My gloomy 23-year-old book The End of Sciencehas been popping up lately, mainly in discussions of physics. Below I respond to recent articles that cite my book:
*David Kordahl, a graduate student in physics, writes in Los Angeles Review of Booksthat it is “hard to imagine today’s popular writing about physics without the existence of two books.” The first is Stephen Hawking’s 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time, which prophesied that physics would soon discover a unified theory, sometimes called a “theory of everything,” that explains the universe. The second is The End of Science.
Kordahl rightly calls my book a response to Hawking’s. My argument, Kordahl says, is that “scientists, having inherited answers to most of nature’s big questions, are now constrained either to study increasingly insignificant details or to play with abstractions increasingly unlikely to be tested.” That’s a fair summary, with the important stipulation that some “big questions” might be too tough to crack, notably how matter makes a mind (to which I’ll return below).
*On her blog “Back Reaction,” physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (who spoke at Stevens last fall) considers why I provoke so much hostility in other physicists. She suggests that “no one likes people who make bad predictions [meaning bad outcomes] and end up being right.” In her new book Lost in Math, Hossenfelder argues that fundamental physics, and especially the quest for a unified theory, has stagnated.
In another recent post, she says that “crisis” is too optimistic a term to describe her field. Crisis “raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing for 40 years.”
*The end of science also rears its head in “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck.” The authors are computer scientists Patrick Collison, a billionaire entrepreneur, and Michael Nielsen. They assert inThe Atlanticthat we are “investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress.”
As evidence, they cite a survey of scientists in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine, the three fields for which Nobel Prizes are awarded. Scientists in these fields were asked to rank the importance of Nobel-Prize-winning accomplishments in the last century.
Physics fared the worst. The rankings peak in the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of quantum mechanics, and after that decline except for an uptick in the 1960s (a good decade for particle physics). Chemistry and physiology/medicine were more or less flat. Collison and Nielsen did not include rankings of prize-winning work since 1990, because the Nobel committees have granted so few prizes for research done since then.
“We aren’t the first to suggest that scientific discovery is showing diminishing returns,” Collison and Nielsen acknowledge. They note that biologist Bentley Glass discussed that possibility in an essay published in Sciencein 1971, and I did in 1996 in The End of Science(which cited Glass).
Collison and Nielsen suggest that research into so-called emergent phenomena, which do not easily yield to conventional scientific reductionism, might produce breakthroughs that rouse science from its doldrums. I agree with them on this point. The ultimate emergent phenomenon is the human mind. How does matter generate mind, and how, in turn, does mind affect matter? This is the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries.
In The End of Science, I proposed that the mind-body problem is unsolvable, but my views have shifted recently. That is why I wrote my new book Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are. You can read the book, which I dedicated to my students, online for free at mindbodyproblems.com. There isn’t one solution to the mind-body problem, I argue; there are infinite solutions. Unless we go down a very dark path, our self-exploration should never end.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally posted on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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