Rating: 
Summary: Dream of a final arbiter?
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]
Rating: 
Summary: The end of science....I don't think so
Review: This is a provocative book that everyone interested in science, or interested in more general questions about the evolution of knowledge and our culture, should read. However, I wouldn't say the book is great or even that convincing in its arguments about science approaching a dead end, but nonetheless it raises important questions and gets a dialogue started. To his credit, Horgan has interviewed a number of interesting and influential scientists, and this improves the book substantially. It's pretty well-written, too. Overall, a book that will interest nearly anyone with a curious mind. Avery Z. Conner, author of "Fevers of the Mind".
Rating:
Summary: Informative, entertaining, but still completely wrong
Review: This is a very informative and entertaining book, despite the fact that I think its central thesis is completely wrong. Horgan's thesis is that there are not going to be any truly revolutionary new discoveries in science; that science has turned into an enterprise of finding more decimal points and filling out the details in well understood theories. Horgan interviewed a number of major scientists in a wide selection of fields, and he sketches their personalities and summarizes their thoughts on his thesis and related issues. Where he has gone wrong, I believe, is in his notion that even the key scientists in a field can predict true scientific revolutions; in fact, one of the hallmarks of scientific revolutions is that they can not be predicted. Thus, the fact that nobody he interviewed could see any coming doesn't mean they won't arrive. To see the fallacy in Horgan's reasoning, let's look at the fields of cosmology and neuroscience, two of the fields he considers. In cosmology, we have already had, since this book was written, the completely unforeseen discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This implies (most likely) that the universe is filled with a substance that physicists call dark energy. This makes a substantial change in our view of both the universe and fundamental theories of physics. These observations showing the dark energy, together with other observations, mean we also now know the age of the universe to an accuracy much better than Horgan ever expected would be possible, revealing the inherent conservatism of his approach. In neuroscience, it's clear that if we are ever to have a decent understanding of the brain, we need a fundamental revolution. What is Horgan's answer to this? In short, he says "we may never know." But this could also have been said about the questions of "why are we seeing so many new elementary particles?" in the 1960's, and the question of "how is genetic information inherited?" in the 1940's, and in both cases science provided a definitive and satisfactory answer. I am more optimistic: I expect fundamental insights in neuroscience are yet to come. Horgan may be right that at some point, we will know the outlines of all the scientific knowledge that is worth knowing, reducing science to the thankless task of filling in more and yet more details. However, this point is still decades or maybe centuries away; science as a whole is still enormously vital, and we scientists should now leave arguments about Horgan's thesis to the philosophers and get on with the task of discovering the next scientific revolution (or, for the less fortunate but vast majority of us scientists, to the task of filling in the still interesting, but less fundamental, details of our known theories).
Rating:
Summary: Informative, entertaining, but still completely wrong
Review: This is a very informative and entertaining book, despite the fact that I think its central thesis is completely wrong. Horgan's thesis is that there are not going to be any truly revolutionary new discoveries in science; that science has turned into an enterprise of finding more decimal points and filling out the details in well understood theories. Horgan interviewed a number of major scientists in a wide selection of fields, and he sketches their personalities and summarizes their thoughts on his thesis and related issues. Where he has gone wrong, I believe, is in his notion that even the key scientists in a field can predict true scientific revolutions; in fact, one of the hallmarks of scientific revolutions is that they can not be predicted. Thus, the fact that nobody he interviewed could see any coming doesn't mean they won't arrive. To see the fallacy in Horgan's reasoning, let's look at the fields of cosmology and neuroscience, two of the fields he considers. In cosmology, we have already had, since this book was written, the completely unforeseen discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This implies (most likely) that the universe is filled with a substance that physicists call dark energy. This makes a substantial change in our view of both the universe and fundamental theories of physics. These observations showing the dark energy, together with other observations, mean we also now know the age of the universe to an accuracy much better than Horgan ever expected would be possible, revealing the inherent conservatism of his approach. In neuroscience, it's clear that if we are ever to have a decent understanding of the brain, we need a fundamental revolution. What is Horgan's answer to this? In short, he says "we may never know." But this could also have been said about the questions of "why are we seeing so many new elementary particles?" in the 1960's, and the question of "how is genetic information inherited?" in the 1940's, and in both cases science provided a definitive and satisfactory answer. I am more optimistic: I expect fundamental insights in neuroscience are yet to come. Horgan may be right that at some point, we will know the outlines of all the scientific knowledge that is worth knowing, reducing science to the thankless task of filling in more and yet more details. However, this point is still decades or maybe centuries away; science as a whole is still enormously vital, and we scientists should now leave arguments about Horgan's thesis to the philosophers and get on with the task of discovering the next scientific revolution (or, for the less fortunate but vast majority of us scientists, to the task of filling in the still interesting, but less fundamental, details of our known theories).
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