the.bricoleur
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making sense of change
 
 
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"why I think science is ending" a talk by J. Horgan
« on: 2003-09-29 18:30:27 » |
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Admittedly not something new to science, but I was curious what peoples thoughts are on John Horgan’s 1966 book The End of Science and this 1997 talk.
A transcript of the talk can be found here – EDGE
Quote:
My claim is that science is a bounded enterprise, limited by social, economic, physical and cognitive factors. Science is being threatened, literally, in some cases, by technophobes like the Unabomber, by animal-rights activists, by creationists and other religious fundamentalists, by post-modern philosophers and, most important of all, by stingy politicians.
Also, as science advances, it keeps imposing limits on its own power. Einstein's theory of special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or even information at speeds faster than that of light. Quantum mechanics dictates that our knowledge of the microrealm will always be slightly blurred. Chaos theory confirms that even without quantum indeterminacy many phenomena would be impossible to predict. And evolutionary biology keeps reminding us that we are animals, designed by natural selection not for discovering deep truths of nature but for breeding.
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1997 was a little before my Internet debut, but does anyone remember what impact this had on the scientific community, if any?
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