Word: horganitis
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...HORGAN: Sure, scientists are keeping busy, but what are they actually accomplishing? My argument is that science in its grandest sense--the attempt to comprehend the universe and our place in it--has entered an era of diminishing returns. Scientists will continue making incremental advances, but they will never achieve their most ambitious goals, such as understanding the origin of the universe, of life and of human consciousness. Most people find this prediction hard to believe, because scientists and journalists breathlessly hype each new breakthrough, whether genuine or spurious, and ignore all the areas in which science makes little...
...spirited debate, conducted via e-mail, between two acclaimed science journalists: John Horgan, author of the controversial book The End of Science, and Paul Hoffman, former editor of Discover magazine and past president of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
...HORGAN: My faith is based on common sense, Paul, and on science itself. As science advances, it imposes limits on its own power. Relativity theory prohibits faster-than-light travel or communication. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory constrain our predictive abilities. Science's limits are glaringly obvious in particle physics, which, as Steven Weinberg describes [in the Visions issue], seeks a "theory of everything" that will explain the origin of matter, energy and even space and time. The leading theory postulates that reality arises from infinitesimal "strings" wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions. Unfortunately, these hypothetical strings...
...HORGAN: Here's the big question we're dancing around: Can we keep discovering profound new truths about reality forever, or is the process finite? You seem to assume that because science has advanced so rapidly over the past few centuries, it will continue to do so, possibly forever. But this view is, to use your word, ahistorical, based on faulty inductive logic. In fact, inductive logic suggests that the modern era of explosive scientific progress might be an anomaly, a product of a singular convergence of social, intellectual and political factors. If you accept this, then the only question...
...HORGAN: I hope you're right, Paul. I became a science writer because I believe science is humanity's most meaningful creation. We are here to figure out why we are here. The thought that this grand adventure of discovery might end haunts me. What would it be like to live in a world without the possibility of further revelations as profound as evolution or quantum mechanics? Not everyone finds this prospect disturbing. The science editor of the Economist once pointed out to me that if science does end, we will still have sex and beer. Maybe that...