[.ca] The End of Science (ISBN 0553061747)

From Amazon.com:
In a series of interviews with luminaries of modern science, Scientific American senior editor John Horgan conducted a guided tour of the scientific world and where it might be headed in The End of Science. The book, which generated great controversy and became a bestseller, now appears in paperback with a new afterword by the author. Through a series of essays in which he visits with such figures as Roger Penrose, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, and others, Horgan captures the distinct personalities of his subjects while investigating whether science may indeed be reaching its end. While this book is in no way dumbed down, it is accessible and can take the general reader to the outer edges of scientific exploration.

I'm glad I didn't see the reviews before I read the book!:
Maybe "The End of Science" deserves only four and a half stars, but after seeing some of the older reviews that rated it far less, I'm sure that five stars is merited. I've never submitted a review to Amazon but some reviews of the book I read here just seem to represent the people who have written hundreds of reviews rather than the book itself. With 50 years of scientific expertise and knowing people who knew more than one Nobelist characterized by Horgan, I trust the accuracy of his evaluations because they coincide with what I had independently known. As important as accuracy to a reader, from the insights that Horgan develops as a result of each interview, to the plan of the whole book, to its span across such huge areas of science, to the unusual content -- this is the ultimate in fascinating and stimulating reading. Of course, I do not agree with all of his interviewees nor with all of his conclusions, but time and time again he was brilliant in opening me up to ideas that I had not before thought about. What more than that can a book be? A great read.

The ends of science:
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...

Informative, entertaining, but still completely wrong:
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).

Dream of a final arbiter?:
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 \obut not nameless\c 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. \ostephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada\c

But sadly, prose doesn't prove...:
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.