The following review of The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, by John Horgan, was written by Brian Hayes, a freelance writer and columnist for The American Scientist, and published in the September-October 1996 issue of that publication. Reprinted with permission.
The thesis is exactly what the title suggests. John Horgan really does mean to argue that science is a goner, that its best moments are all behind us, that the last great discoveries have already been made. All that is left to future generations is to embroider ornaments on the grand fabric of knowledge woven by our pioneering forebears. Horgan writes: "Given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social and cognitive limits constraining further research, science is unlikely to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already generated. There will be no great revelations in the future comparable to those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick."
Exactly when science ends (or did end, or will end) is left somewhat vague. Maybe the last great breakthrough came in the 1950s or '60s; maybe we have another decade or century before terminal boredom sets in.
Exactly how science ends is also a tricky question. It could be a bang or a whimper. On the one hand, we may have the bad luck to stumble onto The Answer (a phrase that Horgan capitalizes and italicizes throughout this book). In that case science will be done in by its own success. We will have a final theory that explains all; we'll know everything worth knowing. This is the fate Horgan foresees for most areas of biology: Equipped with Darwin's principle of natural selection and a key to the genetic code, we have life licked. Certain details remain to be filled in--Horgan mentions the problems of understanding embryonic development and the brain--but we are fast running out of fundamental questions, he says.
The alternative to stultifying success is frustrating failure. Perhaps there is no final truth to be wrung from nature, or perhaps The Answer exists but will remain forever beyond our reach. In this case we enter the era of "ironic science," in which we bandy about theories and speculations without any hope of making real headway. "Science will follow the path already trodden by literature, art, music, philosophy. It will become more introspective, subjective, diffuse, obsessed with its own methods." Ironic science can go on forever, but it never gets anywhere. Horgan's primary models here are physics and cosmology, already infused with ideas (10-dimensional superstrings, cosmic inflation) that will never (he asserts) be subject to experimental test.
Of course Horgan's prophecy is itself beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. No matter how healthy and hearty science might appear today, who is to say it won't keel over tomorrow morning? Other counterarguments are equally futile. The failures of earlier dire predictions--the end of science, the end of history, the end of the world--carry no logical weight; after all, the boy who cried wolf was eventually attacked by a wolf. Lists of the questions that remain open in the sciences are also easily dismissed: If the questions can be answered anytime soon, they are trivial; if not, they are signs of a roadblock that science may never get around.
This "tragic dilemma" of an enterprise doomed whether it succeeds or fails is the heart of Horgan's argument; it is his one theme. It seems to me a rather slender basis for a book, and when looked at closely it is not a true dilemma at all. The quandary, I would submit, stems entirely from defining science in terms of a quest metaphor, as a search for The Answer . The whole idea behind the quest is that the object of desire--the holy grail, satori, the lost chord, the messiah, utopia, the mother lode--must be ardently sought but never found. That's the essence of the story. It is often an apt metaphor for the way science works, but when it breaks down, the problem is with the metaphor, not with science. Those who are engaged in actually doing science are too busy looking for answers to worry much about The Answer.
Horgan and I have a lot in common. We are both science writers who came to writing first and to science second. We both got our on-the-job training at Scientific American (I left two years before Horgan arrived). We have learned science from many of the same people. Thus we have looked out on the world from the same vantage point, he and I--and yet I recognize nothing of what he sees. His ideas seem to me consistently wrong-headed. Worse, I find the way he chooses to present those ideas distasteful and in some instances contemptible.
"When I first thought about writing a book," he says, "I envisioned it as a series of portraits, warts and all, of the fascinating truth seekers and truth shunners I have been fortunate enough to interview. I intended to leave it to readers to decide whose forecasts about the future of science made sense and whose did not. After all, who really knew what the ultimate limits of knowledge might be? But gradually, I began to imagine that I knew; I convinced myself that one particular scenario was more plausible than all the others. I decided to abandon any pretense of journalistic objectivity and write a book that was overtly judgmental, argumentative and personal." If journalistic objectivity was indeed a pretense, he was right to abandon it, but I wish he had made his book still more personal. As it stands, he has kept the portraits, warts and all. Horgan makes pilgrimages to sit at the knee of some three dozen eminent sages--but not to learn anything. The point of the interviews is to show how deluded and dim the practitioners of science are, and what a clever boy John Horgan is.
There is a script for these encounters. First you have to get your foot in the door; this part is usually easy for an emissary of Scientific American , but now and then a bit of toadying may be needed. (In one case, Horgan has to send a "fawning letter.") Then you ask some ingratiating questions to build up an atmosphere of trust. Once the interviewee is speaking freely, you spring your trap, your double-edged question: Do you believe in The Answer? Any response will do, since on the one hand science is dead and on the other "ironic," either postmortem or postmodern.
In the end it makes little difference what the subject says anyway, since you are the one who goes home to write an account of the interview. You needn't falsify the words; it's enough to characterize them. An extraordinary number of interviewees here "admit" or "concede" points rather than merely state them. You can also dismiss someone's words after the fact: "There was little conviction in Weinberg's voice." Or make thoughts up for him: "He had just eaten lunch and was probably experiencing postprandial fatigue. But I preferred to think he was brooding over the tragic dilemma of particle physicists: they are damned if they achieve a final theory and damned if they don't." Another useful technique is playing one source against another: Just because you ridiculed an idea in the previous chapter doesn't mean you can't beat somebody up with it in this chapter. And finally you can win the reader over to your side by showing what a silly ditz the great professor is, with his squeaky voice, his bald pate, his palsied hands, his bulging eyes, his unathletic pallor. Maybe there's a rumor he's a Marxist too, or even a Republican!
What is the object of Horgan's own quest? What wisdom is he hoping to receive from the savants he visits? At several points in the narrative he admits (as he might say) that he has looked to science for meaning and comfort and purpose in his life. He seems upset that science might come to an end without explaining the existence of John Horgan; he is appalled that "a final theory might not reveal the universe to be meaningful in human terms." The reader who has been alert to these clues will not be surprised by Horgan's epilogue, in which he describes "what I suppose could be called a mystical experience." "Subjectively, I was hurtling through a dazzling, dark limbo toward what I was sure was the ultimate secret of life. Wave after wave of acute astonishment at the miraculousness of existence washed over me. At the same time, I was gripped by an overwhelming solipsism." By the end of the ride he has found "the secret of existence," if not The Answer. He explains it this way: "God's fear of his own Godhood, and of his own potential death, underlies everything." This explanation of everything is preferable to other final theories-if I understand correctly-for the very reason that it will never be understood. "The question mark of mystical wonder can never be completely straightened out, not even in the mind of God."
If it's not the end of science, it threatens at least to be the end of science writing.
The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, by John Horgan. 308 pp. Helix Books/Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996.