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The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
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As a staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has been privileged to interview the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, and E.O. Wilson, with license to probe their innermost thoughts. This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final “theory of everything” that signals the end? Is the age of great discoveries behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding details to existing theories? Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. Yet, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and deconstructionists. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literary criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in what he calls “ironic science.” 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.