Great Minds Galled by Guy Who Says Science Is Through

NEW YORK —  In the usually breathless, gee-whiz world of science-writing, it isn’t often that somebody pens a nasty rebuttal.

Maybe that’s why John Horgan’s new book, which basically is an unauthorized biography of science, has so many scientists in such a bother.

In “The End of Science,” Horgan contends that humanity’s quest for truth--a 4,000-year odyssey begun by the ancients and brought to a head in the technological 20th century--is all wrapped up.

“Pure science, the quest for knowledge about what we are and where we came from, has already entered an era of diminishing returns,” Horgan writes.

He explains that science is a victim of its own success. Astronomers have seen as much of the universe as they ever will. Physicists have probed as deeply into the nature of matter as practical experiments will allow. And biologists have been finished since Darwin conceived of evolution in the 1850s, the principle that ultimately explains all things great and small.

Horgan, a 43-year-old senior writer at Scientific American magazine, seems to be making his argument everywhere lately. He and his book--the paperback rights to which were just sold for an impressive $350,000--have been spotted recently on the editorial pages of the New York Times, on television talk shows and on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”

Naturally, most scientists don’t believe Horgan. But their reviews of “The End of Science” suggest he has struck a nerve.

Stuart Kauffman, a biochemist at the scientifically chic Santa Fe Institute, calls it “well-written, amusing, nasty, bitchy and entirely misleading.”

University of Chicago astrophysicist David Schramm calls it “nonsense.” “I think he wanted to sell books,” Schramm says.

From Caltech, condensed-matter physicist David Goodstein: “Fun to read in spite of its grim subject matter.”

And from Rolf Landauer of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center: “I’m skeptical. . . . But it’s possible.”

Then there’s Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-winning physicist and author of the 1992 book “Dreams of a Final Theory.”

“I’m not upset about him at all,” says Weinberg, a physics professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “I don’t agree with him, but I can see why he says it.”

Nobody claims that science will go on forever. At some point, humanity will reach insurmountable natural, intellectual or technological limits. But most scientists see so many unanswered questions in their fields that they can’t believe the end is nigh.

“It’s clear that there is a much more exciting level of questions than we’re at right now,” Schramm protests.

Horgan contends that scientists are fooling themselves. We’ll never know what existed before the universe began, what processes give rise to consciousness or what physical rules lie beyond the ones that are now understood, he argues. Those things simply lie beyond the reach of scientific investigation, so any theorizing or speculating about them is what he labels “ironic” science.

“It’s ironic in the sense that real science can be taken as literally true,” Horgan said recently in his New York City office. “They’ve gone beyond what science can do.”

When Stephen Hawking speculates about the properties of supermassive black holes, or Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., talks about his far-out physics theories, that’s not really science, Horgan says.

“They talk about mathematical consistency and logical consistency and all that, but that’s what philosophers were doing 3,000 years ago,” Horgan says. “Real physics means going out and doing experiments and testing theories.”

Of course, no experiment could test the theory that science is about to end. So Horgan is engaging in the same intellectual exercise he finds so inadequate.

“Obviously, it’s not scientific. It’s not a rigorous argument,” Horgan says of his book. “It’s intended to be provocative.”

And provocative it has been. In July, Witten, who frequently is touted as the smartest man in the world, and Princeton University physicist Paul Gross wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that didn’t mention Horgan or his book, but was obviously directed at it.

“The questions that we can now ask are as exciting as they have ever been, if not more so,” the physicists wrote. “In the coming decade, the instruments necessary to address at least some of these questions will be built, and exciting discoveries are soon to follow.”

Naturally, Horgan thinks that unlikely. And even if it happens, he says, so what? The average person doesn’t even understand the physics that’s known. Confirming complex mathematical notions such as supersymmetry and string theory won’t affect most people’s understanding of the world.

“It’s meaningless in human terms,” Horgan insists. “It doesn’t tell us about the purpose of the universe and our place in it, and all those sorts of things.”

Some scientists consider that a cheap shot, as they do most of Horgan’s rhetoric. In the book, he portrays many of his subjects in less than favorable terms.

He compares Kauffman to “a salesperson trying to establish bonhomie.” Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman speaks “loudly, slowly, pausing between words, like a tourist trying to make a presumably dim native understand him.”

Kauffman, whose Santa Fe Institute comes in for some of the harshest criticism in the book, says he takes it in stride.

“One wants to be both amused and tolerant,” Kauffman says.

But that’s tough when the Santa Fe Institute, an unorthodox scientific think tank where Kauffman is a scholar in residence, comes in for a chapterful of venom in Horgan’s book. The institute is a cross-disciplinary affair that delves into complexity, a realm that’s difficult to define and even harder to understand.

Complexity deals with systems as wholes, rather than as sums of parts. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute often create computer simulations of extremely intricate systems, such as the stock market or a set of primordial chemicals that may have developed into life nearly 4 billion years ago. The researchers then use those computer programs to develop hypotheses that can later be tested with experiments.

Horgan doesn’t consider that a promising line of research. He describes complexity research as an oversold and underwhelming snow job.

“They haven’t done anything,” he says. “They just talk about stuff they’re going to do, and I think a lot of it has been just really dishonest.”

With the budget cuts and bad publicity that scholars already face these days, Horgan allows that he may be kicking science when it’s down. But he insists his passion for science is as strong as anybody’s, even if his assessment of its prospects is less than rosy.

“I think science has been arrogant,” he says. “On the other hand, I still think it’s the greatest of all human enterprises.”