A 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.
HOFFMAN: The past decade has brought a spate of books sounding the death knell for a host of subjects. Francis Fukuyama served up The End of History and David Lindley The End of Physics. But your more sweeping work The End of Science (1997) attracted a lot more attention and controversy--and with good reason. The idea that science may have had its run--that we've discovered all we can realistically expect to discover and that anything we come up with in the future will be pretty much small-bore stuff--left people either intrigued or outraged. With today's seemingly frenetic pace of scientific discovery, however, how can you say that the whole enterprise is coming to an end? The scientists I know, far from preparing for the undertaker, are ebullient about the future of their field.
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 or no progress. The human mind, in particular, remains as mysterious as ever. Some prominent mind scientists, including [TIME Visions contributor] Steven Pinker, have reluctantly conceded that consciousness might be scientifically intractable. Paul, you should jump on the end-of-science bandwagon before it gets too crowded.
HOFFMAN: Don't save a seat for me quite yet, John. Take the human mind. I agree that we are not close to an understanding of consciousness, despite the efforts of some of the best minds in science. And perhaps you're even right that we may never understand it. But what is the evidence for your position? You've criticized scientists for having faith--a dirty word in the scientific lexicon--that our era of explosive progress will continue unabated. Isn't it at least as much a leap to think that the progress will abruptly end--particularly since the trajectory of discoveries so far suggests just the opposite, that supposedly unanswerable questions eventually do get answered?