Interesante repaso al panorama de las ciencias a finale del siglo XX. ( )

It seems there is a simple statement at the heart of this book: "We're not going to find anything as world-altering as General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, or Darwinian Evolution in the future." And maybe this is correct. (modulo e.g. resolving dark matter/energy.)

Attached to this is a critique that much of public science communication is just boosterism or "ironic science," as defined by Horgan (which would be 'speculative' science to the rest of us.)

It's hard to argue with either of these. Maybe we will need to replace the standard model to account for dark matter; but that replacement will contain the standard model. QM and GR need to be married, but that marriage will contain QM and GR. Will either of these things be as revolutionary as their predecessors? Horgan argues no, based on some faith and a bit of argument. I'm not so sure, but there is a strong possibility he is right.

Nonetheless, science may be limited in many ways, few of which are ever discussed in pop-science books. This book tries to do that... but fails to be convincing on several fronts.

The first is that while I share some of Horgan's sense of, "Well, this is just BS," in regards to some popular theories/areas/subjects, he doesn't argue that these areas are non-productive so much as he argues that the people promoting/researching in them are "ironic scientists." He also, it seems, caricatures or even... cherry picks... to make his point. (That is my impression; not a fact.) Additionally, he fails to discuss whether the cruft around the edges is normal. Perhaps there is always a certain amount of BS swirling about the edges of 'real' science; perhaps 'ironic' science isn't new or unusual or significant. I think it's easy to forget all the ideas, good and bad and 'not even wrong', left on history's cutting room floor.

Second, the argument that we've found out enough that there simply isn't room left on the map for world shattering discoveries to be hiding is compelling. But that is all. Maybe figuring out what e.g. dark matter is will involve some truly fundamental shift in physics. Maybe there is some deep revelation waiting in network/complexity/brain studies/sciences. Point is, we won't know until it happens. (Though, yes, we can, so to speak, constrain phase space and say it is more an more unlikely when/if 2050, 2100, 2250, 2500 passes and no new discoveries have come.)

Third, even if his point is valid, I'm not sure it's quite the existential crisis he makes it out to be. E.g. terraforming Mars is 'mere engineering', but I'm sure it would absorb a lot of the mental 'spare cycles' of those so inclined. He mentions and kind of dismisses lifespan extension... as if this wouldn't be earth shattering to scientists and lay persons alike, even if not as fundamental in some pure, Platonic sense as e.g. General Relativity.

Horgan also leaves some points just lying on the table. He discusses science becoming too complex for humans but what if it simply becomes too bulky? He could have explored more the idea that as science builds up there is more training required to become an expert who can contribute; already young scientists will be near 30 when finishing their first post-doc, and many will be older if they don't follow a strictly 'standard' educational path. This isn't, strictly speaking, a matter of science; it is at least as much one of pedagogy and perhaps one of human lifespan (so, science/technology.) ( )

Song and dance from start to finish. If Horgan were serious, then this book would evidence only a lack of imagination. But one or two passages, unless plagiarized, suggest that the author is sufficiently knowledgeable and intelligent that he can hardly be thought to believe what he proposes. True, he quotes scientists whose statements appear to support his view, but he must have omitted everything and everyone else who might suggest otherwise.

There is a story, untrue, that someone suggested a hundred years ago that the patent office should be shut down because everything already had been invented. Why does this book remind me of that? ( )

In support of a daring postulate, certain to enrage a myriad of scientists, the author harvested a cohort of interesting interviews that provide interesting perspectives. Given what’s at stake, one would have expected little support for such a subjective and aggressive proposition, but pessimists will be delighted to discover that they are in good company. ( )

The end of science, or the Star Trek Factor?

In “The end of science” John Horgan is pursuing provocative questions.
Has science been entered an era of diminishing returns?
Is physics moving towards absolute truth?
Would be able physicists to prove a final theory in the same way that mathematicians prove theorems?

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 end-of-science argument and timing (millennium and link with Fucuyama’s End of History) have caused wide-range and “confusing” reactions and responses form science critics, scientists themselves, and even from Clinton’s Science Advisor who publicly repudiated Horgan’s argument. We can safely say that it is a discussion/debate that still goes on.

In my personal opinion the value of the book is not in the message and if we are/ or not denouncing it. Horgan is a science journalist with an education in literature. I think, his background makes the difference in the way he writes about science. With his prose style, he manages to fill gaps that other science writers fail to do, and make scientific writing an interesting adventure. He has the gift not only to make scientific theories understandable for the non-scientists readers but also to reveal beautifully his interviewee’s personalities. These interviews, the presentation of scientists as human beings, are the most interesting insight for me in the book.

Reading the book I had the feeling that Horgan tried to construct a psychological and ideological profile of each one person and it was fascinating to “discover” the eccentricities of the scientists who invented?/developed? some of the most interesting scientific and philosophical theories in the 20th century.

As for the end of science? As a scientist I am optimistic. The best in science are still to come. But my view (as a Star Trek fun) is possibly distorted by what Horgan call in his book (p.244-245) the Star Trek factor.

“How can science be approaching a culmination when we haven’t invented spaceships that travel at warp speed yet?” ( )