The End of Science Revisited

The End of Science Revisited O ne of my most memorable moments as a science journalist occurred in December 1996, when I attended the Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm. During the white-tie banquet for 1,500 presided over by Sweden's King and Queen, several prizewinners stood to give brief speeches. David Lee of Cor-nell University, a winner in physics, decried the " doomsayers " who were claiming that science is ending; the work for which he and his colleagues had been honored showed just how vital physics is. As the audience applauded, several people at my table whispered and jabbed their fingers at me. They knew Lee was alluding to my book, The End of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1996), which had been stirring up trouble since its release six months earlier. The book argued that science—especially pure science, the grand quest to understand the universe and our place in it— might be entering an era of diminishing returns. As the New York Times put it in a front-page review, " The great days of scientific discovery are over; what science now knows is about all it will ever know. " 1 The book was denounced by eminences such as Bill Clinton's science advi-sor, the British minister of science, the heads of NASA and the Human Genome Project, the editors of Science and Nature, and dozens of Nobel laureates. These denunciations usually took the form not of detailed rebuttals of my arguments but of declarations of faith in scientific progress. Scientists need a certain degree of faith to bolster their confidence in the arduous quest for truth; lacking such faith, science would not have come so far so fast. But when researchers reflexively deny any evidence and arguments that challenge their faith, they violate the scientific spirit. Perhaps recognizing this fact, some pundits reacted thoughtfully to my book. Moreover, I suspect that more than a few scientists who publicly assailed my views privately acknowledged their merit. David Lee was a case in point. When I introduced myself to him at the Nobel banquet to tell him how flattered I was that he had mentioned my book, he said he hoped that I hadn't been offended. He had enjoyed the book and had agreed with much of it, particularly the argument that achieving fundamental discoveries is becoming increasingly difficult. He just felt that the only way for scientists to truly know the limits of …