I recently gave a talk at Stevens about how I came to write The End of Science, which was published two decades ago and just reissued with a new preface. Here’s a quick version of the story:
In 1992, when I was a senior writer for Scientific American, my editor asked me to write an essay on the future of science for the year’s final issue. At the time, physicists were blabbing a lot about a “final theory.” So my essay played with — and ultimately dismissed — the notion that science as a whole might solve all its problems and come to an end.
Afterward, however, I started brooding obsessively about the limits of science. I wrote a proposal for a book called The Ends of Science. Ends, plural, not singular, because I wanted to explore the many ways in which science might end, as well as the many goals of science. A book agent sold the proposal to the publishing firm Addison Wesley.
After I completed the manuscript, my editor sent me a draft cover for the book. It said The End of Science. End, singular. When I pointed out the misprint, my editor said, Whoops, but The End of Science is more dramatic, isn’t it? I said, I guess you’re right.
The End of Science began, you might say, with a mistake. I have no regrets, and I still believe the book’s core thesis: “If one believes in science, one must accept the possibility—even the probability–that the great era of scientific discovery is over. By science I mean not applied science but science at its purest and grandest, the primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it. Further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions but only incremental, diminishing returns.”
After my talk, my Stevens colleague Alex Wellerstein, an historian of nuclear weapons, spelled out his concerns in an email:
My only issue is that you’ve set things up so that methodologically it will be very hard for you to be wrong, because your goalposts are pretty subjective. Which you can see as an advantage or disadvantage as you see fit!
I think many physicists and cosmologists would call the dark matter/energy thing a massive re-orientation of their view of the universe (e.g., the majority of the universe is matter visible only by its mass signature–that’s pretty weird), if the explanation of it ends up being something other than “we fudged our original equations” (as Einstein’s cosmological constant sort of was).
I also think your putting of the mind/body/consciousness problem into the category of “unsolvable” is premature. Either it has a paradigm-busting explanation, or it just has a very boring answer (i.e. a product of just increasing the number of synapses or something), but either way, I don’t think there’s anything special about it, other than the fact that we are not sure of the right questions to ask.
Which gets at the bigger question — what are the odds we’ve been asking the right questions about the world all of this time? (Or that we asked all of the right ones by the end of the Cold War?) It just seems unlikely on the face of it that we’ve had a basically correct track record, given how off we know other human beings have been in the past… The appearance of this [may have] more to do with the structure of scientific research and funding in the late-20th and early-21st centuries than any fundamental epistemological difference. (And the fact that your “end of science” coincides with the “end of the Cold War” seems unlikely to be a coincidence to my historian eyes–the amount of money going into fundamental research declined dramatically from the 1970s onward).
I hope that, as my book enters its third decade, it keeps provoking these sorts of smart objections, even if they always fail to budge me from my own beliefs.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
