Today, thoughts about the end of science. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Stories are told about
19th-century legislation meant to close the Patent
Office because everything had been invented. There
was talk of that kind, but no serious legislation.
Now people have been talking about the end of
science. What such talk really reflects is a change
in the character of invention or science.
Think about the nature of matter: 2400 years ago,
Greek philosophers argued that question. Is matter
made of four continuous essences, earth, air, fire,
and water? Or is it made of essential particles
that might be called atoms? Science today is rooted
in the idea that matter is made of atoms. Yet, as
we break atoms into components on the scale of
quantum indeterminacy, we seem to be facing
Aristotelian essences once more. The nature of
matter is as troubling today as it was to the early
Greeks.
The difference is that we've seen much more of the
process by which the sciences cajole nature into
releasing her secrets than Aristotle ever did. As a
result, we also face much longer laundry lists of
unanswered questions than he did.
We accept a 15 or so billion-year-old universe that
began with a big bang, but who can say whether time
flowed before that moment? We know species evolve
but our knowledge of evolution is laced with deeper
questions. We have many physical laws, but we
realize those laws are not absolute truth. They are
human constructs meant to make nature predictable.
Meanwhile, mathematics has shown us that the only
futures we'll ever predict will be trends, not
events. Our increasing knowledge seems only to be
widening our ignorance.
On the other hand, science now suggests vast arenas
of invention. Science and math have given their
users so great a capacity for altering human life
that change is muted only by our ability to absorb
it. What must occur next is not the completion of
physics, astronomy, and biology. The method those
fields use is already complete. Method is what
defines science, and today's scientific method now
widens the questions we ask faster than it answers
them.
But the technologies that science now makes
feasible demand the creation of wholly new
sciences. We need a science of the behavior of
large interacting systems. We need a science of
biological ethics -- a science in which right
versus wrong can be optimized and dealt with in the
incredibly complex matrix of manipulated life. We
need a psychology of humanity in transition.
Five hundred years ago the new medium of print gave
us widespread visual information and it gave birth
to a whole set of new sciences: anatomy, geography,
descriptive geometry, botany. Now a flood of
machine-manipulated information calls for new
information-dense sciences. So science will take up
new methods and move to a new arena. It will die
only in the sense alchemy died centuries ago. It
will merely put on an unrecognizably new set of
clothes.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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