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Re: The End of Science



On Sun, 28 Jul 1996, Jim Green wrote:


John Horgon has written a book titled "The End of Science" --- was
interviewed by David Gergen (sp?) on PBS recently. -- says that all the
science that is discoverable is already discovered -- any further answers
are not "provable" ie testable in a scientific method sense. For example we
could never get to another galaxy to test any theory regarding galaxies.

There is an interview with this author on NPR Talk of the Nation Science
Friday, on the internet audio archive for the show. There's a link to the
site on my coolsci page, down in the big link collection. I think the
episode was near the end of May.

I think the book was made intentionally controversial in order to sell.
Even so, I notice that plenty of people on sci.physics and sci.skeptic
believe that science is a collection of objective information which
accumulates continuously, rather than an imperfect human endeavour colored
by beliefs and which grows by paradigm shifts. On the NPR show the author
seemed to be one of these types. He seemed to reject as apocryphal the
stories that scientists of the 1900's believed physics to be at an end. I
think that if one puts science on too high a pedestal, then it becomes
easy to believe that researchers of previous eras never made mistakes or
were influenced by group dynamics or systems of beliefs of the time. If
science is nearly perfect and its practitioners deal only with objective
truth, then scientists of the past must never have prematurely predicted
the end of science?

But since I haven't read the book, most of my objections are aimed at the
concepts contained in the title, and the actual book might be about other
things.


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