The End of Science

[Ari Epstein <awe@pimms.mit.edu>]

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.

> 1)  Who is this guy?  Gergen is too respectable a fellow to be interviewing
> a witless soul.

John Horgan works for _Scientific American_ magazine, where he writes
news and interview stories for the section that used to be called
"Science and the Citizen." 



> 2)  A Tom Coony (?) was mentioned -- just passes -- has ideas about "new
> paradigms" etc  Who is *he*?


Probably Thomas Kuhn, the historian/philosopher of science who wrote
_The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ (published in 1962, I
think). Kuhn proposed that science is not a single, continuous
process, but rather consists largely of two kinds of process: 1)
individual scientists working according to a certain "paradigm", or
world view, adding incrementally to knowledge as perceived within that
paradigm; and 2) scientists discovering that the paradigm doesn't fit
the accumulated knowledge and radically changing the paradigm, thus
casting all the previous work in a new light. Process (2) would be a
scientific revolution. Kuhn's idea seems pretty obvious to a lot of
people now, but it didn't when he wrote the book--in a sense, the book
presented a new paradigm for understanding the history of science, and
the fact that it seems so obvious now is a sign of Kuhn's genius.

Incidentally, some of Kuhn's obituaries (he died recently) touched on
points raised on phys-l. A number of people talked about Aristotle's
definition of "force", Descarte's definition of "energy", etc. Kuhn
said that the inspiration for his book came to him when he was reading
Aristotle, trying to understand how *anyone* could believe that force,
velocity, etc. worked that way, when he suddenly realized that those
concepts were *completely* different for Aristotle *because* of the
way he viewed the universe--his paradigm.

I've got lots to complain about in Horgan's book, but perhaps I'll
reserve it for another time.


Ari Epstein