The End of Science

Another review for Chemistry & Industry (2.3.98)

The Beginning of Creativity?

            A favourite cartoon strip of mine comes from “The Wizard of Id” The wizard is complaining to the king that his research budget is almost exhausted. The king snaps that “Money doesn’t grow on trees , you know!”, to which the wizard responds “That’s the project I’m working on.”

The End of Science (Helix Books)

John Horgan

            That for me is the aim of science (or “The End of Science”, if you will) - using our knowledge to create something useful. Even when I’m not looking for immediate applications, what motivates me is the ability to predict that if we do X to Y something neat should happen. Science is part of the creative process. I expect the vast majority of “Chemistry and Industry” readers would subscribe to that view. So, I imagine, would most practising scientists.

            Unfortunately John Horgan has never been a practising scientist. His interest, as befits a “Scientific American” writer, is in coffee-table science. Indeed he ignores chemistry and doesn’t regard applied science as science at all. I don’t imagine, therefore, that he would expect a sympathetic review from an industrial chemist, and he’s not going to get one here.

            His thesis is that all the interesting questions in science have either already been answered or are too difficult to answer. Speculative approaches to the difficult questions - the curled up dimensions of superstrings, thoughts on consciousness or the origins of life - he regards as unprovable, and labels them as “ironic” science. (Why “ironic”? I’m not sure.) He doesn’t like philosophic relativism. For him, Darwinism, quantum theory, general relativity are True (his capitalisation), rather than being simply very useful models or concepts. I don’t understand his difficulty here. In my experience scientists are perfectly comfortable in using theories that they know full well are only approximations to the truth, but which work well within strictly defined fields of application.

            To gain support for his thesis he interviewed a cohort of Big Name scientists and tried to get them to agree that their areas of interest were virtually exhausted. To their credit, most of them would not go along with him. However, Horgan’s speculation is itself “ironic” as he admits, so he closes most of these sections by suspecting that the illuminati really were of the same mind as him, deep down.

            Is there any substance to his idea? Possibly. The one area where he found some support from the practitioners was in particle physics. It is hard to deny that the subject appears to be approaching a plateau. There simply isn’t the money around for ever bigger accelerators. But Horgan feels that the limits are not solely economic, that Theories of Everything will not be confirmed by building a collider the size of Switzerland, that with Quantum ChromoDynamics we have reached the limit of human comprehension. Who knows? I’m sure I don’t, nor will anyone until we try.

            Have we reached the limits of biology? Here Horgan is on much weaker ground. There are big questions to be addressed, questions that can be tackled without budgets the size of the economies of medium sized countries, questions that can have concrete answers. Admittedly we can never prove, for instance, that life originated on Earth in any particular way, but the subject is nevertheless open to experimentation. We can do experiments that rule out many scenarios, eliminating the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes put it. Then, when we eventually succeed in creating self-reproducing blobs in the laboratory, we can be certain that we are on the right track.

            Philosophers may argue, following Gödel and Turing,  that the origin and purpose of animal or human consciousness cannot be understood by animal or human mind, but we shouldn’t be too afraid of the philosophers. We know that other humans, mammals and other higher animals are conscious, even if we can’t prove it to an existentialist. How we know is, I would suggest, part of the same problem. While we don’t have a good handle yet on what causes consciousness, that’s no reason to stop looking. And when we can recreate this biochemically or electronically we will know in the same way that we have succeeded.

            Evolutionary biology also seems to be in need of a breakthrough. Horgan’s beloved Darwinian/Mendelian/Watson and Crickian model, phenomenally successful as it has been, seems to be reaching its useful limits. Trying to explain the course of evolution with an individual-level model is equivalent to trying to solve the Wave Equation for the drying of a paint film, or the setting of concrete. Chemists successfully use higher order models for such processes; evolutionary biologists are busy trying to develop analogous models for populations and eco-systems. In spite of Horgan’s denigrations of their attempts, I’m sure they’ll succeed.

            There’s a whole host of inter-connected sciences where reductionism is inappropriate, where statistical models and number crunching currently provide our best leads. How about fluid mechanics, solid state chemistry, geology and meteorology? Or psychology, sociology, economics and history? Horgan argues that these sciences are by their very definitions limited, and I suppose he’s correct. But are we approaching those limits? Hardly. Maybe Horgan should have argued that we are reaching the “End of Reductionism” rather than the “End of Science”. A far more defensible title, surely, though I guess it would have put fewer copies of his book on the shelves.

            One final question: Does it matter? Here I can confidently say: Assuredly not! A look at our own subject will show why I am so dogmatic. In Horgan’s terms the “End of Chemistry” was reached about fifty years ago with the elucidation of the nature of the chemical bond and the development of X-ray crystallography. But I would see this rather as a beginning. With a sound theoretical framework chemists have been able to turn their subject into something truly creative. We can make molecules and compounds with properties undreamt-of even ten years ago - high temperature superconductors, shape-memory polymers, fullerene cancer-busting drugs. And while the number of useful new combinations we can come up with is probably finite, as of yet there’s no end in sight. We ought to pity the “Horgan Chemists”, that poor breed who call themselves theoretical chemists, strapped for big questions but not creative enough to be real chemists.

            The biologists have got enough to be going on with for some time to come, but the physicists should take heart from our story. They have allowed themselves to be duped by the likes of Horgan into thinking that the only exciting facet to their subject is pushing back the theoretical frontiers, and have allowed all the best bits to be hijacked by the engineers, materials scientists and ourselves. They should now be looking for ways to exploit their new knowledge, to build spacecraft that can explore the nearby stars and get the information back before we’re all dead.

            I hope I’ve been sufficiently damning, because I have to concede that for all its faults the book exerts an unhealthy attraction. I originally thought I would warn you not to look at it, but on reflection I’m sure that “Chemistry and Industry” readers can be trusted with such stuff. But it’s for consenting adults only. If you’ve a teenage child considering a career in science, keep this book locked away.