Product Description

As a writer for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, John Horgan has an unsurpassed window on contemporary science, routinely interviewing the scientific geniuses of our times, scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky. In THE END OF SCIENCE, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be human, whilst also encouraging them to confront the very limits of knowledge. 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? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to these and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, consciousness and numerous other topics. In a time where scientific rationality is under fire from every quarter, THE END OF SCIENCE is a witty, thoughtful, profound and entertaining narrative which serves as both a critique of and a homage to modern science.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44141 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 324 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In a series of interviews with luminaries of modern science, Scientific American senior editor John Horgan conducts a guided tour of the scientific world and where it might be headed in The End of Science. The book, which generated great controversy and became a bestseller, now appears in paperback with a new afterword by the author. Through a series of essays in which he visits with such figures as Roger Penrose, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson and others, Horgan captures the distinct personalities of his subjects while investigating whether science may indeed be reaching its end. While this book is in no way dumbed down, it is accessible and can take the general reader to the outer edges of scientific exploration.

Review
'A fine example of popular science writing. Accessible, argumentative, stimulating, informative, highly polished and hugely enjoyable ... this is a feast of a book' TES 'I wish I could write like John Horgan ... [he] has a novelist's eye for character revealing detail, and we can almost see, as well as hear these scientists engaging in their passionate arguments.' NEW SCIENTIST 'Horgan covers a stunning set of thinkers, with whom he discusses a remarkable range of scientific ideas' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A hugely entertaining book, certain to create controversy.' E.O Wilson 'Horgan certainly puts the argument skillfully enough to provoke reaction. You could learn a lot about where science is going.' GUARDIAN 'we all owe a debt to Horgan for giving us a more realistic picture of the ways as well as the thoughts of some of the great minds of science.' FOCUS 'gives memorable and serious glimpses into the winding-down worlds of physics, quantum mechanics and molecular biology.' LITERARY REVIEW 'Horgan weaves a skilful and often entertaining portraits of his star-studded cast, explaining the science succinctly and accessibly in the process.' IRISH TIMES 'John Horgan buttonholes the most interesting scientists on the planet- and he listens, he argues, he thinks. He has an exceedingly accurate instinct... it's a privilege to be able to follow along as he peers behind the curtain.' James Gleick, author of CHAOS 'Intellectually bracing... often brilliant... makes the powerful case that the best and most exciting scientific discoveries are behind us... a wonderfully concise introduction to the greatest scientific hits of the last 15 or 20 years... Mr Horgan is a master thumbnail artists, introducing every character with a few phrases that capture the person's appearance and temprament with dead-on-wit... impressive and entertaining.' THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'Horgan's talent is for translating scientific jargon into colloquial terms without condescending the reader... there are some genuinely funny moments.' CHICAGO TRIBUNE 'A wonderful, provocative book.' WASHINGTON POST 'One of the most appealing aspects of Horgan's books is its sheer entertainment value. The go-for-the-jugular writing style, coupled with the fact that just about everyone who's anyone in the scientific world has been subjected to one of Horgan's interviews, gives the reader an opportunity to see world-class scientists as "demigods on stilts"... the book is amusing and the issues it raises are of great importance.' John L. Casti, NATURE 'Fun to read in spite of its grim subject matter. Horgan writes gracefully and well, and he seems to have interviewed everyone who's anyone among the deep thinkers.' SCIENCE 'For readers who like ambitious, big-idea books... very clever... Horgan exhibits a fine, good humoured, writerly appreciation for the distinctive cadences of language, personal habits, physical traits and towering egos of each prestigious interviewee. While the book's legitimacy derives from its reasoned case that science is winding down, its greatest pleasures flow from Horgan's encounters with the characters who have made science their lives, and whose lives have largely made contemporary science what it is.' SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE 'Thanks to Mr Horgan's smooth prose style, puckish sense of humour and wicked eye for details, these encounters [with the scientists] make for zesty roading. Frequently, they are hilarious... a thumping good book.' WALL STREET JOURNAL 'A fascinating thesis, and one Horgan buttresses with arguments from history and philosophy as well as science... provocative.' NEWSWEEK 'A compelling tale... A deft wordsmith and keen observer, Horgan offers lucid expositions of everything from the supersting theory and Thomas Kuhn's analysis of scientific revolutions to the origin of life.' BUSINESS WEEK 'Provocative and passionate... Horgan strikes at the heart of civilisation as we know it... Horgan's audacious book, rather than merely serving to treatise on the demise of science, may, in fact, open the door to a more important dimension of inquiry for all of us.' THE HERALD 'As good a case as can be made that just as we discovered the globe only once... so we have already discovered the basic laws of physics, biology, cosmology and so on... fascinating.' WIRED 'To make this argument, Horgan gives us a tour through the minds, offices and sometimes sitting rooms of eminent scientists he has interviewed over the years. He does this with an irreverance that is bracing... what higher praise can you pay to a book than that you loved it, even though you thought its central thesis was wrong?' TORONTO GLOBE 'Provocative, entertaining, cheeky... Horgan's book, a condensation of profiles of scientists he has written during his ten years at SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is a fascinating, engaging survey of bright minds and brilliant ideas.' THE SEATTLE TIMES 'Brilliant.' NEW YORK TIMES 'Agree with him or not, readers will find his ideas provocative and engaging.' SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE 'THE END OF SCIENCE... gives memorable and serious glimpses into the winding-down worlds of physics, quantum mechanics and molecular biology.' LITERARY REVIEW 'In a series of interviews with luminaries of modern science, Scientific American senior editor John Horgan conducts a guided tour of the scientific world and where it might be headed in The End of Science. The book, which generated great controversy and became a bestseller, now appears in paperback with a new afterword by the author. Through a series of essays in which he visits with such figures as Roger Penrose, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson and others, Horgan captures the distinct personalities of his subjects while investigating whether science may indeed be reaching its end. While this book is in no way dumbed down, it is accessible and can take the general reader to the outer edges of scientific exploration.' AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW

NEW STATESMAN
'I wish I could write like John Horgan ... a joy to read'

Customer Reviews

A post-modernist looks at frontier science.
Science needs Horgan like a medieval court needs a jester, to point out the ludicrousness inherent in a reductio ad absurdum view of any moderately serious exercise. And, like any jester, he has the occasional flash of insight that may or may not be heard above the laughter at his antics.

Horgan is a science journalist with an education in literature. Clearly he feels this qualifies him to build a postmodern analysis of the frontiers of modern science (but does a jester require an education in sheep bladders?). His over-used phrase "ironic science", defined as scientific theory which it is not possible to verify experimentally, in principle or at least within some forseeable time frame, is pasted wherever he looks. Interestingly, where he looks is among the big-name scientists that everybody knows; regular, working scientists don't even get a nod. Yes, he's met everyone: Popper, Hawking, Weinberg, Dawkins, Minsky, Chaitin, etc., etc. What a pity he decided to commemorate these meetings with pocket character assassinations and potted summaries of their sillier ideas...

Ultimately, this book is more about Horgan than frontier science. It is a subjective, judgemental tour of modern science, given from the conviction that that it is either old hat or preposterous. The epilogue, an indulgence in a "final theory" of his own, is almost too much to bear, exposing the book for what it really is: a quasi-religious, quasi-scientific catharsis, an expiation of scientific inadequacy. The picture is completed by the repeated admission that the central idea isn't even his own. If his forebear in doom-saying, Gunther Stent, already said it all (he pops up often enough that the conclusion seems inevitable, but he's out of print, so you can't check), then why bother?

All this said, the book is surprisingly interesting and readable. It makes a refreshing anodyne to some of the more excitable and hyperbolic science writers out there. (Although some of non sequiturs will make your eyes water. Complexity theory as pornography?! Yes, really: page 197.) By all means, buy it, read it, then follow up by reading some of the literature in the notes. Don't take Horgan as the final word, but as a starting off point. In the end, do you think he's right? I don't. In fact, I think he must be joking. Doesn't anyone else around here? C'mon, he can't be serious!

(By the way, I may be biased: I'm a working scientist.)

Well written, very interesting, and most worrying
At first, it seems an uncontroversial thing to do - interview 'cutting edge' scientists and philosophers of the late 20th century and summarise, in a book, their views on where knowledge is heading. But when taken away from the protective environments provided by their books and establishment colleagues, and required to communicate with the author using conventional speech, they tend to come across as rather unstable eccentrics. The scientific establishment does not like this book at all, not specifically because it brings today's scientific and philosophical cult heroes down a peg (or ten), but because it shows that pure science is making far less progress than it claims to be making. That tends to reduce funding for new, pure - as opposed to technological - projects, which is not good news for people in that field. Much more worrying, for me, was the way that a kind of mysticism seems to be suggested by the book, waiting in the wings, ready to pounce as soon as conventional deterministic/reductionist methods are replaced by the AI, superstring, chaos theory etc of many of today's leading writers. Horgan seems vaguely aware of this - indeed, he indulges in it himself at the end of the book, when he describes a mystical experience that he personally experienced. This came as a real surprise to me; it was not what I had expected at all. Religion, especially Christianity, has undeniably been forced off the stage by Science, especially by Darwinism. If, as he suggests, Science has limits and probably no absolute foundation, the potential for weird cults and beliefs - such as 'The Church of the Holy Horror' that Horgan (jokingly?) says he wants to found - is very real. I think this book is a warning.

Is it heresy to ask questions now?
The wrong time to have published this book was before the close of the twentieth century. Consequently, the title alone will have attracted the attention of those critics determined to demonstrate it as yet another fin-de-siecle harbinger of doom. Perhaps if the title had had a question mark, it would have received fairer treatment. John Horgan writes for "Scientific American", so one can assume his knowledge of science is fairly extensive. That particualr journal produced an issue in

December 1999 in which scientists from various fields of enquiry were invited to write articles on the direction their various specialisms were taking them. It would appear that each writer was either given a brief, or selected for their positive outlook. The desired effect was precisely the effect it was designed to have, to combat just the kind of doom-mongering that John Horgan is accused of expounding. Now that we are in the new millenium, this might have been a more appropriate time to have published. The question that is being asked is not "Is science reaching a point of redundancy?" but is attempting to discover the limits of objective knowledge. That is the question at the heart of the Western philosophical tradition and is also the reason why science came into being. The book is therefore not concerned with explaining any particular theory which would be a redundant enterprise anyway. There are literally hundreds of books written by scientists who see this as their task and for which organisations concerned with the advancement of science were brought into existence. More to the point is that John Horgan is interested in hearing what the practising scientists who have helped mould the world into its present shape have to say concerning this very serious serious question of limitations. That in itself is not a scientific question, but it has ramifications for science, and so who better to attempt an answer to it than practitioners of science.

What emerges is not the high-gloss confidence engineered by a science journal whose interests are self-served by it, but a counterpoint that is an astonishing dialectic that makes one wonder how anything at all ever came out of science. The fact that so much has, and continues to do so is a credit to it, but in the process a certain prejudice underlies it constantly which is the fear of inclusion of any elements of subjectivism. Behind-the-scenes documentaries are becoming very popular ("The Making Of.....", "The Larry Sanders Show" etc) it is clear that there is a growing interest in the subjective states which give rise to objective knowledge which is ever on show. Practising scientists are well aware of this dichotomy, and even hint at it in this book. At one point during a meeting, "Lee Segel, an Israeli biologist, warned them to be careful how they discussed these issues publicly, lest they contribute to the growing anti-science movement in society". Virtually every scientist interviewed in this book has written books of their own. To read them, one would imagine their authority to be fairly widely accepted. It is refreshing to read a book in which this particular mind-set is removed for the sake of the kinds of question John Horgan is asking here which overrides them. The pity is that science is in dire need of effective criticism if it is to stay healthy and not ossify. From what I have read in reviews so far, such books as this one are attacked in exactly the same way that Galileo was silenced by a perspective that dominated the world picture in a manner that one imagined was far more dogmatic. For whatever faults it may have, and it has several, this book is rare indeed for daring to speak out against such vaulting voices that would strap us into this blinkered cockpit and point at equations as somehow meaningful, when the search for meaning is sourced elsewhere anyway. What are the limits to objective knowledge? Why should such a question be treated as heresy?