Get your own Free Home Page
Get your own Free Home Page
This is a terribly disappointing book. It starts with the promise of showing that science as we know it is comming to an end, and never lives up to its claim.
The basic claim is indeed made, that Scientific progress is comming to an end. That almost all of the big questions have been answered and that further research will consist of filling in the details. However almost nothng is done to back this claim up.
John Hogan's logic is that the last major breakthrough was in the late 1950s, with the discovery of DNA. And since there has been nothing since then perhaps there is nothing more to come. This logic is akin to the theory that there has been no major earthquakes in San Francisco since 1908 so perhaps they've stopped.
This is begging the question of how often do major scientific breakthroughs occur anyway? One could argue that before DNA there was Quantum mechanics in the 1930s, and Relativity in the 1910s, and Electromagnetic theory in the 1870s, with the periodic table being about then too, Electrochemistry in the 1830s and then Thermodynamics in the 1760s... it is easy to see that a mere 40 year break is nothing to get excited about.
There is also the question of Chaos theory, which was developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. John Horgan dismisses this as not being a major discovery because there are no applications. As though there were applications of Relativity in the first few decades after its discovery.
Horgan does acknowlege that one major objection to his theorem is that "that's what they said at the end of the 19th Century". But he does not bother to refute this argument. Instead he just takes one particular case of this, the US Patent Office Director who allegedly said that "Everything has already been invented." Horgan goes to show that this was misquote and not what the man meant at all. Horgan then ignores everyone else who said the same thing (Such as Lord Kelvin, who said that science [at the end of the 19 century] was just a matter of filling in the 4th and 5th decimal places) and assumes that they were all misquoted too.
When it comes to providing evidence to back up his controversial claim, Horgan went out to interview a whole lot of famous scientists. But then he proceeds to tell his readers all about the scientists hair styles, or their office, or what they eat. Anything in fact but about the science which is what the book is supposed to be about. He goes for a drive in someones car and mentions that the dirty widscreen makes it difficult to see ahead, which is a metaphor for the difficulty in seeing a future for physics. A nice poetic image perhaps, but hardly proof!
One area where he does indeed come up with some evidence is that of funding. Research into pure science, particulary expensive areas such as subatomic physics, is having less and less money put into it. Hence, there will be no more discoveries. Well yes... for the forseeable budget forcasts...ie. about 10 years.
This is short term thinking at its worst. The current political climate is for less funding of pure research, therefore there will be no more funding of pure research ever. Predicting the funding of research projects in the year 2100 in China based on funding priorities in 1990s America shows an incredible amount of psychic ability. Perhaps Horgan should put this psychic future telling ability to work in analysing the Stock Market, then he could write books on economics like Paul Ormerod. Or perhaps not, Ormerod's work The Death of Economics, while sounding similar, is in fact a much better written and researched work that actually has something to back up his theories.
In short, don't bother, but if you must: The End of Science
Return To Patrick’s
Homepage
