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Science
Is Science Going To End?
Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks.
“Before my meeting with [physicist Roger] Penrose, I had taken it for granted that science was open-ended, even infinite… The earnestness, and ambivalence, with which Penrose contemplated the prospect of a final theory forced me to reassess my own views of science’s future.” This comment is by former Scientific American columnist John Horgan, who in 1996 provoked a storm among scientists, philosophers and the general public with his book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. This is not a review of Horgan’s book, and I certainly do not think we are even close to the twilight of the scientific age. Still, the issue is worth pondering: will there ever be an end to science as a fruitful human enterprise, a time when all the major questions we can think of will have been asked and properly answered?
When I posed this question to several of my science colleagues over the last few years, I got almost unanimously negative answers – accompanied by a spectrum of reactions that went from the mildly amused to the positively scandalized. The typical response, however, was indicative of the fact that most scientists simply don’t have a penchant for philosophical thinking.
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