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As a staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Steven Weinberg, and E. O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts?
This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: 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? Is the age of great discoveries behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding details to existing theories?
Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information at speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction.
Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike.
As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literary criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage, too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.
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Previews available in: English
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1
The end of science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age
1998, Abacus
in English
0349109265 9780349109268
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2
The end of science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age
1997, Little, Brown
in English
0316640522 9780316640527
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3
The end of science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age
1997, Broadway Books
in English
- 1st Broadway Books trade pbk. ed.
0553061747 9780553061741
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4
The end of science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age
1996, Addison-Wesley Pub.
in English
0201626799 9780201626797
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5
The end of science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age
1996, Addison-Wesley Pub.
Hardcover
in English
0201626799 9780201626797
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Originally published: Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Pub., c1996.
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