John Horgan is the Judas of Science: the enemy of fact

books:


	• The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age John Horgan Broadway Books, 1997 - 322 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Grand goal but flawed premises

Horgan's "The End of Science" is thought-provoking, engaging, and an interesting read. It is well-written in terms of prose, but as an argument it is rather weak. Initially, Horgan intended to write a more objective book that provide information from prominent thinkers in fields of philosophy, science, social science, theology, etc. so that the reader could make informed but unbiased judgment on their own on whether or not the suggestion as put forth by Gunther Stent in Stent's work "The Coming of the Golden Age" that the end of science might be close at hand. If that was the case than the book would be much more valuable and far more neutral and thus with less distorted reportage. However, as Horgan dive deeper and deeper into the well of diverging and conflicting sea of opinions of experts, he came to a conclusion of his own on the subject and ultimately found it only fitting that the book should be opinion (his) driven, rather than facts-and-views driven. Thus, every opinion and observation is skewed towards a favorable angle for advancing Horgan's own beliefs and assumptions. As a result, the reader is left to either agreeing with Horgan or disapproving him. This is science writing at its worse; the objectivity that is expected of blissful science writing has been compromised. Further, too much emphasis is put on non-science disciplines -- a great part, at least one-third, is on fields outside the domain of science. If the argument is to be more convincing, then more background in science is necessary, but not on philosophy, theology, and social science. Generally, there is a flow to the ideas, but the focus of each section can be off-focused sometimes. In some sections, there is the discussion surrounding only one thinker, but this number can greatly multiplied into more than three in some sections, which tends to lead the reader off-track and thus the weakness of exposition in some sections. The most ironic observation about the publication is that the author suggests the end of science with absolute conviction, while rebuffing many scholars of their "ironic" (obstinately held) views and opinioins. Many fundamental ideas are introduced in the book, which makes it useful for the beginning science student. It has been more than a decade since the title was first published, so a great portion of the book is out-dated. However, for the entertainment factor of the work, it is still worth reading it for some serious fun.

for more information click here

John Horgan is the Judas of Science: the enemy of fact

He pretty much knew that he was writing tripe.
John Horgan mistakes his popularity and scientific political power for knowledge and wisdom.
I suppose that ethics is dead as well, so that he is allowed to be this evil.
By talking with all these great men he had a chance for real knowledge
and instead he made verbal cartoons and ridiculed all their ideas.
He would definitely be the lawyer for the devil if one could exist.
I don't think we need to be Spartan about this fox eating our insides out:
he probably deserves the fate of a Judas.
At the end of the book he congratulates himself for his hatchet job on science and it's scientists.
You will notice that like a good English major he hasn't included one equation:
not even Rossler's that he probably didn't even copy down ( page 236).
Rossler named what he had done: distortion.
I think that maybe science deserves to be so served
as it stands today.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts?In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, ?are rarely so human...so at ther mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge.?This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final ?theory of everything? that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories?Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx?s view of progress, Kuhn?s view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindles Horgan?s smart, contrarian argument for ?endism? with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise.Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights acitivists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike.As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls ?ironic science.? Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world?s leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

for more information click here