Can progress be infinite? Are there really no limits to human knowledge? Isn't a belief in the "endless frontier" of science a belief as romantic as believing in God? John Horgan, the author of a provocative new book, The End of Science, tries to answer these cosmic questions by visiting celebrity scientists and recording their opinions. Horgan makes his bias clear from the outset: He believes that the scientific age is in its twilight, because we have already discovered all the major things about the world there is to know. Seriously.
Now, Horgan is no dope. As a longtime profile writer for Scientific American, he can expertly "talk science" with any working scientist, and he's heard all the usual historical anecdotes of earlier predictions wrongly announcing the end of science. His thesis must be more than just simple ignorance. And it is. The first chapter is as good a case as can be made that just as we discovered the globe only once thereafter merely filling in map details so we have already discovered the basic laws of physics, biology, cosmology, and so on. All we are doing now is filling in engineering details. In other words, we can expect lots of little surprises but nothing big to change how we the everyday nonscientists view the world.
Beyond that single semiscientific chapter, the rest is a gossipy journalistic romp through the homes and offices of Big Scientists, where we learn that about half of them believe science is infinite and the other half don't. Horgan gets into the fascinating issue of whether the internal paradoxes of any system of knowledge will strangle it, but he never untangles it satisfactorily. In Horgan's own words, we mostly learn that he's "overly fond of mocking scientists who take their own metaphysical fantasies too seriously." Then why ask them? The conclusion the reader draws from these interviews is that there's a 50 percent chance science will end, leaving a 50 percent chance that knowledge is infinite and science is in its infancy.
It's a gamble, the future. No purchase necessary to play.
The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, by John Horgan: US$24. Addison-Wesley: (800) 358 4566, +1 (212) 463 8440.
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Striking a NerveThe End of Science
