A story attributed to the wily Sufi philosopher Nasrudin tells of a man who offended the king and was condemned to die. “Give me but a year, lord, and I will teach your horse to talk,” the man begged. After the king agreed to postpone the sentence for a year, a fellow prisoner asked the man why he’d made the crazy promise. “A lot can happen in a year,” he said. “The king may die. I may die. The horse may die. And the horse may learn to talk.”
Anyone claiming to predict the future faces the “horse may learn to talk” problem. Something totally unplanned and unexpected may change everything overnight. Such was the case in cosmology in 1998, when two independent research teams reported that not only was the universe expanding (known since the 1920s), but the expansion is accelerating. Shouldn’t the mutual gravitational attraction between galaxies slow everything down? The usual explanation for the acceleration goes by the name “dark energy,” a mysterious repulsive force permeating everything everywhere. (By “dark” cosmologists mean, “We haven’t a clue what it is.”)
That was in 1998, two years after John Horgan published The End of Science, a provocative and cantankerous bestseller in which he claimed, “The era of truly profound scientific revelations about the universe and our place in it is over.” After interviewing a passel of luminaries that included Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins, Horgan asserted science was coming up against fundamental limits. He was wrong: The discovery of dark energy was as much a “truly profound scientific revelation” as any before. But — big but — that’s about it. Putting aside dark energy, we’re left with a decades-long barren landscape devoid of any discoveries one could charitably call “profound.”
Horgan’s many critics have complained that since the initial publication of The End of Science (it was re-issued four years ago), we’ve made huge advances in science. But most of his detractors seemed to be confusing “pure science” (the effort to understand nature) with “applied science” (the effort to manipulate nature, usually under the umbrella term “technology”).
To illustrate what I mean by pure science, here’s my selective, idiosyncratic and incomplete list of what I consider to be revolutions in our fundamental understanding of nature (listed in chronological order of their discovery):
Vaccines (1796: Jenner); anesthesia (1798: Davy); germ theory of disease (1844: Bassi); evolution (1858: Darwin, Wallace); genetics (1865: Mendel); periodic table (1869: Mendeleev), quantum mechanics (1900: Planck); plate tectonics (1912: Wegener); general relativity (1915: Einstein); neurotransmitters (1921: Loewi); antibiotics (1928: Fleming); antimatter (1928: Dirac); expanding universe/big bang (1929: Lemaître, Friedman, Hubble); incompleteness theory (1931: Godel); nuclear fission (1938: Hahn, Meitner, Strassmann); double helix (1953: Crick, Watson, Franklin); dark energy (1998: Riess, Perlmutter). All these qualify for “talking horse” status as they were unexpected and paradigm changing. And each of them possesses that singular quality of great theories: They explain much while assuming little.
In a different category altogether are the wildly speculative ideas that barely qualify as “scientific.” We’re being asked to consider such increasingly weird (and — not incidentally — untestable) ideas as: string theory and supersymmetry, many and parallel worlds, multiverses, panpsychism, a timeless block universe, the Gaia hypothesis, an anthropic universe (ancient Greek solipsism brought up to date!), a conscious universe, the Kurzwell singularity. All we need now are talking horses.
Next time I’ll consider whether applied science has achieved any revolutionary breakthroughs since 1996.
Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) prefers he/him pronouns and believes a science writer should both educate and provoke.
This article appears in Soldiers Unknown.
Pure science is not medical application – that is engineering, or “technology” as the author put it.
Clinical research – applying scientific method to samples too small to evade likelihood of reporting merely a statistically unlikely occurrence (consider winning the lottery: because of huge numbers, somebody has to win, even though the likelihoods of your playing every day for the rest of your life STILL makes it highly unlikely YOU will ever win) is a case showing it not to be valid science at times.
Modern pure science includes also the complex methylation and demethylation , the multivariate methods of histone acetylation and deacetylation discoveries of just two ways that DNA lifts and /or is prevented from acting in a cascading manner to make exquisitely appropriate proteins and enzymes or not) affecting cognition, behaviors, internal communication, development, stress response. We did not even understand the genome until the 2000s, much less that most genes act to enable other genes to produce or cease production of these vital components of life.
Understanding transcription and variations in it – , complex changes refined by , what 3 billion to 4 billion years of live testing, is only now slowly being understood. NOT 1996 -Nothing essential was knnown of so much I might speak of here at that time.
Functional brain imaging technologies feed back into our knowledge of how the brain is structured (Believe me, before this emerging science (the tech is just the tools to pursue hypotheses to find if they are false), and what actually happens electrochemically and physiologically in ALL neuron-containing animals [and i remind you that the intelligent, socially responding octopus and ourselves come from some parent whose offspring diverged perhaps six tenths of a billion years ago,, yet we each come to mental and emotional realizations about one another as individuals].
(but in the USA, most imaging tech is used only for clinical diagnosis- time on the machines to explore is limited at best to 2 to 4 am. IN Europe, it is fast generating pure science.
The Capitalist system plops insufficiently tested discoveries into production,(THAT’S NOT science) into your pharmaceuticals, your appliances, your weapons all the time.
Untold damage is done through ABANDONING science in favor of engineering ASAP.
This is where education goes astray – almost ALL now seek only cash cows, few seek knowledge -I’d bet the ratios are feudal in scope. BUt science IS alive and well. I’ll illustrate just a few more areas.
It was not until the past decade or less that we understood that ALL cells may have some direct communications allowing information transfer, outside of the modalities that were known previous, and that science, has NOT “ended” but is accelerating, even as the vast majority are withdrawing from even seeking knowledge, reverting instead into dogma.
And the trail of why we revert – simply, why we become demented by unrelieved or catastrophic stress – to dogma, is simple to a cognitive/neural scientist by comparison with the fairy tales to which most are addicted instead (it’s just hard to translate to those without long grounding in basic biology, chemistry, physics, and systems interaction and contingent developmental responses. THere are strong indications that not only is there less randomness in biological and universal processes, but true randomness may at any point be illusion.We cannot just jump in to state the results of findings, without a shared culture (culture is information transmission) and functional methods of transmission – IT SEEMS to some that science has discovered much coherence, but the presumption that
1. What is stated is correct under all , or more than one circumstance shows a “universal law.”Science repeatedly disproves this, many many times since 1996.
2.That description itself accurately defines what occurs. This is not true for many reasons, the vagaries of human words being prominent among them.
and others I won’t bother to mention on a suny evening about science, which is only sensory reality testing using math and statistical inferences, is in any way complete, or otherwise obsolescent, or finished by, hah! 1996, especially, is an error so astonishing I shouldn’t be spending a moment on disputing such farce.
Yes, 20th Century relativity and quantum mechanics were an expansion of knowledge, but mathematics has been elaborated since (complexity, nonrepeating systems math, have added to science – these things are NOT buried in the 17th c. but are alive and well. Consider topology, an exercise in describing what descriptive features remain when changes such as shape or other physical characteristics : It had few applications except in fluid technologies UNTIL the past year or two, when it is now useful for exploring protein conformational structure.
So, we didn’t know that fruit flies and ourselves share about 70% common genes, that small differences of environmental input create vastly different evolutionary pressures – and I do mean small – much smaller than mere harder to crack seeds on a drier equatorial isle.
Darwin did not know the method of descent with modification, Geneticists into this century refused to understand that at lest four scales of different evolutionary modalities occur, interacting so well, that we have now to redefine genes as mere participants, giving and taking, varying significantly , even changing within the lifetime of a cell, not to mention through several ways when duplicating , rearranging, deleting, and other ways that make variation NOT rare, or odd, but the norm.
It took well into this century – the past 15-19 years to really understand that genes are NOT the sole arbiters of change in biological organisms.
I have before encountered physicists who have misapplied their understanding of their craft to other sciences, coming out with speculations that have awed too many, but were immediately laughable to anyone with sufficient knowledge o f biology – and it took not much to attain that sufficiency.
game theory must be iterated to be meaningful as allegory or significant variable.
NOTHING in ANY imaginable universe actually has stasis.
The presumption that stability is universal or applicable, even to thought, is in error. Daily your osteoclasts eat your bones – in ten years not a single cell, and their intercellular structure, is totally changed – that’s the femur. In other bones, the replacement is complete within just two or three years.
The fossil rhinos and sabretooths whose skulls I petted may have contained about 0 of what moved and lived 30 million years ago – only their shape, , not even atoms, persisted, and those too, need only a change in circumstance to vanish utterly.
What you remember is not what happened, it was only a malleable and changing impression made through senses limited to what a living animal found appropriate at a moment, and changed in response to what you find appropriate now.
We may wonder, and maths or rigorous testing may illuminate a cloudlike representation , but what you believe is more likely to have little to no relationship to the evanescent momentary truth.
Yet, nothing, nothing, approaches universal measurement like science in the moment. Just as topology seeks what remains when all the usual relationships through which we think are removed, so does science outline recognizable dynamic similarities and likelihoods. It has changed VASTLY since you were in school, and has just now, again, changed significantly outside your awareness and fields of reference – and even within them as you hold to inaccurate past analogues and descriptions.
There is no end. You respire, using active oxygen to break and change things, exhaling CO2, which wafts to the redwood just above, intaken and becoming part o f ITS life, for a while, rebroken, and now, for a moment, component of other things. Your lost loves are, in part, all around you, in all that you see or touches your face. You were and will be others in this astonishingly intimate way – not mystical, but real. Perhaps an aplysia will be startled hormonally moved, as valid but inexorably differently than your own most profound emotions affect you. It knows truth – molecular changes that lead it to or from stimuli – EXACTLY as you.
You live longer as a system, or so a few senses tell you. But the science of molecular sensing, applied by that tiny worm, is as valid as science – no other way except that of testable sensing has any such validity: no other endeavor,certainly NOT twisting deceptive rhetoric, meaningless words intended to convert, distort, or otherwise recruit by a eusocial and hierarchical social primate – has any validity whatsoever.
I am surprised that the author fails to mention the mysterious dark matter, which far outweighs the normal matter in the universe. His revolutions have always been infrequent, so I cannot see how he can claim that they have recently become much more infrequent. And there is no shortage of new phenomena to be explained and discoveries to be made. So the clear answer to the question is “No”.
Dark matter was originally postulated by Fritz Zwicky in 1933, so its not really new. If it led to MOND, non-Newtonian gravity, that would have to be added to my list. (Or if it turned out to be a particle that upset the Standard Model, i.e. WIMP.) But more likely it will explained by regular (but essentially invisible) matter = MACHOs. At this point, nothing to suggest a revolution.
IOW, dark matter, meh. Dark energy, wow!
As far as the frequency of revolutionary new discoveries: count the number in the 60 years before and after 1959.
I received a note saying I should have included, for the discovery of radioactivity, Henri Becquerel and Marie & Pierre Curie.