The End Of Science Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age [EPUB]

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E-Book Overview

Overview In The End of Science, John Horgan makes the case that the era of truly profound scientific revelations about the universe and our place in it is over. Interviewing scientific luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins, he demonstrates that all the big questions that can be answered have been answered, as science bumps up against fundamental limits. The world cannot give us a “theory of everything,” and modern endeavors such as string theory are “ironic” and “theological” in nature, not scientific, because they are impossible to confirm. Horgan’s argument was controversial in 1996, and it remains so today, still firing up debates in labs and on the internet, not least because—as Horgan details in a lengthy new introduction—ironic science is more prevalent than ever. 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.

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E-Book Information

• Year: 2,015

• Edition: New preface

• Pages: 368

• Language: English

• Topic: 178

• Library: Avax

• Identifier: 0465050859, 9780465050857

• Commentary: Genuine epub, no calibre conversion.

• Org File Size: 4,099,156

• Extension: epub

• Toc: Preface to the 2015 Edition: Rebooting The End of Science Introduction: Searching for The Answer Roger Penrose’s ambivalence toward The Answer. The difference between science and literary criticism. The anxiety of scientific influence. What is ironic science? 1 • The End of Progress A meeting on the end of belief in science. Gunther Stent’s Golden Age. Is science a victim of its own success? What physicists really thought 100 years ago. The apocryphal patent official. Bentley Glass casts doubt on Vannevar Bush’s endless frontier. Leo Kadanoff sees hard times ahead for physics. Nicholas Rescher’s wishful thinking. The meaning of Francis Bacon’s plus ultra. Ironic science as negative capability. 2 • The End of Philosophy What the skeptics really believe. Karl Popper finally answers the question: Is falsifiability falsifiable? Thomas Kuhn is hoist on his own paradigm. Paul Feyerabend, the anarchist of philosophy. Colin McGinn pronounces philosophy dead. The meaning of the Zahir. 3 • The End of Physics Sheldon Glashow’s doubts. Edward Witten on superstrings and aliens. The pointless final theory of Steven Weinberg. Hans Bethe’s doomsday calculation. John Wheeler and the “it from bit.” David Bohm, clarifier and mystifier. Richard Feynman and the revenge of the philosophers. 4 • The End of Cosmology The infinite imagination of Stephen Hawking. David Schramm, the big bang’s biggest booster. Doubts among the cosmic priesthood. Andrei Linde’s chaotic, fractal, eternally self-reproducing, inflationary universe. Fred Hoyle, the eternal rebel. Will cosmology turn into botany? 5 • The End of Evolutionary Biology Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s greyhound. Stephen Jay Gould’s view of life: shit happens. Lynn Margulis denounces Gaia. The