Aug 14, 2023 09:21 AM
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/the-d...mniscience
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): Does anyone still think science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed they were solving the riddle of existence. They would explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are.
For years I believed this claim, partly out of deference to the scientists propagating it, but also because the prospect of a final revelation thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Now I see the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.
[...] I suspect Stephen Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he riffed on the ultimate theory. ... Steven Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory... Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity...
[...] Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”
Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life was already solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”
[...] In the late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable.
[...] All this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code...
[...] But the concept of scientific omniscience was flawed from the start. ... the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific. And more than century after discovering quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says about the world.
[...] There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there, but over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined scientists’ confidence--and that is a good thing... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): Does anyone still think science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed they were solving the riddle of existence. They would explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are.
For years I believed this claim, partly out of deference to the scientists propagating it, but also because the prospect of a final revelation thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Now I see the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.
[...] I suspect Stephen Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he riffed on the ultimate theory. ... Steven Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory... Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity...
[...] Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”
Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life was already solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”
[...] In the late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable.
[...] All this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code...
[...] But the concept of scientific omniscience was flawed from the start. ... the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific. And more than century after discovering quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says about the world.
[...] There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there, but over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined scientists’ confidence--and that is a good thing... (MORE - missing details)
