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Editorial Review Product Description
As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts?In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, ”are rarely so human...so at ther mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge.”This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final ”theory of everything” that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories?Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx’s view of progress, Kuhn’s view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindles Horgan’s smart, contrarian argument for ”endism” with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise.Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights acitivists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike.As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls ”ironic science.” Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world’s leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well. Amazon.com Review
John Horgan makes the powerful case that the best and mostexciting scientific discoveries are behind us. He states that manyscientists today, particularly those he interviewed for the book, are"gripped by a profound unease," due partially to dwindlingfinancial resources and vicious competition, but increasingly due tothe sense that "the great era of scientific discovery isover." In other words, he argues, the big problems that can besolved have been, and the big ones that haven't been solved can'tbe. Among the celebrated thinkers quoted in this ambitious book are Stephen JayGould, RogerPenrose, and JohnArchibald Wheeler. A concise history of the last 20 years ofscientific study introduces his thesis and covers such topics assuperstring theory, mathematical topology, and how to distinguish chaosfrom complexity. ... Read more Customer Reviews (68) 
REVIEW OF JOHN HORGAN'S THE END OF SCIENCE BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
It is difficult to know just how to treat this book. It has many serious faults.
It is well-written, was a best seller, but its very subject is to my mind a rather eccentric notion, and the author does some quite annoying things in writing about it.
By the term "end of science" the author does not mean a return to the Dark Ages but a time when all the large and exciting discoveries and theories all will have been established, leaving only relatively small subjects to science. It is the kind of notion that might pass through any thoughtful person's mind, but I think it one that is quickly dismissed.
The interest in the book has to do with the eminent figures interviewed and not with the author's speculations.
The author is not a scientist, but he is scientifically literate and does write pieces for magazines like Scientific American, and I am not automatically put off by the idea of inspired non-experts writing on any subject.
Perhaps the first serious fault is the way the author approaches the subject. What we have is a series of interviews with eminent figures, many of them scientists but many are social scientists or philosophers. A great deal is hidden in that word "interview." These are relatively short interviews or conversations at conventions or discussions on the telephone.
With every live interview, no matter how brief, the author offers a concise description of the subject, some being amusing or interesting, but all highly colored and none strictly appropriate for a book on science or ideas. I regard this as padding, especially in light of how little of the subjects' thoughts on the book's theme the author captures. One also could fairly argue, in light of what we eventually learn of the author's views, that these are used as devices to prejudice readers towards or away from interview subjects.
The subject is provocative, of course, thus perhaps giving the author entrée in some cases which he otherwise might not have been given, and, of course, it also helps sales
I do think, considering at least a half dozen of the world's eminent intellects were interviewed, that the space allotted to each subject's thought is sketchy at best. This perhaps stems from the author's experience in writing relatively short articles but also likely reflects the effort to keep things zippy rather than genuinely thoughtful - what one might expect from most best sellers I'm afraid.
The author insists on using words that to my mind no longer are part of science, chief among these beings "laws" and "truth."
Law is a genuinely outdated concept applied to science, although it is still somewhat carelessly used for theories of long standing. What we have in modern science are hypotheses or theories or conjectures which seem to describe our observations of phenomena but are subject to being endlessly tested against new observations and perhaps discarded.
Science is quite ruthless about ideas. When they cease working, they are set aside and replaced by others that work better. So long as a theory continues to fit new observations - and remember our scientific instruments are almost constantly improving in accuracy and scope of application and even in the measurement of things never before measured - it is viewed as useful and, in a strictly limited sense, valid.
But there are no laws in science truly today, even if phrases carrying over from the 19th century are sometimes used. Each time we rise to another perspective in looking at a phenomenon - as by the new acuteness of our instruments or building upon a new and very convincing theory or doing a kind of experiment never before done - we sometimes begin to see observations, including previous ones, in a new way. A new theory or conjecture replaces the established one, and the process continues so long as we are able to progress.
Einstein replaced Newton, but Newton still serves perfectly well under limited conditions to give the results he always did, and, as Einstein himself suggested, he will himself one day be displaced in the same way by an even more encompassing perspective.
None of these great men's works is regarded as law: they are useful relationships which are valued and retained so long as they continue to be useful.
And none of these theories represents "truth" except in the highly limited sense that when under such-and-such conditions we may expect this-or-that.
Nothing in all of physics has any existence in reality - if we may posit such a thing as reality - neither quarks nor electrons nor electromagnetic spectra: these are our way of describing phenomena to ourselves in useful, consistent, and measurable ways, but they are not, as it were, snap shots of nature.
There is no reason known for this process ever to stop, unless we bump up against limits of perception or understanding, a possibility discussed briefly in the book but which is as utterly speculative and useless today as notions like the mind-body problem of philosophy.
I'll leave it to readers to discover the intense experience of years ago that motivates the author: I would only suggest that someone dropped LSD into something he consumed.
Science Is Still in Its Infancy
I kept this book in the glove compartment of my car to read in traffic jams and (mostly) at restaurants while waiting for my meals to come or over a cup of tea. It had already been published over a decade prior to the time I bought it so my expectations were more on the philosophical side of science than the practical. At times, I sort of found myself in the position of a 'time traveler' in the sense that I was, more than a decade in the future, looking at what Horgan was guessing was going to happen. There wasn't very much to disagree with there, for now, that is. The book has ten chapters and an epilogue. It covers "The End of" progress, philosophy, physics, cosmology, biology, social science, neuroscience, chaoplexity, limitology, machine science, and has an epilogue entitled, "The Terror of God" (not what you think). I was more familiar with the contents of some of these chapters than with others and therefore enjoyed more the related-interviews with the scientists I 'knew'. Horgan is a good writer in that he 'summarizes' many of these scientists' complex views or explanations in terms that a layman could understand. I don't quite agree with him that science is approaching some kind of 'end'. There are still many things left for us to discover; I would imagine even on the scale of the theory of evolution and general relativity. Look at how much more can still be achieved in medical science, for instance. I'm sure a 'silver bullet' cure for cancer, for example, would rank somewhere up there in terms of 'contribution' with the theory of evolution; never mind if the research is 'fundamental' or 'applied'. What about traveling at speeds near or faster than light? Wouldn't that change everything, assuming its possible (and who's to say it isn't?). In short, I wouldn't take the 'prophecies' of this book too seriously because, at best (or worst), it applies to a time in the very distant future if and when man has become god-like himself; when there is nothing in 'science' - assuming we still call it that - worth doing left to do. One thing that science journalists like Horgan could perhaps learn is that while we appreciate what the very top scientists in the world are doing and have to say, there are actually many, many more doing reasonable work and making reasonable progress with opinions that are worth hearing (and writing about) too. Maybe... just maybe, as a group, they won't then seem so eccentric or strange to him.
Reading the final chapter puts the book in context
Given some of the rave reviews and the so-called "interviews" in this book, I thought this might be an interesting read.
I think enough has been said about the style of the book - if you care about the color of shirts of any particular scientist, this might be an interesting read. But content-wise, it is empty. For example, the chapter on evolutionary biology is meaningless - it's entitled "the end of evolutionary biology" but there is no evidence to suggest that this is so. The same with "the end of sociobiology".
In the final chapter, the author describes a mystical experience he has had which seemed to have shaped his thinking profoundly, and in that chapter, the word "God" appears probably around 100 times. Fair enough, but it would have given me an idea where the author is coming from if I had known this before. A couple of examples from the last chapter:
"Our plight is God's plight."
"The world is a riddle that God has created in order to shield himself from his terrible solitude and fear of death".
"One glances at an astrology column now and then, or wonders if maybe there really is something to all those reports about people having sex with alien."
I'm not interested in ad hominem attacks in general. But it seems to me that the author is not neutrally reporting on the subject, as I wish he had, but is rather trying to justify his own world view. Unfortunately, this was a complete waste of time for me.
And why not?
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.
Grand goal but flawed premises
Horgan's "The End of Science" is thought-provoking, engaging, and an interesting read. It is well-written in terms of prose, but as an argument it is rather weak. Initially, Horgan intended to write a more objective book that provide information from prominent thinkers in fields of philosophy, science, social science, theology, etc. so that the reader could make informed but unbiased judgment on their own on whether or not the suggestion as put forth by Gunther Stent in Stent's work "The Coming of the Golden Age" that the end of science might be close at hand. If that was the case than the book would be much more valuable and far more neutral and thus with less distorted reportage. However, as Horgan dive deeper and deeper into the well of diverging and conflicting sea of opinions of experts, he came to a conclusion of his own on the subject and ultimately found it only fitting that the book should be opinion (his) driven, rather than facts-and-views driven. Thus, every opinion and observation is skewed towards a favorable angle for advancing Horgan's own beliefs and assumptions. As a result, the reader is left to either agreeing with Horgan or disapproving him. This is science writing at its worse; the objectivity that is expected of blissful science writing has been compromised. Further, too much emphasis is put on non-science disciplines -- a great part, at least one-third, is on fields outside the domain of science. If the argument is to be more convincing, then more background in science is necessary, but not on philosophy, theology, and social science. Generally, there is a flow to the ideas, but the focus of each section can be off-focused sometimes. In some sections, there is the discussion surrounding only one thinker, but this number can greatly multiplied into more than three in some sections, which tends to lead the reader off-track and thus the weakness of exposition in some sections. The most ironic observation about the publication is that the author suggests the end of science with absolute conviction, while rebuffing many scholars of their "ironic" (obstinately held) views and opinioins.Many fundamental ideas are introduced in the book, which makes it useful for the beginning science student. It has been more than a decade since the title was first published, so a great portion of the book is out-dated. However, for the entertainment factor of the work, it is still worth reading it for some serious fun.
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