Book 24 - John Horgan "The End Of Science"

John Horgan "The End Of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age" (Abacus)





John Horgan’s thesis is that we are coming to an era where all the fundamental scientific theories have been discovered and science as we know it today is coming altogether in an end. Horgan considers fundamental, theories such as Darwin’s natural selection, Einstein’s general relativity and quantum electrodynamics. That means theories that can apply, to the best of our knowledge, throughout the entire universe at all times since its birth.

In order to prove his thesis, Horgan has interviewed interesting scientists and philosophers from the entire scientific and social-philosophical landscape. Roger Penrose, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Popper, David Bohm, Edward Wilson, John Wheeler, Lynn Margulis, Andrei Linde, Daniel Dennet and many others.

I must say that I disagree with Horgan’s argument and I find his view very shortsighted. Horgan is not the first or the last person to argue over the-end-of-science-era. At the end of the nineteen century, physicists also thought they knew everything. But only two decades later Einstein and other physicists discovered relativity theory and quantum mechanics. These theories transformed physics and opened up vast new vistas for modern physics and other branches of science.

The most interesting insights for me here are into the scientists and philosophers themselves as human beings - I value this as psychological information which helps shed light on their thinking. He gives us many seemingly inconsequential details about individual scientist's behaviour and traits which I find fascinating in building up an impression of the people they were (many have since died). When it comes to reasoning however, Horgan reveals he's no philosopher, making some basic errors in respect of (for example) Karl Popper's thinking.

I highly recommend Horgan as a science writer, he seems to be able to cut through the crap as few others do (see for example how he strips the hype from Edelman's pronouncements). What I'm not clear about though is the true nature of his central argument - he says that science will continue in an 'ironic' mode - to me he could be saying that we'll realize that knowledge is ultimately subjective - in which case I'm with him. If he's saying that the limits of knowledge have been reached then I disagree