The End of Science (Helix Books)

Rating:
Summary: A fair question, great responses...
Review:
Is scientific research winding down? Is what we can know scientifically coming to an end? At some point every scientist asks him/herself this question. It's a fair question for a journalist and a great one for access to so many scientists.

I enjoyed the breadth of scientific scope here along with the conversational style. Truth be told, I am envious of Mr. Horgan's ability to spend time with all of these people. I appreciate being able to read both their and his thoughts on the premise of this book.

Is science at an end? Never as long as there are folks around to ask the question and stimulate debate. I recommend this book wholeheartedly to everyone interested in contemporary science.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful book: whether it's correct is irrelevant
Review: I doubt very much whether any open-mided person will be convinced after reading this book that science has reached its limits, or is even close to. For this to have been achieved, the author would have had to draw together the material from his interviews far more carefully than he even attempts to.

However, the book has 2 significant strengths.

1. It presents many prominent scientists' opinions.

2. It has a good bibliography, so one can read the scientists first-hand if one wants.

One of the main criticisms of the book is that the character portraits Horgan paints of the prominent scientists he interviews are biased and unfair. I suspect that they are indeed both. This is perhaps regrettable. However, any reader who takes Horgan's portraits as the raison d'etre of this book is - in my view - missing the point.

The point is, this book examines a number of different sciences, and also the discipline of the Philosophy of Science, with the view to addressing a particular question: whether Science is "coming to an end". Thus, there is a certain cross-disciplinary methodological focus which I - for one - found very valuable indeed.

Although this book is unlikely to provide all, or even any, of the answers to a scientist or sophisticated layman, it at least poses the questions and goes a little way down a particular path of enquiry. If you want more, as I said, the bibliography is there!

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating and entertaining
Review: I know this book irritates many scientists, but I found it the most stimulating book on science I've read in years.

The critical reviews I've read seem to be more on the order of attacks on the person of the author, than the ideas presented here. The book has a strong focus on the basic question of whether pure science has reached an apex and is now going down hill. But while this question interested me, I was more intrigued by the opinions expressed on a variety of subjects in the many interviews with the biggest names in science of the past half century.

I was mildly irritated by the author's attempt to coin a term - ironic science - and although he defined it several times in different ways, I never did feel it added anything to the book.

I love science and have nothing but respect for the disciplined approach to truth embodied in it. I think Horgan asks tough questions here and they should be honestly and dispassionately tested against reality. This doesn't mean Horgan has all the right answers - but he is an excellent interviewer and writer and he's asking the right questions, and that's more than half the battle.

The reaction of some scientists to Horgan sounds more to me like church leaders defending orthoxy - and perhaps their sources of income and power - than like individuals interested in the pursuit of objective truth. Now that's ironic science!

Rating:
Summary: But sadly, prose doesn't prove...
Review: In the first page of first chapter the author tells about a meeting which he says had a "provocative but misleading title, 'The End of Science?'" This is more or less my feeling about this book. I will criticize the book on three grounds: misleading title, omniscient presumptions and pretentious prose.

First of all, this book doesn't come with any ideas or synthesis and doesn't even try to. The author somehow knows all along that the science has finished and with the logic of a TV advertisement he keeps repeating it probably hoping that all this chanting will make us really believe so. What is funnier, I guess he is content that he made his point and proved it clearly, because in the second half of the book end of science is almost unspoken. We are left with a carnival of leading scientists who tell us about their ideas and who each time eventually meet the big question: "Is the end of science near?" Like a witch-hunt, the poor scientists (which in fact are great minds) are left with two options: They say "Yes" and they are saved, the author is happy that someone agrees his point; or they say "No", and they are instantly blamed with wishful thinking, or too scared to admit when they attain the Truth they'll have nothing to seek...

At points in the book, I have thought that I was reading a Holy Book of some sort, not because of the content but because of the high voice of the author. The author knows it all and he is not shy to give you some revelations as well. Whatever the subject is, robotics, quantum theory, consciousness, omega point, chaos, he listens to the experts with great ease, if he cannot understand them (he says) it's because they actually are hiding their stupidity behind obscurity. Then again with great ease he wraps up the subject in a few lyrical sentences and he tells us where these people were right and wrong, and what they should do. This is too much.

The prosaic prose is unbearable. We are here to read about 'end of science', if not that 'science', who cares about the color of the pants and name of the wife of the guy he interviews? But I must congratulate the author, he really found an algorithmic way of writing a book: Find a bunch of leading scientists on a field. Take first one. One paragraph: Talk about the work of him. One paragraph: Visit him and talk about his pants and living room. Two paragraphs: Quote what he says. Last paragraph: Ask him about the end of science and either say he is smart or he succumbed to wishful thinking. Take the next scientist... (why are there no woman scientists interviewed?)

All in all, reading this book is not a waste of time because those two paragraphs of quotations are really nice. The rest (especially the khaki pants) is probably not so relevant. Do not expect a synthesis about the end of science.

Rating:
Summary: But sadly, prose doesn't prove...
Review: In the first page of first chapter the author tells about a meeting which he says had a "provocative but misleading title, 'The End of Science?'" This is more or less my feeling about this book. I will criticize the book on three grounds: misleading title, omniscient presumptions and pretentious prose.

First of all, this book doesn't come with any ideas or synthesis and doesn't even try to. The author somehow knows all along that the science has finished and with the logic of a TV advertisement he keeps repeating it probably hoping that all this chanting will make us really believe so. What is funnier, I guess he is content that he made his point and proved it clearly, because in the second half of the book end of science is almost unspoken. We are left with a carnival of leading scientists who tell us about their ideas and who each time eventually meet the big question: "Is the end of science near?" Like a witch-hunt, the poor scientists (which in fact are great minds) are left with two options: They say "Yes" and they are saved, the author is happy that someone agrees his point; or they say "No", and they are instantly blamed with wishful thinking, or too scared to admit when they attain the Truth they'll have nothing to seek...

At points in the book, I have thought that I was reading a Holy Book of some sort, not because of the content but because of the high voice of the author. The author knows it all and he is not shy to give you some revelations as well. Whatever the subject is, robotics, quantum theory, consciousness, omega point, chaos, he listens to the experts with great ease, if he cannot understand them (he says) it's because they actually are hiding their stupidity behind obscurity. Then again with great ease he wraps up the subject in a few lyrical sentences and he tells us where these people were right and wrong, and what they should do. This is too much.

The prosaic prose is unbearable. We are here to read about `end of science', if not that `science', who cares about the color of the pants and name of the wife of the guy he interviews? But I must congratulate the author, he really found an algorithmic way of writing a book: Find a bunch of leading scientists on a field. Take first one. One paragraph: Talk about the work of him. One paragraph: Visit him and talk about his pants and living room. Two paragraphs: Quote what he says. Last paragraph: Ask him about the end of science and either say he is smart or he succumbed to wishful thinking. Take the next scientist... (why are there no woman scientists interviewed?)

All in all, reading this book is not a waste of time because those two paragraphs of quotations are really nice. The rest (especially the khaki pants) is probably not so relevant. Do not expect a synthesis about the end of science.

Rating:
Summary: "Teacher! My head hurts!"
Review: John Horgan isn't a scientist, and doesn't seem to understand very well what scientists do -- although he has picked some great ones to interview; the most generous thing you could say about this book is that it's pretty confused.

Horgan's argument can be crystallized in the positions of two of the scientists he spoke to. Biologist Gunther Stent says there are limits to our knowledge of subjects like anatomy, or chemistry, and maintains that we have nearly reached them. I have to ask myself how we can be so close to knowing everything there is about anatomy, or biology, or biochemistry, etc., when we can't even regrow a human arm, let alone build a person from scratch.

Stent then backtracks and says that we may never be able to understand consciousness: "No purely physiological theory can ever really explain consciousness, since 'the process responsible for this wholly private experience will be seen to degenerate into seemingly quite ordinary, workaday reactions, no more or less fascinating than those that occur in, say, the liver...' " (p. 11) If the reactions that occur in the liver are so workaday, why haven't we conquered hepatitis? And how does Stent know that "this process" will "degenerate" if he doesn't understand it? This is presumptuous, to say the least.

"Unlike biology," Stent writes, "the physical sciences seem to be open-ended... But in their efforts to gather data from ever-more-remote regimes, physicists will inevitably confront various physical, economic and even cognitive limits.

"Over the course of this century, physics has become more and more difficult to comprehend; it has outrun our Darwinian epistemology, our innate concepts for coping with the world." (ibid.)

The problem here is not with physics or science, but with the inability of some to shed outmoded belief systems. This is not unusual in the history of science. Copernicus, Descartes and Newton forced people to look pretty deeply into the basis of their ideas. So did Einstein and the quantum physicists. Stent may not have caught up with them yet, but that doesn't mean that you or I can't -- if only we dare.

Stent doesn't even believe we can ultimately build computers that really think! "Computers may excel at precisely defined tasks such as mathematics and chess, he pointed out, but they still perform abysmally when confronted with the kind of problems -- recognizing a face or a voice or walking down a crowded sidewalk -- that humans solve effortlessly." (p. 15) We have only been building them for 50 years or so! We haven't even developed a solidly post-Newtonian philosophy of science! Of course no one's built a real thinking "machine" -- yet! Compared to the space shuttle, Leonardo's drawings of flying machines bear a close family resemblance to the Wright brothers' first airplane -- but they were separated by several hundred years of scientific advance. Check back in a few decades on this one...

As for the physical and economic limits Stent refers to, these are only at the mercy of current levels of technological development, on the one hand, and the limited vision that reigns in science, on the other. Horgan cites biologist and American Association for the Advancement of Science president Bentley Glass, who points to his own analysis of the rate of discoveries in biology, which "showed that they had not kept pace with the exponential increase in researchers and funding." This is, above all, a sign of the stagnant paradigm in what now passes for biology.

There have always been two positions on the scope of knowledge. There are those like Horgan who insist that its limits are just around the corner. Then there are those like Isaac Newton, who see clearly its infinitude. I think Sir Isaac himself put it best, even though it is his own systems that must now be overthrown: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

I congratulate John Horgan for the magnitude of the questions he has raised. But if you want serious analysis of them, your best bet is to turn elsewhere. For starters, you might try standing on the shoulders of giants. Some of them were interviewed in this book.

Rating:
Summary: The end or only the begining of the end?
Review: Mr. Horgan is a respected and knowledgable columnist for Sientific American. This book is a series of interviews and assesments of a number of important twentienth century thinkers. Each chapter includes an introduction to the scientist, a talk with him and an assesment. Mr. Horgan makes these men very human by describing their lifestyles and "shticks". Are we at the end of the era of great scientific discoveries or is there a new, as yet undiscovered dimension out there? That is the basic question of the book and each chapter digresses into many sub-questions. A great read and worth a re-read in the future.

Rating:
Summary: The ends of science
Review: Must read book, good to the last penny but I must knock off one star for authorial insolence.
This was a well placed 'potshot' at the pretensions of Big Science, and better barbed than the original Spengler version which was a bit of a 'cheapshot', or overly hysterical, or too neo-barbarous. It would seem the problem is not the end of science but (the question of the 'ends' of science apart) correctly hoping for its true beginning, and in any case cutting out the fat in (very) major areas where science has produced filler instead of knowledge. Science has 1. never escaped Descartes, 2. cold shouldered Kant's critiques 3. produced a bogus theory of evolution 4. never resolved issues of free will, soul, or divinity, and yet claims to have a lockon for absolute truth, 5.forgotten all the warnings that this was happening starting in the generation after Newton.

Thus, the 'end' of science actually happened at the end of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth, but noone quite got the message as the emergence of a host of semi-sciences cluttered the minds of the intellectual masses with massive amounts of junk thinking. A good example is Darwin's theory of selectionist evolution taken as a total theory to bootstrap the pretense evidentally of 'full take over and control' for the Age of Science. Such a theory is the one thing needed to achieve a breakthrough in the human sciences (control again), so it is a good question, did they fake it?
Until science can backtrack and correct its mistakes and account for its inability to backtrack and correct its mistakes issues of the end of science are a bit like asking why Beetlebomb the racehorse never finished the race and was found munching in pasture near the track. In the meantime because science is good at technics (dig those Big Bombs) the mystique and arrogance of the nerdish nitwits has proven sufficient for mindshare/mindcontrol.
The question of the end of science thus hardly arises. The issue is the 'end of fantasy science', the irrationalism of 'scientific rationalism', etc...

Rating:
Summary: One of the most enjoyable books in recent years
Review: The End of Science is delightful to read. Horgan has done a masterful job with his subject. It is fun to see what many leading scientists are like and what they are thinking about science. It is clear from the book that the scientists themselves do not agree about the future of science. Horgan's thesis that science is in its twilight years is unprovable, but it is persuasive and provides coherence to the book. The arcane details of science can be hard to follow, but the issues of the future and role of science are meaningful to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: I'm glad I didn't see the reviews before I read the book!
Review: There's much to learn from this book. Horgan's Grand Tour of scientists' homes, laboratories and their conferences, including personal histories and researchers' theories is comprehensive. You will learn ideas in physics, cosmology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology - in short, nearly every aspect of basic science comes under his scrutiny and assessment. A wide-ranging book in time and topics, it is almost possible to read it selectively. Major personalities in every field have their work, publications and personalities examined, revealed and commented on. In short, Horgan takes an Olympian stance on nearly all science.

As much as he tries to teach us, you come away with only one conclusion. John Horgan is the sole arbiter of the worth of science being undertaken today. And science, as an enterprise, is through - in his eyes. Horgan's theme is that empirical research has achieved its limits. Particle physics is delving so deeply into the atom that evidence can no longer be discerned, only inferred. Biology has no grand pronouncements pending about life. Even cognitive science, perhaps one of the fastest growing areas of research, foresees no "breakthrough". All future science, he contends, will be but picking out niggling details that reinforce the great conceptions of Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein. Science, he argues, has gone from empirical to "ironic". It is no longer grandiose, but petty and "not converging on the truth".

Horgan struggles to bring lofty scientific figures into your lounge room. He visits Karl Popper, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick and countless [but not nameless] others. Dress and grooming are carefully scrutinised. I lost track of the number of "khaki pants" his victims wore. And make no mistake, Horgan's approach is firmly predatory. Behaviour traits - chin rubbing, stair skipping, prolonged silences - are entertaining and sometimes informative. But it's clear that Horgan relates them only in attempting to erode whatever status these figures have achieved. His quest is simplistic and focussed - to each subject he posits The Question: "Do you have The Answer?".

"The Answer" is a "final theory". The advances made by particle physics and cosmology during the last century suggested a unifying formula might tie the universe together. Realisation of the concept has brought physicists deeper into the atom in search of evidence. These depths have proven beyond our perception, says Horgan, and the cost of further penetration is too high for
the public to bear. Besides, the quest may be futile. There's no indication that a Final Theory would emerge from such probing, Horgan argues.

The Final Theory has implications in the other direction. Can quantum physics explain the mechanisms of the mind? Is the scope of human conception so great that it can someday interact with the mythical Creator? Horgan challenges philosophers and neuroscientists to show their work is leading to new, more fundamental, understanding. His approach is sly and disarming. While he contends science is no long searching for the truth, he really means they're not divulging The Truth, an expression scorned by nearly all scientists. The distinction is important, almost overwhelmingly so in this book. Horgan, it turns out, isn't really interested in the status of science. His real quest is for personal certainty. It's a valid quest, but hardly worth the price of demolishing so many scholars. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]