Highlighter Snow

John Horgan is a science journalist who writes for Scientific American. His book was originally published in 1996, updated in 1997 and recently brought out as a paperback. It is a collection of interviews with dozens of leading scientists, to which Horgan has added also his own reflections and opinions on the state of modern science. Whilst many of the interviews are interesting in their own right, the book's main significance is Horgan's attack on science from a postmodernist standpoint. It is symptomatic of an anti-science trend which has emerged in the last decade or so.
Unlike most of these anti-science writers, Horgan does have some knowledge of science and the mood amongst scientists. He is able to claim, not without foundation, that many scientists are "gripped by a profound unease" about the future of science.
The interviews that make up the main content of Horgan's book read like a roll call of late twentieth century science and philosophy. They include philosophers Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend, physicists Hans Bethe, John Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann, and David Bohm, biologists Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, and complexity theorist Ilya Prigogine. In someone else's hands this would have made a fascinating book. But instead of using his privileged access to these people to produce an objective appraisal of the problems at the frontiers of scientific knowledge, Horgan simply uses the interviews as an occasion for a series of pessimistic assertions.
In the chapters on particle physics and cosmology we are told that science has become "postempirical"—more empirical evidence is well beyond our present resources. In successive chapters Horgan tells us that in biology a theory of the origins of life "would always be subject to doubt"; that the "mysterians" who have argued that the understanding of human consciousness is beyond our capabilities may well be correct; that the mathematical and computer-based theories of complexity, chaos and artificial life "will not achieve any great insights into nature—certainly none comparable to Darwin's theory of evolution or quantum mechanics", etc., etc.
Instead of elucidating the astonishing developments made by scientists in the course of the twentieth century and explaining the new scientific challenges, he examines all of the current problems and difficulties from the standpoint of “proving” that science in all areas, from physics to biology, has reached an end. His argument is essentially the following: "If one believes in science, one must accept the possibility—even the probability—that the great era of scientific discovery is over. By science I mean not applied science, but science at its purest and grandest, the primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it. Further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns."

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