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THE END OF SCIENCE
JULY 26, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
David Gergen, editor at large of 'U.S. News & World Report," engages John Horgan, senior writer at "Scientific American," author of the "End of Science, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age."
MR. GERGEN: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Watson, and Crick, great men, great discoveries, great ideas. Your essential point in your book is we’ve come a long way but we’re reaching the end of discovery. Tell us about how far we’ve come first.
JOHN HORGAN, Author, "The End of Science": Well, first of all, all these great scientists in the past have helped us create a kind of map of all of reality from the very small scale of quarks and electrons right out to the edge of the universe, to the galaxies and quasars that we can see there through our telescopes. We have discovered with telescopes that the universe is expanding and at one point was much hotter and smaller than it is now. So there seemed to have been some kind of great explosion about 15 billion years ago that created the universe. Physicists have shown that all matter consists of a few basic particles ruled by a few basic forces. When you look at the history of life, we know that all life descended from a common ancestor that appeared about 4 billion years ago, and it became enormously complex and created all these different species through the process of natural selection and Mendelian genetics. My argument is basically that in the future, we will be filling in details within this framework that scientists have already created with all these different theories, and there won’t be any great revolutions analogous to the theory of evolution or to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity or to quantum mechanics.
MR. GERGEN: Richard Feinman, the late and very beloved physicist, you quote him as saying that we live in an age of wonders, discovery is a one-time thing.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s right.
MR. GERGEN: And that’s essentially what you’re arguing. It’s like exploring a continent, and you find the mountains and you find the oceans.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s right.
MR. GERGEN: And we found that, and now we’ll be filling in the rest of the map.
JOHN HORGAN: We could only discover galaxies once. At one point early in this century, astronomers thought the galaxies were little tiny clouds of gas in our own Milky Way, our own galaxy. Then they discovered that these are gigantic islands of stars just like our own Milky Way. And if you believe that science is a real process of discovery, of, of truths and nature, then, then you have to accept that once we discover things, that’s it. Then we have to go on to the next thing. And science is different than art in that sense. Art can be this constant regeneration. But science is a very linear process, and I think that that sort of forces you to accept that there are some limits to discovery eventually.
MR. GERGEN: Now you write for the “Scientific American,” and you reach these conclusions based upon a number of years of reporting but also a series of conversations with leading scientists in biology and physics, neuro science, and the like.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s right. And what I realize is that scientists in, in both in physics and biology and in lots of different fields were talking in terms of reaching a kind of culmination or a final theory. Some of them talked in those sorts of terms. And usually they were talking about something that was going to come in the future. But what I realized was that in some cases, they had already arrived at that point. For example, in physics, most physicists think that quantum mechanics is the--really sort of the final theory in a qualitative sense. We might discover new particles or phenomena in the future, but they basically will be within that framework of quantum mechanics. And the same way in biology--I realized sort of reading between the lines of books written by biologists and listening to them carefully that they’re really saying that, that Darwinian evolution and modern genetics, DNA-based genetics, created again this basic paragon within which all future knowledge would be placed.
MR. GERGEN: Mm-hmm. Now, your notion is a very provocative one, bu t it does represent a minority view, I gather, with the scientific community.
JOHN HORGAN: Oh, definitely, but what I, what I try to show is that the reasons that people reject what I’m saying is it’s more often wishful thinking than what I think is a very careful analysis where science is right now. For scientists in particular, science is what has made their lives meaningful. In a personal sense, I think many of them probably believe, as I do, that science is the most wonderful, marvelous creation of, of humanity. It’s provided direction to history, and it’s made our lives, it’s enriched our lives--it’s made our lives much more comfortable, and they just can’t accept that there might be an end to it, even though their own theories often imply that.
MR. GERGEN: Well, John Maddox, who is the editor emeritus of “Nature,” the British publication, is working on a book that’s due to be published this fall by an American publishing house. We talked to him this morning.
JOHN HORGAN: Oh, really?
MR. GERGEN: And I wanted to explore this question about, you know, what he felt about your book. Now, he had said, look, I haven’t had the opportunity to read the book, and I’ve read and heard about it, but he said, you know, there is a danger here of being limited by your own imagination.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s right.
MR. GERGEN: We shouldn’t be so fatalistic. And, in fact, he said, for example, life beyond the earth. Now that’s a very popular notion this summer with this blockbuster movie, "Independence Day" and extraterrestrial creatures.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s true.
MR. GERGEN: A lot of people are going to be asking about--what about life on earth--life beyond earth, is there life somewhere else, and Maddox’s argument is, we may well discover that in the 21st century.
JOHN HORGAN: I understand his point that there are many profound questions that are, are still unanswered, and one of them is, are we alone in the universe?
MR. GERGEN: Right.
JOHN HORGAN: Now, there are some scientists who’ve actually created very elaborate theories that argue that we’re not alone, that it’s inevitable that there’s life elsewhere. Some even say that there’s life very much like us, conscious, intelligent life that’s even created science like ours. Now, I think this is really science fiction. It’s, it’s just elaborate speculation. There’s no proof. The only way we’re going to know that life exists elsewhere is if we find it elsewhere. And, unfortunately, that’s a very difficult thing to do.
MR. GERGEN: So your point is it’s not that there are not major questions still to be answered.
JOHN HORGAN: Right.
MR. GERGEN: We don’t know what causes life itself.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s right.
MR. GERGEN: We don’t know what causes consciousness, as you point out. We don’t know whether there’s life elsewhere. We don’t have the final answer. You keep talking about the one unifying theory.
JOHN HORGAN: That’s right.
MR. GERGEN: Your argument is it’s not that those questions don’t exist. It is that science probably can’t find the answers.
JOHN HORGAN: I don’t think so.
MR. GERGEN: Testable science?
JOHN HORGAN: Right. I mean, what happened before the big bang? Why was the universe created in the first place? Why does the universe have these laws of physics and not some other laws? Why did the history of life take the course it did, rather than some other course?
MR. GERGEN: Right.
JOHN HORGAN: Were we inevitable? I think all these are profound questions. Some of them have spiritual implications. I just--and scientists are asking these questions and proposing theories. Just think if you look at the sorts of theories that they’re proposing, it’s not really science anymore. It’s something more like philosophy or theology or literature because these theories can’t possibly be verified.
MR. GERGEN: What you call ironic science.
JOHN HORGAN: Ironic science, right. I mean, I used the term ironic because an ironic statement--
MR. GERGEN: Yeah.
JOHN HORGAN: --is a statement that shouldn’t be taken literally. Fiction shouldn’t be taken literally and neither should some theories of science.
MR. GERGEN: Now Tom Kuhn just died here a couple of weeks ago, wrote about paradigms.
JOHN HORGAN: Right.
MR. GERGEN: The structure of science. Is it possible we’d have a paradigm shift and we might have a whole different way of looking at the world? Are we, in fact, as Maddox would argue, perhaps limited by our own imaginations?
JOHN HORGAN: I don’t think so. I think we’re limited by, by the fact that we can’t travel faster than light. We’re stuck here on this, this little, tiny cinder revolving around this one particular star. Thomas Kuhn had a very profound influence on people’s view of science, and he had this notion of a paradigm shift as causing the scales to fall from our eyes, and we suddenly see in a new light, and realize that everything we believed previously was false. And that was true in a sense of a couple of revolutions in science when quantum mechanics, for example, was, was a profound revolution and the Copernican revolution when we realized that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, but science has, has not been that revolutionary really. Modern genetics has just sort of extended Darwinian theory in showing how it works and its details, but I think we can’t stop asking these questions, and we can’t stop proposing various answers, and that’s where religion came from. That’s where art and philosophy came from. So I think that even when or if science does end, real science, I think we’re going to continue pressing up against these limits and wondering about these things.
MR. GERGEN: Well, with that, I think we’re going to have to come to our own end. And thank you very much.
JOHN HORGAN: Thank you.
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