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.
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