Science will only end once we've licked all the objects in the universe

OR: the return of Gary the Messiah

photo cred: my dad

There’s an exquisite, painful joy in discovering someone who believes everything that you believe, except for one very important thing.

Imagine two Christians meeting each other and finding that they share all the same dogma—God sent his only son to die for our sins, etc., except one of them thinks God’s only son was a guy named Jesus who lived in first-century Palestine, and the other one thinks God’s only son was a guy named Gary who lived in 1970s Poughkeepsie.

That’s how I felt reading The End of Science by the journalist John Horgan. If you printed out big chunks of this blog, stapled them together, and then crossed out the conclusion and wrote in the opposite, you would get something like Horgan’s book.

I’m gonna unload on Horgan’s argument in a minute, but before I do: this book is a treasure. In particular, Horgan’s interviews with the philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and Paul Feyeraband are, to me, instant classics. (Fortunately, you can read those interviews here, here, and here.)¹ Except for the part where I disagreed with this book so much that I wanted to scream, I loved it.

Horgan’s thesis is that science is a victim of its own success. We’ve notched so many big discoveries, and now there just aren't that many left. Our greatest scientists, their heads softened from repeatedly bumping up against the limits of reality, have now turned to what Horgan calls ironic science: “propositions so speculative and fuzzy—string and multiverse theories come to mind—that they should be viewed as fictions.” Ironic science, in Horgan’s view, is just one big, flabby, jargon-riddled exercise that boils down to people saying “science sure is neat!” It’s like doing comparative literature with some equations tossed in. “As conventional science yields diminishing returns,” Horgan warns, “ironic science will proliferate.”

Horgan makes his point by interviewing and scrutinizing a bunch of famous scientists and finding their work not just lacking, but silly. Some examples:

• Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman boasts the he’s created the world’s first truly intelligent machine; meanwhile, all it does is roll around a room, picking up red balls.

• Chaos theorists spout gobbledygook about “bubbles and instabilities and quantum fluctuations.” Then they make wild proclamations based on their computer simulations, which turn out to be completely wrong.

• Sociobiology, which was once supposed to harden the social sciences into respectable disciplines, has...not done that.

Physicists come off looking particularly bad. After attending a Stephen Hawking lecture about fantastical ideas like wormholes and superstrings and “mini-superspace,” Horgan concludes that Hawking is “less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker” whose work “can keep us awestruck. But it is not science.” After interviewing several more famous physicists, Horgan declares that they

practice physics in a nonempirical, ironic mode, plumbing the magical realm of superstrings and other esoterica and fretting about the meaning of quantum mechanics. The conferences of these ironic physicists, whose disputes cannot be experimentally resolved, will become more and more like those of that bastion of literary criticism, the Modern Language Association.

Virtually everyone profiled in The End of Science somehow utterly embarrasses themselves in front of Horgan. One low point comes at a Santa Fe Institute workshop called “The Limits to Scientific Knowledge.” Here’s a dialogue between Ralph Gormory, the former vice president of research at IBM, and chaos theorist Stuart Kauffman:

Gormory remarked that a Martian, by observing humans playing chess, might be able to deduce the rules correctly. But could the Martian ever be sure that those were the correct rules, or the only rules? Everyone pondered Gomory’s riddle for a moment. Then Kauffman speculated on how Wittgenstein might have responded to it. [...] After all, how could the Martian tell if the move was just a mistake or the result of another rule? “Do you get this?” Kauffman queried Gomory.

“I don’t know who Wittgenstein is, for starters,” Gomory replied irritably.

Kauffman raised his eyebrows. “He was a very famous philosopher.”

He and Gomory stared at each other until someone said, “Let’s leave Wittgenstein out of this.”

The story continues:

Patrick Suppes, a philosopher from Stanford, kept interrupting the discussion to point out that Kant, in his discussion of antinomies, anticipated virtually all the problems they were wrestling with at the workshop. Finally, when Suppes brought up yet another antinomy, someone shouted, “No more Kant!” Suppes protested that there was just one more antinomy he wanted to mention that was really very important, but his colleagues shouted him down.

(Apparently, several of the attendees later told the organizer it was the “best meeting they had ever attended.”)

After 291 pages of this, it’s hard to disagree with Horgan’s claim that our best and brightest have gone bonkers. Most of them also appear to be outrageously arrogant. When asked about consciousness, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky says, “I’ve solved it, and I don’t understand why people don’t listen.” The Danish physicist Per Bak claims that particle physicists “think they're still doing science when they’re really just cleaning up the mess after the party.” And then there's the physicist Murray Gell-Man:

After a series of particularly demeaning comments about some of his fellow physicists, Gell-Mann added, “I don't want to be quoted insulting people. It's not nice. Some of those people are my friends.”

INCREASE SCIENTIFIC OUTPUT BY TOSSING SCIENTISTS TO THE LIONS

I’m sympathetic to Horgan’s claim that there’s something rotten in the state of science, I can get on board with the idea that our scientific luminaries are a bunch of asses and buffoons, and I’m even open to the possibility that large swaths of supposed scientific activity have basically become interpretative dance.

But the core of Horgan’s argument is that ironic science is inevitable, and this is where I stop nodding along and start shaking my head. (I am thus grateful to The End of Science for providing a balanced neck workout.)

There’s a strong assumption hidden in Horgan’s claim that ought to be excavated: the main limit on science is reality. As in, Nature buries some of her secrets deeper than others, so of course we’re going to discover the shallowest ones first, and the deepest ones may be beyond our reach forever. The philosopher Nicholas Rescher, one of Horgan’s interviewees, puts it well:

We can only investigate nature by interacting with it. To do that we must push into regions never investigated before, regions of higher density, lower temperature, or higher energy. In all those cases we are pushing fundamental limits and that requires ever more elaborate and expensive apparatuses. So there is a limit imposed on science by the limits of human resources.

Let’s call this the Realist position. To a Realist our successes and failures in science say more about the universe than they do about us—we’re just doing whatever Nature lets us do. So when a Realist sees, for example, that the number of researchers is increasing without a proportional increase in the number of breakthroughs, they assume that’s because it now “takes” more researchers to make a breakthrough. Similarly, when scientists start doing ironic science, the Realist explanation is that actual science has become too hard.

I ain’t a Realist. I certainly believe that Nature makes some mysteries easier to untangle than others—it’s easier to study Earth than it is to study Pluto—and some of those mysteries might be unsolvable entirely. But the main limit to scientific inquiry isn’t reality. It’s us.

Lots of low-hanging scientific fruit went unpicked for centuries because nobody ever thought to pick it. Someone could have proven 1000 years earlier that heavier things don’t fall faster than lighter things, for example, or that maggots don’t spontaneously generate from rotting meat. I know I keep banging this drum, but: we only invented the randomized-controlled trial in 1948. Reality didn’t stop us from discovering these things. Our own imaginations did.

We’ve had kings, soldiers, merchants, builders, farmers, artists, teachers, and priests for a very long time—maybe as long as we've had human civilization itself. But we've only had scientists for a few hundred years. (Indeed, the word “scientist” didn't exist until 1833.) The idea that you could have people in society using empirical methods to discover truths about the world—that was not in the Human Civilization Starter Pack. It had to be invented.

(Indeed, as the historian

Anton Howes

points out, it wasn’t any particular invention that kicked off the Industrial Revolution; it was the “improving mindset” that inspired people to invent in the first place.)

The fact that science showed up so late in human history also suggests that it’s more delicate than other social institutions. For example, people keep on worshipping their gods and practicing their faiths despite fervent and occasionally state-sponsored efforts to stop them. You can throw ‘em to the lions or burn down their temples and they’ll just worship harder! On the other hand, there have been large spans of time and space throughout history (up to and including today) where people did very little science at all, even when there was no threat of lions. 

And we’re not just shooting for any scientific activity. Science is a strong-link problem; it depends on producing useful stuff. Cranking out mediocre research is merely an elaborate ritual for turning taxpayer dollars into paywalled papers that no one reads. We need not just a world where science happens, but a world where it happens right. It seems like that world is pretty hard to get!

So I’m not worried about the limits that reality places on scientific discovery. The strictest limits are inside our own minds—the questions we never ask because they seem too obvious, the explanations we accept without sufficient evidence, the studies we never run because they’re too far outside the consensus.²

These are the obstacles that have held us back for thousands of years, and we haven’t conquered them yet. We’ve barely even dented them. We have, if anything, cemented them by attempting to professionalize, formalize, and regulate the kinds of questions that may be asked, the explanations that may be given, and the studies that may be run.

THE PARABLE OF THE FLAMING POP-TART

I’ve learned to be extra skeptical when people claim that something beautiful is going away and that something terrible is about to happen, mainly because I’ve spent so much time standing outside in the middle of the night, shivering in my jammies.

In college, the fire alarm went off multiple times a month. Some pampered freshman, far from home and feeding himself for the first time, would stick a Pop-Tart in the toaster for an hour, and the next thing you know we’d all be standing in the cold, waiting for the fire department to give us the all-clear. At this point, I have lived through hundreds of fire alarms and exactly zero fires.³ (I’d knock on wood, but I'm afraid of ending my streak by making a spark.)

So when I hear someone warn that everything’s coming to an end, I remember the fire alarms. People really do die in fires, which is why you can’t just ignore the klaxons. Similarly, disasters really do strike, empires crumble, and economies tank, so you can't just ignore every warning that those things are about to happen. It’s just that there’s always someone warning that those things are about to happen, and so the only way you can avoid getting duped all the time is to set a high standard of evidence for doomsayers.

Unfortunately, we’re often too credulous when people cry calamity. (See: the Illusion of Moral Decline.) Here’s one of my favorite examples: the Baptist preacher William Miller predicted that Jesus would return to Earth on October 22, 1844. When this didn’t happen—an event that went down in history as the Great Disappointment—you might think that the thousands of people who followed Miller (some of whom had sold all their possessions in preparation for the Rapture) would have, I don’t know, beat him up, or something. And while some indeed got mad and others lost their faith, a chunk of Millerites kept believing, and their sect eventually gained millions of followers. Today, we know them as Seventh-Day Adventists.⁴

Scientists can also mispredict the end-times and then get off mostly scot-free; they just do it with more charts. The best example is perhaps Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who predicted in his bestselling book The Population Bomb that overpopulation would cause “hundreds of millions” of people, including tens of millions of Americans, to die from food shortages in the 1980s. When this didn't happen, Ehrlich was punished for his wild and irresponsible claims by, uh, receiving a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 1990. He continues to make media appearances and has only grown bolder. “My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” he said in 2015.

When you can get death threats for making jokes on Twitter, it just seems kinda odd that you can predict a global catastrophe, be completely wrong, and then continue on as normal. Maybe it’s because anxiety is socially acceptable—if the things you worry about never happen, well, phew! Plus, you can always postpone your predicted armageddon, or move the goal posts, or claim that your warnings helped avert disaster. There’s nothing wrong with “raising awareness,” after all! Except when, you know, your awareness-raising helps justify forced sterilization campaigns.

Anyway, speaking of Twitter, here’s what Ehrlich is up to now:

None of this is to say that Horgan is necessarily wrong, just that he’s writing in a genre with a lot of debt to pay off. In a world where people are always crying wolf, any would-be wolf-criers had better bring a thick stack of binders documenting wolf activity. So in this case, to prove that we’re in the inevitable twilight of science, you have to do a lot more than show some famous scientists are basically doing macaroni art with numbers.

THE BEST PSYCHOLOGISTS IN THE WORLD WORK FOR HEINEKEN

But that raises an interesting question: what would it take to prove that science is ending? I don’t know much about superstrings or mini-spaces or chaoplexity or whatever, so I can only offer an example from my home field of psychology.

In college, one of my professors warned me not to go into studying prejudice because, in her opinion, there wasn’t much left to learn about it. She was one of the most prominent experts in the field, so I took her word for it. But now, a decade later, I wonder what made her so sure. How would we know that we’re past Peak Prejudice?

Well, if nobody studied prejudice anymore, that might be a sign that we’ve worked things out. But whenever I go to a social psychology conference, it seems like the plurality of talks—if not the majority—are somehow related to prejudice. And while I often have plenty of objections to these talks, they aren't ironic in the Horganian sense; they're trying to make empirical points, not just gin up oohs and ahhs about the wonders of people hating each other.

Here’s another way to evaluate our understanding: can we use all of our knowledge about prejudice to reduce it? Well, this review says “no,” this meta-analysis says “we don’t know” (and this update says “we still don’t know”), and this meta-analysis says “yes kind of, but not for long and not in the ways we care about the most.”

In fact, we’re living through a test case right now. There’s been a recent uptick in political animosity—Democrats and Republicans hate each other more than they used to. Psychologists are very worried about this and would like to stop it. (I’m less worried, but that’s just me.) As I mentioned recently, the most ambitious attempt to do something about this is the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, which asked everyone (anybody!) to send in ideas for interventions, and the organizers tested the ones they thought were the most promising. The thing that reduced partisan animosity the most was this Heineken commercial from 2017. So I think we have a ways to go here.

Our state of the art

(I can’t help but notice that the physicists can use their knowledge to do things like go to the moon and build nuclear bombs. They don’t have to put out calls like, “Hey, can everybody send in their best rocket ship ideas?” only to discover the best submission is one of those homemade flying machines they use to advertise Red Bull. That’s why I think psychology has barely started.)

So it’s pretty hard to know whether we’re “done” studying prejudice, and even the tiny bit of evidence we have suggests that we are far from it. And yet it's possible for an expert to be sure enough that the end is coming that they'll try to warn off the next generation of researchers. (A warning that was, apparently, heeded only by me.)

That’s just a little thing that happened to me, but people seem to embarrass themselves quite reliably when trying to predict how science will go in the future. In 1903, an article in the New York Times estimated that airplanes were “between one and ten million years” away; the Wright Brothers flew nine weeks later. In 1932, Einstein claimed, “There is not the slightest indication that [atomic] energy will ever be obtainable”; seven years later he would write his famous letter to Roosevelt, warning of nuclear weapons. Believing in meteorites was a loony position until 1803, when hundreds of them rained down in front of a crowd.

It wasn’t crazy to think that we’re a long way from manned flight, or that we’d never split the atom, or that rocks don’t fall from the sky—it was only crazy to be certain about those things.

Just one last stupid example. According to this post by

Malmesbury

(no relation to the 11th-century flying monk), all of our major artificial sweeteners were discovered by accident. As in, someone in a chemistry lab licked their fingers and went, “Ooh, sweet!” Not that Splenda is our greatest scientific achievement or anything, but lots of major discoveries have happened through accidents like this, from penicillin to X-rays to the first evidence of the big bang. So if breakthroughs sometimes happen from people just bumbling around, how can we ever be sure what’s going to happen next? Which is just a long way of saying, if science is slowing down, perhaps scientists should lick more things.

NAVEL SUPERIORITY

Here’s how Horgan ends The End of Science:

Just as lovers begin talking about their relationship only when it sours, so will scientists become more self-conscious and doubtful as their efforts yield diminishing returns. Science will follow the path already trodden by literature, art, music, and philosophy. It will become more introspective, subjective, diffuse, obsessed with its own methods.

I gotta disagree here: you should definitely talk about your relationship before it starts souring! That’s how you prevent it from souring in the first place.

(An older, divorced friend of mine once told me he thought it was good that he and his wife never fought. They only realized too late that they never had conflict because they were drifting apart.)

Sure, if you gaze at your navel too long, you might get sucked into it. But a little introspection is a good thing. Case in point: universal pre-publication peer review, the largest scientific intervention of all time, went into effect without, as far as I can tell, much of a peep from anyone. Now that we’re blowing a billion bucks every year on a system that doesn’t seem to work, perhaps we could have saved ourselves some sourness by navel-gazing a bit more?

That’s why I’m always howling about the structures of science—funding, applications, institutions, public participation, and so on. This isn’t about tweaking the dials to get 3% more science or something. You can, quite easily, turn the dials in such a way that you get no worthwhile science at all.

That’s also why I’m so gung ho about building a Science House. (Starting with a prototype this summer—holler at me if you’re interested, time is running out.) I think Horgan is right about the shabby state of science today; I just disagree about how we got there, and how to get out. The solution is to experiment with how we experiment. (What if we lick our thumbs instead of our fingers??)

If the Realists are right, none of this will matter. I’m happy to take the other side of that bet. If the indicators of scientific progress tick downward and ultimately asymptote to zero no matter what we do, if we speckle the world with Science Houses and decades go by with nothing to show for it, then at least we can knock down the houses and use them for firewood in our cold, dystopian future.

But notice that the Realists don’t have a plan, because they can’t have a plan. To them, the rotten state of science is inevitable. All they can do is sit quietly and wait for the end to come. And look, “sit quietly and wait for the end to come” has a pretty bad track record.

It is, however, a great way of making some money, and I could sure use some for a Science House. And, as luck would have it, the Messiah (Gary from Poughkipsee) is about to come back! Repent, and send me your dollars before it’s too late!

1. For more, you can listen to this podcast he did with Demystify Sci, which serendipitously came out just as I was working on this post and was helpful for writing it. Demystify Sci rocks, by the way. I did an episode with them a while back that you can listen to here.

2. I imagine Horgan might even be sympathetic to this argument, given that he’s a self-professed psychonaut—the last chapter of The End of Science is about his mind-expanding experiences taking LSD.

3. I suspect this is the real reason why fire alarms are so loud. They have to be unbearable because they’re untrustworthy.

4. One hundred and fifty years later, the radio preacher Harold Camping would complete a similar feat, amassing millions in donations while predicting the world would end in 1994. When the 90s apocalypse turned out to be a bust, he rescheduled it for May 21, 2011, then delayed it again to October 21, 2011, and then finally gave up and, to his credit, apologized for his “sinful” behavior. His radio stations still exist, though they’ve stopped re-running Camping's sermons.