The New York Times, Book Review, June 30, 1996, pp. 11, 12.





   The Job Is Finished



   Science has been so successful at describing the universe,

   John Horgan claims, that further research may not yield

   much.



      THE END OF SCIENCE

      Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the

      Scientific Age.

      By John Horgan. 308 pp. Reading, Mass.:

      Helix Books/Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. $24.



   By Natalie Angier





   Anybody who habitually follows science, or has the

   sweet-and-sour privilege of writing about it for general

   consumption, will very likely resist the premise that the

   end of science is nigh or that we are "facing the limits of

   knowledge." The "twilight" of the scientific age? The first

   feeble streak of dawn is more like it. After all, as most

   science writers can affirm, one of the biggest challenges

   of the craft is to come up with novel ways of saying that

   scientists don't know something in a specific case.

   Researchers find hundreds of new genes practically every

   month, but they have no clue what the great bulk of those

   genes do in the body. They know that the human

   immunodeficiency virus causes AIDS, but they have only the

   muddiest understanding of how the virus operates and none

   at all of how to stop it. They know that 98 percent of the

   DNA of chimpanzees is identical with that of humans. Why,

   then, are the two species so different that one has the

   capacity and sense of entitlement to keep the other in zoos

   and laboratory cages? Even Lewis Thomas, for all his

   extravagant literary skills, began to creak redundant in

   his last years on the subject of our vast ignorance and the

   need to kneel humbly before it.



   Yet in this intellectually bracing, sweepingly reported,

   often brilliant and sometimes bullying book, John Horgan

   makes the powerful case that the best and most exciting

   scientific discoveries are behind us. He argues that many

   scientists today, particularly those he interviewed for

   this book, are "gripped by a profound unease." Part of that

   malaise results from all the sociopolitical irritants we've

   heard about: the dwindling financial resources, the vicious

   competition, the strident antipathy of animal rights

   activists, religious fundamentalists, technophobes and the

   like.



   But a far more important source of despair, Mr. Horgan

   insists, is that scientists are beginning to sense that

   "the great era of scientific discovery is over." The big

   truths, the primordial truths, the pure truths about "the

   universe and our place in it" have already been mapped out.

   Science has been so spectacularly successful at describing

   the principal features of the universe, on a scale from

   quarks to the superstructure of galaxies, that the entire

   enterprise may well end up the paradoxical victim of its

   own prosperity. "Further research may yield no more great

   revelations or revolutions," he writes, "but only

   incremental, diminishing returns."



   In pursuing his thesis, Mr. Horgan, a senior writer for

   Scientific American, interviews dozens of scientists and

   scientific philosophers, many of them the celebrated big

   thinkers and wild speculators -- and best-selling authors

   -- of our day. Here you will meet Stephen Jay Gould, Roger

   Penrose, Steven Weinberg, Daniel Dennett, Stuart Kauffman,

   Marvin Minsky, John Wheeler, Frank Tipler and others. Mr.

   Horgan has a strong grasp of a broad spectrum of

   disciplines, and one of the best things about "The End of

   Science" is that it is a wonderfully concise introduction

   to the greatest scientific hits of the last 15 or 20 years.

   It may make you feel you understand, at least colloquially,

   superstring theory, mathematical topology and how to

   distinguish chaos from complexity.



   Scientists may not always consciously recognize that the

   undertaker is waiting at the door; they may, and in fact

   usually do, disagree with the premise throughout the book.

   Yet Mr. Horgan takes pains to show how the scientists often

   belie their confidence in the future with the stray

   admission of fallibility, lapsed vision or undifferentiated

   anxiety; if nothing else, the high-pitched and nearly

   hysterical cackles that escape from the mouths of more than

   one of his sources after they have scolded him for his

   "pessimism" bring to mind the image of the mad scientist

   who is totally out of touch with reality.



   Mr. Horgan is a master thumbnail artist, introducing every

   character with a few phrases that capture the person's

   appearance and temperament with the dead-on wit of the

   caricaturist David Levine. Of the astrophysicist Stephen

   Hawking, he says, "His purple-lipped, Mick Jagger mouth

   often curled up at one corner in a kind of smirk." Richard

   Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist whom Mr. Horgan clearly

   dislikes, is "an icily handsome man, with predatory eyes,

   a knife-thin nose and incongruously rosy cheeks ... a

   finely tuned, highperformance competitor in the war of

   ideas: Darwin's greyhound."



   Mr. Horgan is like an excessively clever and argumentative

   colleague. He can get on your nerves; he can make you feel

   as if you're coming down with a mental ulcer; you may not

   even like him much of the time. Nevertheless, he is too

   impressive and entertaining to ignore. He is right, after

   all, when he says that science has constructed a

   magnificent framework for comprehending our world. We know

   that the universe exploded into being 15 billion years ago,

   give or take a fistful of billions, and has been expanding

   ever since. We know that all matter is governed by a few

   basic forces -- gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force

   and the weak force. We know that the earth was born about

   4.5 billion years ago, that life arose a few hundred

   million years later and has been evolving ever since

   through the mechanism of natural selection. We have

   deciphered the laws of heredity and the elegant structure

   of DNA.



   These are the highlights of a basal reality, a "modern myth

   of creation" so profoundly and objectively true, Mr. Horgan

   insists, that he wagers it will still be recognized as true

   a thousand years from now by whatever sentient minds (or

   machines) are around to do the recognizing. And he doubts

   that there will be many, if any, new discoveries able to

   match in sweep, potency and sheer shock value a theory like

   relativity, which set the universal speed limit at the pace

   of light and revealed the elasticity of space.



   Certainly many big, succulent mysteries remain, Mr. Horgan

   admits. But he proposes that most of those glorious

   problems may well stay insoluble, in the scientific sense

   of being able to put one's putative knowledge to the test

   and use it to make subsequent predictions about reality.

   For example, neuroscientists have almost no notion of how

   consciousness arises. There are some very pretty

   hypotheses, including Mr. Penrose's attempts to link the

   powers of the mind to quantum mechanics, or Mr. Dennett's

   contention that consciousness is an illusion "arising out

   of the interaction of many different 'subprograms' run on

   the brain's hardware," as Mr. Horgan synopsizes it. Yet

   none of these artful ideas are verifiable, any more than

   one can verify the meaning of a composition by Philip

   Glass. Even Mr. Dennett says that if we could design a

   computer program that accurately mimicked the human brain,

   it would be as inscrutable as the brain itself.



   The same might be said for knowing exactly how the universe

   was created, how life began on this planet, whether there

   is life elsewhere and whether that alien life adheres to

   the dictum of natural selection. These questions are but

   scientific sirens; you can hear their song, but you'll

   never reach their source in one piece.



   In other words, Mr. Horgan argues, the big problems that

   can be solved have been solved, and the big ones that

   haven't been solved can't be solved. Where does that leave

   contemporary scientists? They can either pursue small,

   manageable and vaguely boring science (sequencing the

   complete complement of human DNA may fall into this

   category), or they can turn to what Mr. Horgan calls

   "ironic science." Such science is "speculative,

   postempirical," resembling literary criticism "in that it

   offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best,

   interesting." Ironic science is provocative, he says, but

   it fails to converge on the truth. " It cannot achieve

   empirically verifiable surprises that force scientists to

   make substantial revisions in their basic description of

   reality," he writes.



   I have some quarrels with this book. For one thing, it is

   almost completely devoid of female voices. Of the scores of

   scientists who show up to stroke their chins on these

   pages, only one is a woman, Lynn Margulis, and she barely

   lingers long enough to declare that she is not "a feminist"

   (whatever that means). The lack of women is in part

   attributable to the book's underrepresentation of genuinely

   working scientists, the people who are doing the

   experiments and keeping their hands -- and minds -- in the

   muck of the world. Too many of the characters here have

   entered the phase of their career that has been called "the

   philosopause." They have retired from the university or

   grown bored with lab work, and so have taken up

   professional cogitation.



   For another, Mr. Horgan, who is very much an active

   character in his narrative, too often seems less intent on

   getting at the truth than in engaging in intellectual

   one-upmanship, triumphing when questions he asks fluster

   his sources or catch them off guard. Finally, I do not buy

   his central thesis of limits and twilights. I remain an

   optimist who believes that many solid, empirically based

   beauties await us, particularly in the biological sciences:

   unifying insights that will illuminate pattern formation in

   the developing embryo, or the outpouring of biological

   diversity from comparative genetic monotony. But read this

   ambitious book for yourself, pick it apart, snarl at it to

   your heart's discontent. Whether you agree or disagree that

   science is entering its senescence is not, after all, the

   end of the world.



   -----



   Natalie Angier, a science reporter for The New York Times,

   is the author, most recently, of "The Beauty of the

   Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life." She is working

   on a book about women's bodies.



   [End]