The appliance of science

The End of Science By John Horgan Little, Brown, 324pp, £18.99 in UK

HAVE all the big questions been answered? Is the age of great discoveries behind us? Is there a final "theory of everything"? Billed as having "unrivalled access to the finest minds in contemporary science", John Horgan rounds up more than the usual suspects who, according to the subtitle of this book, are "lacing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the Scientific Age". He draws upon an impressive cast to help answer such questions: Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Sheldon Glashow, to name but a few.

Horgan challenges the notion that science will eventually provide answers to all these questions and suggests that those scientists who are trying to do so are pursuing science in a speculative, post-empirical mode that he terms "ironic science". But "ironic science", he warns, will not give us "the answer, the final truth that would quench our curiosity for ever".

Science for Horgan should concern itself with questions that, in principle, can be answered. But that isn't what is happening in much of modern cosmology which is, for Horgan, ironic science par excellence. It's science which is neither experimentally testable nor resolvable even in principle, and should therefore be regarded not as science in the strict sense, but something more akin to literary criticism and philosophy.

Cosmologists, says Horgan, will never be able to answer questions such as: How was the universe created? Is our universe just one of an infinite number of universes? All they can offer are opinions which provoke further discussion. This, from an American science journalist and staff writer on the magazine Scientific American, is unexpected.

Horgan weaves skilful and often entertaining portraits of his star-studded case, explaining the science succinctly and accessibly in the process. This is no mean feat, ranging as it does from super-strings, consciousness, neural Darwinism, wormholes and baby universes to artificial intelligence. This is a well-paced, well-written book of enormous scope. Individual chapters deal with the end of progress, philosophy, physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, social science, neuroscience, chaoplexity, limitology and machine science. Sadly the final chapter, "The Terror of God", contains what he admits is the "woo-woo stuff".

Horgan draws heavily upon Harold Bloom's 1973 essay "The Anxiety of Influence", in which the modern poet is likened to Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. Just as Satan fought to assert his individuality by defying the perfection of God, so the modern poet is engaged in an Oedipal struggle to define herself in relation to Shakespeare and other giants of the past. This is futile, Bloom warned, because no poet can hope to match, let alone surpass, the perfection of the past. Modern poets are tragic latecomers.

Horgan believes that modern scientists are latecomers too. They must endure Newton's laws of motion, Darwin's theory of natural selection and Einstein's theory of general relativity. There are no great discoveries over the horizon to compare with these; "pure science, the quest for knowledge about what we are and where we came from has already entered an era of diminishing returns. By far the greatest barrier to the future progress in pure science is its past success. No one ever said that science at the cutting edge was easy, but to suggest that "The End of Science" is at hand because science is the victim of its own success seems, well, ironic.

The modern era of scientific advance, Horgan suggests, was the result of a unique "convergence of social, intellectual and political factors." He's right. Yet until the end of the nineteenth century, it was a common assumption that scientific advance and social progress marched hand in hand; the scientific revolution was the product of dynamic social progress and at the same time an essential contributor to that progress. If there is an "End of Science" it is likely to be as a result of social and political factors rather than anything to do with the past success or failure of science. Now that would be an ironic end.