain fields and that the complexity of our knowledge has grown to the point that the days of the lone inventor and garage tinkerer are over when it comes to major discoveries. His characterization of a certain postmodern sensibility he calls "ironic science" is astute. However, some of his own examples run counter to his argument. Neuroscience, a field just coming out of its infancy, still has much to discover about the brain and cognition, though I did still enjoy the chapter on it. Nevertheless, I don't feel that the faults in the argument detract from the book all that much as Horgan seems mostly content to let his interviewees do much of the talking.

I can see why it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, but this is one of my favorite pieces of science journalism.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The End of Science is about the end of new discoveries in scientific fields more than it's about the end of science as a method of discovery. It discusses many different reasons why scientific discoveries may be harder to make in the future, but the most important one mentioned is that science has been so successful. It's discovered all of the low hanging fruit, and the author claims that we've entered into an era of diminishing returns on investment into scientific investigations.

The book is full of interviews the author did with various scientists and philosophers. Many of those interviews took place well after the interviewee did their most famous work. Often, the book compares two different types of scientist in a given field: one who feels that the topic is about solve all of its problems, and another who feels that the topic has fundamentally unanswerable questions. There are a lot of speculative psychoanalyses of various scientists in the book, and many are described as "scared of success".

The book doesn't claim that the end of science is necessarily bad, just that it's happening. It does claim that many of the un-testable theories currently in vogue are not science as it used to be practiced. The value of these un-testable theories, according to the book, is that they inspire in people a sense of wonder, and a sense that science isn't settled law. Much of the book seems to argue that if we figure everything out, life will in some way be less worth living. I don't agree with that at all.

Overall, I thought that a lot of the conclusions about science and the future were pretty tenuous. I also felt that many of the suggestions about what various scientists may have meant by their work or secretly felt were pretty unsupported. The main benefit of the book is that it goes over weaknesses and open questions in many different fields, which is incredibly thought provoking.

[Max Becher · Rating 2 out of 5]

TLDR: Horgan throws together a bunch of his interviews with scientists to persuade us (semi-convincingly) that pure scientific discovery has largely run its course. Then he embarrasses himself in the last chapter by claiming to know why god created the universe.

In this book, Horgan defines ironic science as the "pursuit of science in a speculative, postempirical mode." This means that in ironic science, scientists generate theories based not on observations and experiments, but on aesthetic principles. Ironic science is not science. It's a search for The Answer (to all our questions) in a subjective, opinion-based manner which may masquerade as science but cannot yield empirical truth. Throughout the book, he describes ironic science as resembling literary criticism and incessantly makes references to Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence to the extent of revealing his (Horgan's) tumescent priapism.

Horgan spends almost the entire book revisiting and summarizing interviews he's conducted with various prominent and semi-prominent scientists. This operates as a survey of scientific facts and opinions circa '96, and in that capacity, I found that it worked fairly well. There were plenty of ideas I hadn't come across before. Some of which I spent excessive time Wikipedia-ing. Others, I'll gladly forget. In fact, many of his interviews revealed, embarrassingly, the preposterousness and contradictoriness of the work of many modern (at the time) scientists. Horgan seems to catch a sick thrill by exposing some of these figureheads to be utter kooks and cranks. It's just a shame that he ends up doing the same to himself in the last chapter...more to come.

(By the way, for what it's worth, I think I only counted one interview of a female scientist. Goes to show what the scientific culture of the 20th century was like: a competition for who wielded the most impressive mental phallus.)

Perhaps I shouldn't be so degrading. We all share the same plight. Our innate desires and fears lead us to do crazy things. The seven deadly sins abound. Can we really blame these people for winning their absurd reputations and the rest of society for not giving a damn? I want to be sympathetic, but at some point, a line needs to be drawn.

Horgan has a reason to portray these scientists and philosophers as brilliant fools. It's a back-handed argument against authority. He's using it as a tactic (and he probably did this naturally seeing as though he's trained in the art of persuasion) to pull the skeptic out of his audience so he can more easily convince them of his own opinion. When people perceive "authority" figures as fools, the things the authority represents become foolish. Thus he's trying to weaken our assumption that science is capable of finding truth and continuing forever by exposing select practitioners. He isn't very subtle either about who he selects to apply the principle of charity to and who he doesn't. Proponents of pessimistic views look far less foolish in his writing than the optimists.

Horgan's book is really a battle between optimism and pessimism. The optimists say science has infinite things to learn while the pessimists say science has just completed its era of major discoveries and all that's left is the boring filling-in of details. Horgan is a pessimist who thinks that science is providing diminishing returns and that we should acknowledge that fact as a portent of the death of the discipline. Because of my own bias as a disenchanted former physics student, I am inclined to agree with him. The tension between pessimism and optimism seems to me like the same kind of tension between the modes of knowledge seeking: avoiding falsehoods and finding truths. Insomuch as you wish to avoid believing something that is false, you should always suspend judgement. And insomuch as you wish to have a truth, you should always believe everything for risk of discarding something true. Thus, an optimist accepts hope and a pessimist eschews hope because both want to believe that they know something about the future.

Then there is the issue of the last chapter. For about 250 pages, Horgan is just recounting interviews, treating topics with however much respect he deems fair, and fantasizing about Harold Bloom sodomizing him. In the last 6 pages, he surprises his tenderized readers with a revelation of his. The title of the chapter is The Terror of God. He claims to have had a mystical experience before he became a science writer in which he discovered "God's fear of his own Godhood and of his own potential death." Later, through learning about the Omega Point theory, in which the universe is essentially one giant computer, he believes he found the explanation for his revelation. Essentially, he believes God, or the Omega Point, created the universe as a means to keep itself distracted from its own solitude and fear of death. Thus, the universe is a myth providing the same comfort for God that our myths provide us. A problem with this theory, and myriad other theological theories, is that it relies on God being like-man: a being with fears and desires, limited knowledge, solipsistic feelings, trapped in his own head, etc. Which means Horgan's theory, in itself, is interesting at best. It is just a reflection of his own solitude, his own fear, his own solipsism. In this final chapter he reveals himself to be a kook, a crank, a truth-seeker, a wannabe "strong poet" of Bloom's description, a desperate soul, a disgruntled simian, whatever you want to call it. In his "colossal conceit" (from a Paul Feyerabend quote), Horgan believes he has discovered The Answer and must share his wisdom with the rest of humanity. In his defense, if he truly believed his theory was so brilliant, he would have written a different book about it instead of hiding it in the last 6 pages of this book. Maybe he did. I'm not familiar with his other work.

If it weren't for that final chapter, I'd say Horgan is a serious communicator of ideas with a tinge of malicious intent. But alas, he doesn't practice what he preaches. There's more to say on this book and some of the actually interesting ideas it contains, but I can't be bothered to dig through it again knowing what lurks at the end.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horgan about his book

I burst into the jam-packed meeting room just as an audience member, Trudy Bell, a reporter and former colleague of mine at the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum, stood and said: "I can't resist asking such a distinguished panel your opinion about John Horgan's argument in The End of Science."

An online video recording of the event made by C-Span, the public-affairs show, shows Bell's question provoking smirks and chuckles among the panelists. The recording also shows a guy in a blue blazer crossing in the front of the camera. That's me. As I searched, breathless and sweaty, for a seat, the panel members took shots at me.

"He's a very nice guy," Margulis said, "and he wrote a very bad book."

Jim Peebles said that in his field, cosmology, he sees "no end, and no cause for concern about the end of research."

Chemist and Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach groused that I had chapters on the end of particle physics, evolution biology and neuroscience but "no 'End of Chemistry'!"

Witten insisted that "the next 35 years will be one of the greatest periods of the adventure of theoretical physics."

Gould, who had spotted me, said, "I don't mind saying this in your presence John." He called my thesis "ridiculous," and likened me to scholars who sought attention by declaring the "end of literature."

Someone shoved a microphone at me. Months of defending my thesis on radio and television and in public talks had left me pretty battle-hardened. I was nonetheless stunned to find myself thrust so abruptly into the spotlight, especially after being scolded by these mega-experts.

.....

This week Basic Books is publishing a new paperback and electronic edition of The End of Science.

The re-launch has stirred up many memories—and forced me to evaluate my thesis. My book has now sustained almost two decades worth of attacks, some triggered by genuine scientific advances, from the completion of the Human Genome Project to the discovery of the Higgs boson. So do I take anything back?

Hell no.

I wrote a preface for the new edition, which begins as follows:

Here's what a fanatic I am: When I have a captive audience of innocent youths, I expose them to my evil meme.

....

In some ways, science is in even worse shape today than I would have guessed back in the 1990s.

In The End of Science, I predicted that scientists, as they struggle to overcome their limitations, would become increasingly desperate and prone to hyperbole.

This trend has become more severe and widespread than I anticipated.

I go on to review the status of physics, biology, neuroscience and chaoplexity (my coinage for chaos and complexity, the hype of which has been repackaged under the label "Big Data").

Neither these nor any other fields, I contend, has yielded discoveries that contradict my end-of-science prophecy (although the startling discovery in the late 1990s that the expansion of the cosmos is accelerating comes closest).

....

Some critics have suggested that such a discussion is bad for science.

In a 1999 column in Physics Today, physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson (another character in my book) blamed the malaise in physics on "Horganism," which he defined as "the belief that the end of science (or at least of our science) is at hand."

Anderson chided me for "pessimism," which he feared would become "self-fulfilling."

Thomas Eisner, a biologist and insect specialist who was on that 1996 panel, made this point when responding to my question about whether science is infinite.

"John, I liked your book," Eisner said, "I thought it sharpened the mind. I have required it of my graduate students. But I do think you're wrong in a fundamental way. You equate science with the search for great universal truths."

[Chiara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered this book a couple years ago when I was, as I always am, wandering around in my favorite bookshop to occupy my free time and help out customers - most of which are to this day still firmly convinced I work there. Anyway at the time I found it expensive and far too pretentiously titled (also the Italian edition - beautifully elegant but serious nonetheless - with its non-figurative red cover kind of frightened me) so I put it back on the shelf and forgot all about it. A couple weeks ago I happened to be in a bookshop sale and found it again, still kind of pompous looking but with the red cover a little bleached out because of the wear and the significantly lower price; the former hesitancy immidiately turned into compassion for the abandoned book and I decided to give it a try.
Horgan's thesis is that science might have reached in the last century its climax and therefore have little left in store for scientists. In the book he argues that there could not - and won't - be any discoveries comparable to that of quantum mechanics or Einstein's relativity. As a journalist Horgan happened to interview a great deal of influent scientists so he thought of putting those interviews together in this book which is divided in chapters named after each scientific field the interviewed people deal with - all of which follow the scary verdict "the end of".
I have to say, I was too fast judging this book: I found it rather interesting and insightful. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no expert - so that could be partly why - but I enjoyed it a great deal. Horgan's writing is fluent and not a bit dull (as I pictured it to be from the non-figurative red cover). Also I really liked the fact that each time he gave a full description of the person - scientist - he was interviewing so that it was easier for me to picture him/her from more than what they were saying.
Overall I'd recommend this book: it probably isn't as up-to-date as it could get - being 20 years old and all - but it certainly gives you an overview on the developings in the main scientific fields.

[Kirk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doesn't have the best presentation of science, for example it contains the following error:
'According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither particle has
a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but by measuring
the momentum of one particle, the physicist instantaneously forces the other
particle to assume a fixed position—even if it is on the other side of the
galaxy.'
This is completely and totally wrong.

I've noticed that people who are quick to talk negatively about the limitations of knowledge tend to have more limited knowledge than the people they are trying to critique.
People who bring up that science doesn't prove things often neglect that you don't really need absolute proof to have a fair degree of confidence that, yes, we should act like the sun is going to rise tomorrow.
Of course there is Godel, but Godel had a completeness theorem as well as his incompleteness theorem and there's no real reason to think the axiomatic system of our (As far as we can observe and interact with) finite universe has the kind of unwanted indirect self referencing that leads to incompleteness... If nothing else, it makes no sense for a part of a universe to not be part of the universe, so translating 'valid statements' to physical bodies and their motions (that is, if we don't assume the laws of physics are written 'outside' of the universe with indirect referencing, and instead that particles can be thought of as having behaviors all on their own simply from existing, kind of like the difference between writing '2 fingers' and holding up 2 fingers) leads to a contradiction if we somehow get an incompleteness there.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book did not age well.

Written in the early 90s by John Horgan (for context, he's a journalist, and mainly penned pieces for 'Scientific American'), it's desperately trying to convince you that science, as most of us know it, has burnt out and, well, has nothing more to discover. I beg to differ. And I beg to differ with its style.

He's American, so he naturally thinks the world revolves around him and his ideas. He's also white, and a man. And this was written in a time where basically trying to portray your interviewees as caricatures was acceptable. So yeah, the premise is 'if I disagree with them, I'm gonna slander them'. And that's what he does for 300 or so pages. His depiction of Popper is less than flattering, and so's the one of Kuhn (as a funny aside, the way he describes the interview is a frustrated Kuhn constantly going 'you're not getting this', him saying 'no, I understand' and then missing the point completely).

However, I'm glad science proved him wrong. Because, even if your day and age is not the one of discovering novel great theories (I'm still a unification hopeful), at least we have a LHC. And that's the thing: science will never stop asking questions, it will just shift focus every now and again.

[Jerry Petersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing premise is soured by the author’s snide, dismissive attitude toward any of the scientists whose viewpoints don’t align with his. And his analyses are rife with circular reasoning. For instance he declares that science can’t answer what the purpose of the universe is, which of course assumes that it even has a purpose. Then he concludes with an “insight” gained from a purely subjective experience that more than likely was a result of his brain going haywire for a moment.

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF at like a hundred pages. Some cool stories but most of them are better covered on YouTube or elsewhere by now. It's interesting but Horgan seems to misunderstand a lot of things about science. He assumes the purpose of science is to find out if God or whatever exists, which is really silly and was never on the table.

[Zack Subin · Rating 2 out of 5]

He talks to every famous scientist and philosopher of science of the 20th century and glibly makes fun of them, without coming to much conclusion.

[Dominik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sažetak: "Možda smo sve otkrili, a možda i nismo"
1/10 useless

[Öykü Akın · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a true gem. to better your understanding of science and to laugh at popper.

[Gavin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Forced myself to power through this as the first chapter was pretty good. Now I want my time back

[Mike Parkes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps you have told your boss to take this job and shove it when leaving a job or changing careers… John Horgan wrote a whole book that reads as a long resignation letter from his profession of science writing. One that I found immensely entertaining and infuriating at the same time, almost twenty-five years after it was written.

This book is really two books in one. Book one contends that we are approaching the limits of science. The great era of scientific discovery is over, and “further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.”

In Horgan’s view, many of the greatest remaining challenges – consciousness, the origin of the universe, the origin of life – are not “problems” that can be solved, but “mysteries” that cannot be answered, due to multiple factors including lack of historical evidence, the role of chance, and perhaps the limitations of our own mind.

As a consequence, Horgan asserts that many of the best-known scientists working on these cutting-edge issues are actually practicing “ironic science”, generating speculative and untestable ideas that do not converge on the truth. Horgan makes an accurate point that the public has a strong appetite for scientific revolutions, which (aided by promotion by scientific journalists) leads to more publicity for some of the woolier theories than is warranted by the evidence, at the expense of more mundane science. Sometimes the emperor (Penrose, in this case) may truly have no clothes.

But a little of this attitude goes a long way. The greatest strength of this book is that Horgan’s time as a writer for Scientific American gave him access to almost all of the best-known scientific minds. There doesn’t seem to be a well-known scientist still alive in the 1990s that Horgan didn’t interview and profile. Unfortunately, he uses this unprecedented access largely to simplify and mock the work and views of these scientists. Only Francis Crick and a very few others come away unscathed.

Horgan has set up a bit of a strawman here. He may indeed be correct that the most fundamental theories of science (the Big Bang, Darwin’s theory of evolution, etc.) are unlikely to be overturned or modified in truly substantial ways (although I would suggest that he is unduly pessimistic about his conclusions as to where the limits are and what we can find out; for example, the discovery of “dark energy” since the book’s publication is one truly fundamental and unexpected challenge to our current understanding).

But this is not the only type of relevant or interesting science. Horgan has little interest in straightforward science that does not overthrow paradigms ( mere “puzzles”), in historical/descriptive science (the understanding of biodiversity is “a mindless glass bead game”) or applied science.

Many of these areas have seen huge advances in the two decades since the book was written, that I suspect engage the interest of many others, if not Horgan. For example, we now know vastly more about the history of life on earth, including human evolution, largely through application of molecular biology tools, and much more about the arrangement of matter in the universe (e.g., exoplanets).

Book two is a philosophy book. If book one’s thesis is correct and we are reaching the limits to science, what does this mean for humans? For many scientists, and for Horgan himself (judging by the unusual epilogue), the end of science is nothing less than an existential crisis. “What will scientists do if they succeed in knowing what can be known. What then, would be the purpose of life?”

However, based on a discussion with Francis Fukuyama, Horgan concludes, accurately, I think, that for the population as a whole, science is not such a central pillar of our lives: “science was less a byproduct of our will to know than our will to power”, and “whatever the long-term destiny of Homo sapiens turns out to be…it will probably not be the pursuit of scientific knowledge.”
Certainly, coming to terms with a general slowdown in material progress - imposed by resource exhaustion, environmental concerns, and, yes, a slowdown in advances in many areas of applied science, is a broader question that many other writers have grappled with in more detail. I can recommend John Michael Greer – his essay on a requiem to the space age is a nice starting point: https://www.resilience.org/stories/20...

All in all, I can strongly recommend this book, even if you disagree with its conclusions. A useful counterpoint is John Maddox’s “What Remains to be Discovered”, written just after “The End of Science”.

[Daniel Cunningham · Rating 2 out of 5]

It seems there is a simple statement at the heart of this book: "We're not going to find anything as world-altering as General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, or Darwinian Evolution in the future." And maybe this is correct. (modulo e.g. resolving dark matter/energy.)

Attached to this is a critique that much of public science communication is just boosterism or "ironic science," as defined by Horgan (which would be 'speculative' science to the rest of us.)

It's hard to argue with either of these. Maybe we will need to replace the standard model to account for dark matter; but that replacement will contain the standard model. QM and GR need to be married, but that marriage will contain QM and GR. Will either of these things be as revolutionary as their predecessors? Horgan argues no, based on some faith and a bit of argument. I'm not so sure, but there is a strong possibility he is right.

Nonetheless, science may be limited in many ways, few of which are ever discussed in pop-science books. This book tries to do that... but fails to be convincing on several fronts.

The first is that while I share some of Horgan's sense of, "Well, this is just BS," in regards to some popular theories/areas/subjects, he doesn't argue that these areas are non-productive so much as he argues that the people promoting/researching in them are "ironic scientists." He also, it seems, caricatures or even... cherry picks... to make his point. (That is my impression; not a fact.) Additionally, he fails to discuss whether the cruft around the edges is normal. Perhaps there is always a certain amount of BS swirling about the edges of 'real' science; perhaps 'ironic' science isn't new or unusual or significant. I think it's easy to forget all the ideas, good and bad and 'not even wrong', left on history's cutting room floor.

Second, the argument that we've found out enough that there simply isn't room left on the map for world shattering discoveries to be hiding is compelling. But that is all. Maybe figuring out what e.g. dark matter is will involve some truly fundamental shift in physics. Maybe there is some deep revelation waiting in network/complexity/brain studies/sciences. Point is, we won't know until it happens. (Though, yes, we can, so to speak, constrain phase space and say it is more an more unlikely when/if 2050, 2100, 2250, 2500 passes and no new discoveries have come.)

Third, even if his point is valid, I'm not sure it's quite the existential crisis he makes it out to be. E.g. terraforming Mars is 'mere engineering', but I'm sure it would absorb a lot of the mental 'spare cycles' of those so inclined. He mentions and kind of dismisses lifespan extension... as if this wouldn't be earth shattering to scientists and lay persons alike, even if not as fundamental in some pure, Platonic sense as e.g. General Relativity.

Horgan also leaves some points just lying on the table. He discusses science becoming too complex for humans but what if it simply becomes too bulky? He could have explored more the idea that as science builds up there is more training required to become an expert who can contribute; already young scientists will be near 30 when finishing their first post-doc, and many will be older if they don't follow a strictly 'standard' educational path. This isn't, strictly speaking, a matter of science; it is at least as much one of pedagogy and perhaps one of human lifespan (so, science/technology.)

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, no, not quite yet

One the strengths of this book is the outrageous way John Horgan writes about the august scientists of our time and the forthright way he reveals his subjective impressions. Also one finds delight in the colorful and descriptive language. Some examples:

Visible matter in the universe as "just foam on a deep, dark sea." (p. 96)

Dawkins as "Darwin's greyhound" (cf. Huxley as his "bulldog") on page 116.

This exchange on page 125: "What's beyond the brick wall?" "But that's Cartesian space, and even if space is curved you still can't help thinking what's beyond the curve, even if that's not the right way of thinking about it."

My sentiments exactly! and something I've felt for many years. I used to hate it when I was told that there was nothing "as a matter of definition" beyond the universe as defined in the Big Bang model, and advised to stop thinking in terms of something beyond!

Useful as a Zen koan is Horgan's question on page 247, "What would we do if we could do anything?" Ditto for "What will mind chose to do when it informs and controls the universe?" (from Freeman Dyson on p. 254). Also appearing in this book is the question (my formulation), "Why is there anything at all; why isn't there nothing?" This question also appears in other books, for example, Edward O. Wilson's On Human Nature and John Taylor's When the Clock Struck Zero. I mention it because it is my favorite "Zen koan" kind of question. I first stumbled across it as a teenager, and experienced an instant enlightenment. It seemed to me that by being able to pose such a question I had proven the existence of God.. Not the sort of God Horgan talks about who is afraid of death. No this God was more like the God of the Vedas about which nothing can be said. I don't mean "proven" in the scientific sense or even in a sense that would necessarily be meaningful for anyone else. I suspect my experience was similar to that of Descartes when he thought he had proven that he existed when he said, ergo cognito sum. Of course he had proven nothing since to say "I think" is to assume a thinker, linguistically speaking, at any rate.

I like Horgan's idea of "ironic science" and I'm amazed that he could get a whole book out of the idea of "the end of science," since the end of science is just another way of saying the end of human knowledge or the limits of our ability to know or to explore.

A nice bit of self-revelation at the end is Horgan's speculations on that God who created the world as a puzzle to "shield himself from his terrible solitude and fear of death." That was sporting of Horgan since now his critics will be able to accuse him of anthropomorphizing God as is done in some very familiar religions.

Anyway this is an excellent book and I enjoyed reading it and I recommend it highly.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Steven T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read an article recently that referenced this book. The article was about the declining interest in science owing to the fact that there have been relatively few major discoveries in science in the last few decades (none in some fields). Since Horgan's book was published almost thirty years ago, he
was apparently fairly prescient.

The book was very good, although the title was a little misleading. It should be more aptly titled, “The Limits of Science”. What the author argues is not that science is really at an end, or that scientists can’t do any more science, but that there are philosophic, or more accurately epistemological, limitations to the approach science takes to understand the world. Only certain things can be “known” given this approach and that there aren’t many, if any, major landmarks left to discover within this approach. Further, once you realize this, you are compelled, or should be compelled, to reassess the scientific worldview tout court, which is to say the limits of materialist philosophy.

As the author points out, or as a philosophy professor at a conference he attended on the limits of science points out, this is hardly a revolutionary thesis. Kant, arguably, foresaw most of the problems scientists have encountered with their methods. In fact, even Aristotle foresaw many, which is why he rejected the materialist, mathmaticalized view of nature Descartes pursues and promulgates in his Discourse on Method and Meditations in the first book of his Physics. (physis is the ancient Greek word for "nature".)

I particularly enjoyed the anecdotal observations and insights about the many particular scientists he has met and interviewed and their lives.

This book reaffirmed the assessment of science I came to in graduate school after taking courses in philosophy of science, history of science and math theory. Before taking those courses, I thought I knew what science was (albeit I had taken only about sixteen hours of lavatory science as an undergrad). I realized fairly quickly that I didn’t really know what science was and hadn’t thought much about it. After taking those courses, I realized nobody really knows what science is, least of all scientists. There are many theories, but no consensus, particularly among scientists, about what science is, and every attempted definition and theory is problematic in some respects.

I’ve had many conversations with many scientists over the years about science and particular problems in science from which I discovered two things: people’s faith in science or any particular scientific theory, e.g. evolution, the big bang, is directly inversely proportional to their scientific education and understanding of the theories and most scientists have not thought that much about science. They are too busy doing science to think much about it, i.e. the philosophy of science or the limitations and problems of the underlying assumptions of their discipline.

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm rating the book a 3 (Liked It) even though I don't like the author, his opinions about science and society, his like communist leanings and many aspects of the book... why, you ask? because it was a useful source and some times you just have to read something you don't like to learn something you want to know. In this book there are many many Opinions given about many scientists Interviewed by the author; the author provides a little background on each and his comments on their interview But its the description of each scientist's work which is useful. The author does provide notes and a bibliography (although I closed my reader at the acknowledgements happy to end the end of science there). So, it's a mixed bag... if you're truly in science books this (and other) samplers of scientists is a great help to find More Content. I advise that this author is likely a socialist/communist/fascist who believes in a planned world (which you don't plan)!

[Mohsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The End of Science,’ offers a profound understanding of science’s definition, the contrast with pseudoscience (where almost I saw in a lot of universities and research lab ), and speculative predictions about the future of scientific discovery. It was fascinating to embark on a historical journey across various scientific fields, from physics and biology to neuroscience and chaos theory, showcasing the main influencers and the evolution of scientific thought. Particularly compelling was the exploration of scientists’ diverse and often ideologically stubborn viewpoints, highlighting the significant impact of ego and human nature on scientific discourse. The book critically examines whether we are nearing the ‘end of science,’ where major discoveries become fewer and speculative science blurs with science fiction, challenging readers to consider the objective nature of scientific inquiry amidst personal biases.

[Jesse Coker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird book. I actually found Horgan’s core argument persuasive, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it the last few weeks. However, the method of making the argument (“let’s cherry-pick quotes from esteemed scientists to make them seem silly”) is pretty lame, and the final chapter is borderline comically inept given the rest of the book’s argument. Thought-provoking but not particularly impressive.

[Nino · Rating 3 out of 5]

3* - kao aritmetička sredina između 2 i 4. Ova knjiga zaslužuje 4* kao zanimljiv prikaz kako već prihvaćenih teorija, tako i alternativnih ili divlje spekulativnih te kao prikaz (ne)postojećih granica znanosti. S druge strane, zaslužuje 2* zbog karikaturalnog i podcjenjivačkog portretiranja sugovornika i njihovih stavova.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 4 out of 5]

While transhumanists are spreading the creed of augmenting returns for every discovery John Horgan is stating the opposite, there will be dimiminishing returns and most fundamental discoveries have been made. That is his view. He may be very wrong, let's watch out for the next twenty years, but superficially he is right.