The End of Science Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age

Preface to the 2015 Edition: Rebooting The End of Science

Introduction: Searching for The Answer
Roger Penrose’s ambivalence toward The Answer.
The difference between science and literary criticism.
The anxiety of scientific influence.
What is ironic science?

1 • The End of Progress
A meeting on the end of belief in science.
Gunther Stent’s Golden Age.
Is science a victim of its own success?
What physicists really thought 100 years ago.
The apocryphal patent official.
Bentley Glass casts doubt on Vannevar Bush’s endless frontier.
Leo Kadanoff sees hard times ahead for physics.
Nicholas Rescher’s wishful thinking.
The meaning of Francis Bacon’s plus ultra.
Ironic science as negative capability.

2 • The End of Philosophy
What the skeptics really believe.
Karl Popper finally answers the question: Is falsifiability falsifiable?
Thomas Kuhn is hoist on his own paradigm.
Paul Feyerabend, the anarchist of philosophy.
Colin McGinn pronounces philosophy dead.
The meaning of the Zahir.

3 • The End of Physics
Sheldon Glashow’s doubts.
Edward Witten on superstrings and aliens.
The pointless final theory of Steven Weinberg.
Hans Bethe’s doomsday calculation.
John Wheeler and the “it from bit.”
David Bohm, clarifier and mystifier.
Richard Feynman and the revenge of the philosophers.

4 • The End of Cosmology
The infinite imagination of Stephen Hawking.
David Schramm, the big bang’s biggest booster.
Doubts among the cosmic priesthood.
Andrei Linde’s chaotic, fractal, eternally self-reproducing, inflationary universe.
Fred Hoyle, the eternal rebel.
Will cosmology turn into botany?

5 • The End of Evolutionary Biology
Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s greyhound.
Stephen Jay Gould’s view of life: shit happens.
Lynn Margulis denounces Gaia.
The organized disorder of Stuart Kauffman.
Stanley Miller ponders the eternally mysterious origin of life.

6 • The End of Social Science
Edward Wilson’s fear of a final theory of sociobiology.
Noam Chomsky on mysteries and puzzles.
The eternal vexation of Clifford Geertz.

7 • The End of Neuroscience
Francis Crick, the Mephistopheles of biology, takes on consciousness. Gerald Edelman postures around the riddle.
John Eccles, the last of the dualists.
Roger Penrose and the quasi-quantum mind.
The counterattack of the mysterians.
Is Daniel Dennett a mysterian?
Marvin Minsky’s fear of single-mindedness.
The triumph of materialism.

8 • The End of Chaoplexity
What is chaoplexity?
Christopher Langton and the poetry of artificial life.
Per Bak’s self-organized criticality.
Cybernetics and other catastrophes.
Philip Anderson on the meaning of “More Is Different.”
Murray Gell-Mann denies the existence of “something else.”
Ilya Prigogine and the end of certainty. Mitchell Feigenbaum is refuted by a table.

9 • The End of Limitology
Pondering “The Limits of Scientific Knowledge” in Santa Fe.
A meeting on the Hudson River with Gregory Chaitin.
Francis Fukuyama disses science.
The Star Trek factor.

10 • Scientific Theology, or The End of Machine Science
The out-of-sight prophecy of J. D. Bernal.
Hans Moravec’s squabbling mind children.
Freeman Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity.
The “bunkrapt” vision of Frank Tipler. What would the Omega Point want to do?

Epilogue: The Terror of God
A mystical experience.
The meaning of the Omega Point.
Charles Hartshorne and the Socinian heresy.
Why scientists are ambivalent toward truth.
Is God chewing his fingernails?
Afterword: Loose Ends
 
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index