Was I Wrong about “The End of Science”?

This month, Basic Books is publishing a new edition of my first book, The End of Science, originally released in 1996. My book has now sustained almost two decades of attacks, some provoked by genuine scientific advances, from the completion of the Human Genome Project to the discovery of the Higgs boson. So do I take anything back?

Hell no.

I wrote a preface for the new edition, which begins as follows:

Here’s what a fanatic I am: When I have a captive audience of innocent youths, I expose them to my evil meme.

Since 2005, I’ve taught history of science to undergraduates at Stevens Institute of Technology, an engineering school perched on the bank of the Hudson River. After we get through ancient Greek “science,” I make my students ponder this question: Will our theories of the cosmos seem as wrong to our descendants as Aristotle’s theories seem to us?

I assure them there is no correct answer, then tell them the answer is “No,” because Aristotle’s theories were wrong and our theories are right. The Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa, and our world is made not of earth, water, fire and air but of hydrogen, carbon and other elements that are in turn made of quarks and electrons.

Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they will invent gadgets even cooler than smart phones. But their scientific version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours… is in many respects true; most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?–might be unsolvable.

That’s my end-of-science argument in a nutshell, and I believe it as much today as I did when I was finishing my book 20 years ago. That’s why I keep writing about my thesis, and why I make my students ponder it—even though I hope I’m wrong, and I’m oddly relieved when my students reject my pessimistic outlook… So far my prediction that there would be no great “revelations or revolutions”—no insights into nature as cataclysmic as heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang–has held up just fine.

In some ways, science is in even worse shape today than I would have guessed back in the 1990s. In The End of Science, I predicted that scientists, as they struggle to overcome their limitations, would become increasingly desperate and prone to hyperbole. This trend has become more severe and widespread than I anticipated. In my 30-plus years of covering science, the gap between the ideal of science and its messy, all-too-human reality has never been greater than it is today.

I go on to review the status of physics, cosmology, biology, neuroscience and chaoplexity (my coinage for chaos and complexity, the hype of which has been repackaged and labeled “Big Data”). Neither these nor any other fields, I contend, has yielded discoveries that would contradict my end-of-science prophecy.

Candid discussion of the themes of my book, some critics have warned, could harm science. In a 1999 column in Physics Today, physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson blamed the malaise in physics on “Horganism,” which he defined as “the belief that the end of science (or at least of our science) is at hand.” Anderson chided me for fomenting “pessimism,” which he feared would become “self-fulfilling.”

I think of my view of science as realistic, not pessimistic. Also, I’m optimistic about what matters most. No, I don’t think science will deliver paradigm-shattering discoveries comparable to quantum mechanics and the double helix. But I do think science—and, more broadly, human reason–can help us create a world without poverty, tyranny and war, in which all people can flourish. That’s pretty optimistic, isn’t it?

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which belongs to the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”