SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR

It s amazing the degree to which a lot of extremely intelligent, hard-nosed scientists are motivated by the science fiction they read or watched when they were kids, chuckles John Horgan. Their views of the future are really shaped, in a powerful way, by television shows like Star Trek and movies like Star Wars.
This kind of science fiction outlines future scenarios where we ll have spacecraft that can go faster than the speed of light, zipping us around the universe to other galaxies. But Einstein s theory of relativity imposes a limit on us. You can t go faster than the speed of light. It s pretty damn hard even to approach the speed of light. So, all those warp-speed spaceships are just violations of what we know about nature. As depressing as it is, we can just forget about those future scenarios.
New Yorker John Horgan is not without sympathy for the Trekkies in the lab coats. He too grew up in thrall to the visions proposed by the imagineers of science fiction. Though he was an English major at college, he took at least one course in science or mathematics every term. Shortly after he graduated, he abandoned what was already shaping up to be a glittering career in literary criticism to become a staff journalist with Scientific American.
I became a science writer, he explains, because I considered science pure science, the search for knowledge for its own sake to be the noblest and most meaningful of human endeavours. We are here to figure out why we re here? What other purpose is worthy of us?
Horgan quickly established himself as one of the sharpest science writers in the business. Expounding, for the general public, ideas that have hitherto appeared only in the technical literature is a difficult art. Horgan has a neat knack for the insightful twists of metaphor and language that the job requires, and his journalism soon scooped a slew of gongs and rosettes, many of them from the scientific community.
Last year, however, Horgan outraged that community when he first published, in the US, what became an acrimoniously controversial book called The End Of Science, which was subtitled Facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the Scientific Age. Its more recent publication on this side of the Atlantic has also occasioned feverish debate and vicious denunciation.
The central thesis of Horgan s tome is that it is both wrong and dangerous to believe that science will eventually provide answers to all of the Big Questions it has set itself, from a final theory of matter and energy to how and why the universe was created. He also argues that the age of great and revolutionary discoveries may well be behind us.
From here on in, he suggests, scientists will be unable to do more than fine tune Newton s laws of motion, Darwin s theory of evolution and Einstein s theory of general relativity.
Science, in a certain grand mode, is over, Horgan affirms. We ve got to be realistic about what we can do in the future. We re not going to have anything as big as quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution again. There is no scope left for those kind of breakthroughs.
That leaves a lot left. It leaves a lot of environmental science; figuring out how, if at all, the climate is changing in response to pollution. There are all sorts of things in medical science that can be done, I hope: better treatments for cancer and AIDS. We could develop cleaner sources of energy, better forms of transportation. But I think scientists have promised too much. They ve promised these ultimate answers that they re really not capable of giving us.
Even in applied science and technology, they have been too optimistic. We ve been hearing talk about a cure for cancer being around the corner for at least 20 or 30 years now. In fact, the more research we do, the more difficult it seems it will be to get a cure for cancer. That s not to say we shouldn t do research but scientists do a disservice to society, and to science, when they keep making promises that they might not be able to fulfil and that their track record doesn t really support.
For John Horgan, the promises of scientists are like pie crust: they look good, they seem to be an integral part of the pie but touch them and they flake away to dust on your fingertips.
The way we live now, he contends, will be closer to the way our descendants will live 100 years thence than it is to the way our forebears lived 100 years ago.
Just think of all the things we didn t have 100 years ago: aeroplanes, television, computers, antibiotics, rockets. The progress has been immense but it just doesn t seem reasonable to me that it should continue at this pace forever. Indeed, progress will probably be at its fastest just before it reaches its limits.
To substantiate his case, Horgan again turns to the over-confident future scenarios offered by science fiction.
One of the most common things you always see in science fiction movies is the use of telepathic powers by humans, he avers. People tapping into that famous 90% of their brain that they re not using and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. The fact is that science has already pretty much conclusively ruled out the existence of ESP. I would love it if ESP existed. It would blow everything wide open. But I don t see how you can really accept what science has told us up to this point and still believe in ESP and all that goes with it.
Ditto time travel. If the citizens of future eras will be able to travel backwards and forwards in time, how come they re not here right now?
There are some physicists who propose ways of twisting relativity around and who come up with schemes that would allow time travel or travel to other universes, Horgan asserts. You d go down something called a wormhole, which is a tear in the fabric of space/time, and squirt out on the other end of the universe. There are very serious scientists who publish papers on this stuff. But if you really press them on whether this is going to actually happen some day, most will tell you that it s not and that this is really just an intellectual exercise.
It s playing with the theories and getting them to do things that are very fun and provocative but they re not real science any more.
What about close encounters of the third kind? Surely, contact with extraterrestrial life forms must be a distinct possibility at some point?
Well, that s the most amazing thing could happen, declares Horgan. The existence of life elsewhere seems to me to be the biggest unanswered question in science right now. And it s answerable. It could happen any day. We could find bacteria on Mars which, in itself, would be amazing. But what everybody wants is aliens in space suits and spaceships, like in ET. I certainly would love to live long enough to see that happen but I honestly don t think it will.
Unless we have some huge breakthrough in space transportation, it would take us thousands of years just to get to the nearest star to see if there s life there. The idea of really exploring the universe and checking for life is pretty much ruled out by these limits imposed on us by relativity.
Computer technology and artificial intelligence: isn t that revolution already vigorously underway and damn near unstoppable?
Artificial intelligence people have been bragging about all these amazing things that they re gonna do for decades, says Horgan. Chess is something that computers should be really good at. You ve got very simple rules that can be easily programmed into software code. You ve got this little tiny board with a limited number of spaces on it. But the fact is that it s taken decades to develop a computer that consistently beat a mere human at this really simple game. That, to me, means that there s virtually no hope that computers are ever going to be really intelligent in the way we are.
They re not going to have the capacity to do all the really subtle things that we do without even thinking, like recognising faces, holding conversations. Computer scientists like to say that real artificial intelligence is inevitable, that they ll get there, that the delay is just kind of a technical problem. No way. It s another science fiction fantasy you can forget about.
John Horgan even pooh-poohs the idea that the Internet will provide the next major leap forward in the evolution of human society.
I think it s like saying the telephone is going to transform everything. The telephone was transformative in many ways. But it hasn t changed the human condition in any really fundamental way. I don t think the Internet is going to either. It s another technology that helps us communicate in different ways.
These books that talk about us turning into some kind of gigantic meta-organism, with a single group mind, because we re all connected in cyberspace I just think that s really bullshit. A lot of the people who I know that hang out on the Internet too much are just terribly lonely and dysfunctional. They re watching porn all day and just wasting time. The Internet is a wonderful tool, I use it myself, but it s not going to give us utopia.
For John Horgan, science is the journey rather than the destination. He is by no means launching an attack on the desirability of scientific enterprise. He simply fears the consequences if some of the discipline s louder mouthpieces keep on writing cheques that their bodies of work can t cash.
I get really squirrelly when this subject comes up, about whether my book will become a self-fulfilling prophesy by turning people off science, Horgan concedes. Critics of my book are angry because they say it will be used to discredit science, to allow governments to cut off the funding and to discourage kids from studying science. I would certainly be appalled if any of that happened. I ve got two little kids of my own. I d be delighted if they became scientists.
Being a scientist can be a really rewarding career. Maybe it doesn t pay as well as banking or corporate law but, intellectually, it can be more stimulating. I just think we ve got to be honest about what science can achieve.
To Horgan s horror, The End Of Science has become extremely popular among religious fundamentalist nutjobs in the US who see it as an indictment of science and therefore a vindication of their creationist beliefs.
This can only have happened because they really misunderstand what I m saying, he states. Most religious versions of reality, and their explanations of creation, are either completely unconvincing or obviously just wishful thinking. The only point of religion, that I can see, is to make us feel good, to feel better about ourselves.
Most religions tell us that there s some underlying plan to the universe, that there s some divine being who knows what s going on and has better things in store for us. If you look at nature, or human history for that matter, there s absolutely no sign of any benign intelligence behind it. Innocent people are slaughtered by others or just die for accidental reasons every day.
The scientists who worry John Horgan most are the fanatics who try to portray themselves as Demi Gods who can, and will, bring about Heaven on Earth, as long as the rest of us stand back and let them at it.
There are serious scientists who claim that they, and they alone, will eliminate disease, racism, warfare and everything else that s wrong with the world, he attests. They say that we will have so much energy production from fusion that we d have virtually infinite wealth and people could basically do whatever they want to do. To me, that s as arrogant and unconvincing a claim as that put forward by any religion.
What I m trying to do is pose a few questions to the scientists who make these claims. What would people do in a world like that anyway? Is it desirable? Would we just sit around taking drugs all day? Just abandon ourselves to pleasure? There would be no great purpose to unify us and to give us direction. Without constant challenges, we might just fall into some sort of oblivion.
My first job, I had a big chunky IBM Selectric typewriter. Now, I ve got this little laptop Apple Macintosh. To me, that s progress and that s the kind of progress we can realistically expect. I can do my job better and that s as a direct result of scientific research and technology. Most people aren t living hand-to-mouth as much as they used to. There s more social justice in the world but there s still an awful lot that s wrong with the world.
I guess, the question is how far we can go towards improving things and how much of a role science is going to play in that. Can we really achieve some kind of utopia and do we really want some kind of utopia? What would we do when we get there, particularly if science is over?
These may no longer be the days of miracle and wonder. However, as a species, humanity is certainly in no position to rest on its scientific laurels. Having learned almost everything there is to know about the world around us, John Horgan submits that it s high time we started to explore more fully the world within us. Even in this area though, he believes that the best we can hope for is painstakingly slow and small steps forward.
Comparatively, the most wide-open fields of science are all those fields that address he human mind, human nature, he warrants. Some people have said that it s crazy to argue that science is ending when we ve just begun to address the human mind. Of course, that s not true. We had a fairly detailed theory of human nature presented 100 years ago by Freud. What s remarkable is that, while people have been attacking Freud all this time, nothing better has come along since Freud. If a theory that was obviously superior came along, Freud would just be forgotten fairly quickly.
There have been all sorts of advances in looking at the brain and mapping out different regions with specific neuro-processes for different mental functions and even emotions. But there s no sign that that is converging on some kind of unified theory of human nature which really explains us to ourselves.
The social science and psychology are really fractured into a million pieces. Everybody s got their own theory. There s no sign of this convergence that you get in fields that really make fast progress like nuclear physics or molecular biology.
In an interview with John Horgan in The End Of Science, the brilliant biologist and author Richard Dawkins proclaims that Charles Darwin basically solved the secret of life and that all else is mere footnotes. Horgan himself states that the theory of natural selection is the single best idea that anybody ever had or is likely to have.
It just makes sense of so many different things, Horgan adds. It provides this framework for understanding the whole history of life, and for understanding our own minds.
So, if the best ideas have already been had and all that remains is the making of footnotes, can science continue to attract people of lofty intellect, with that quality s attendant lofty ego and even loftier ambition?
It s right to say that ego is a factor here, agrees John Horgan, with a broad smirk. It s a chicken and egg thing whether they were egomaniacs first and became scientists because they thought they were smarter than everybody else. Some of these people are phenomenally successful so their egos might have become inflated as result of that success. With a lot of these guys, it really seems that their primary motive is to prove that they re smarter than every other damn person on Earth.
Science will always have something to offer the ambitious and intelligent. There s a lot of really important things to be done that could make people very famous and very rich. Discovering really effective treatments for breast cancer, for instance, or AIDS. Believe me, there s plenty of room for people with big egos in science still. n
The End Of Science is published by Little, Brown at #18.99.