DUE 1/8

SCIENCE

HORGAN
I
“A thumping good book.” —Wall Street Journal
n The End of Science, John Horgan makes the case that the era of truly profound
scientific revelations about the universe and our place in it is over. Interviewing
scientifi c luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins, 12/10
he demonstrates that all the big questions that can be answered have been answered,
as science bumps up against fundamental limits. The world cannot give us a “theory of
JOHN HORGAN
12/10
everything,” and modern endeavors such as string theory are “ironic” and “theological”

THE END
in nature, not scientific, because they are impossible to confirm. Horgan’s argument

THE END
was controversial in 1996, and it remains so today, still firing up debates in labs and
on the internet, not least because—as Horgan details in a lengthy new preface—ironic
science is more prevalent than ever. Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded
in the thinking of the world’s leading researchers, he offers homage, too. If science is
ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

“Hugely entertaining.” —E.O. WILSON, Harvard University

“In this wonderful, provocative book... Horgan’s approach is to take us along

of

of
while he buttonholes several dozen of earth’s crankiest, most opinionated, most
exasperating scientists to get their views on where science is and where it’s going...
They all come to life in Horgan’s narrative.”—Washington Post Book World

SCIENCE SCIENCE
“An unauthorized biography of science.” —Associated Press 5.5 x 8.25
B:0.92
“A deft wordsmith and keen observer, Horgan offers lucid expositions of everything Basic-PB
from superstring theory and Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions to the Color:4C
origin of life and sociobiology.”—Business Week

JOHN HORGAN is a science journalist, writes the “Cross-check” blog for

Scientific American, and directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of
Finish:
Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.
gritty

Cover design by Chelsea Hunter

$17.99 US / $22.50 CAN FACING THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE
ISBN 978-0-465-06592-9
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IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE SCIENTIFIC AGE

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 Praise for John Horgan’s
THE END OF SCIENCE

“In this wonderful, provocative book . . . Horgan’s approach is to take

us along while he buttonholes several dozen of earth’s crankiest, most
opinionated, most exasperating scientists to get their views on where
science is and where it’s going. . . . They all come to life in Horgan’s
narrative.”
—Washington Post Book World, front page review

“Thanks to Mr. Horgan’s smooth prose style, puckish sense of humor,

and wicked eye for detail, these encounters make for zesty reading.
Frequently they are hilarious. . . . A thumping good book.”
—Wall Street Journal

“A deft wordsmith and keen observer, Horgan offers lucid expositions

of everything from superstring theory and Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of
scientific revolutions to the origin of life and sociobiology.”
—Business Week

“[The book’s] greatest pleasures flow from Horgan’s encounters with

the characters who have made science their lives.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Rich in provocative ideas and insightful anecdotes.”

—Library Journal

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 “The End of Science, a lively, witty book by science writer John Hor-
gan, exemplifies the genre’s virtues and faults: It is fun to read. It will
make people think.”
—Reason

“It is a sweeping argument, admirably brought off.”

—Washington Times

“John Horgan has everybody talking. Probably no science book of

this year has generated as much comment.”
—Rocky Mountain News

“The End of Science is a revealing glimpse into the minds of some of our
leading scientists and philosophers. Read it. Enjoy it, learn from it.”
—Hartford Courant

9780465065929-text.indd 2 2/2/15 3:24 PM

 T HE E ND of S C IE NC E

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9780465065929-text.indd 4 2/2/15 3:24 PM
 T HE E ND
of

SC IE NCE
FA C ING T HE L IM I T S OF K NO W L E DGE
IN T HE T W IL IGH T OF T HE S C IE N T IF I C AGE

JOHN HORG A N

A MEMBER OF T HE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP

NE W YORK

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 “Preface to the 2015 Edition” copyright © 2015 by John Horgan

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are
claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and the publisher was
aware of the trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
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Text design by Jack Lenzo.

A CIP catalog record for the original paperback edition of this book is available from the
Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-465-06592-9 (ppk.)
ISBN: 978-0-465-05085-7 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-0-553-06174-7 (original ppk.)

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1996 by Addison-Wesley Publish-
ing Company, Inc.

Copyright © 1996 by John Horgan.

First trade paperback edition published 1997 by Broadway Books.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 Fo r D a d

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 x • CONTENTS

3 • The End of Physics 55

Sheldon Glashow’s doubts.
Edward Witten on superstrings and aliens.
The pointless final theory of Steven Weinberg.
Hans Bethe’s doomsday calculation.
John Wheeler and the “it from bit.”
David Bohm, clarifier and mystifier.
Richard Feynman and the revenge of the philosophers.

4 • The End of Cosmology 90

The infinite imagination of Stephen Hawking.
David Schramm, the big bang’s biggest booster.
Doubts among the cosmic priesthood.
Andrei Linde’s chaotic, fractal, eternally self-reproducing, inflationary universe.
Fred Hoyle, the eternal rebel.
Will cosmology turn into botany?

5 • The End of Evolutionary Biology 114

Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s greyhound.
Stephen Jay Gould’s view of life: shit happens.
Lynn Margulis denounces Gaia.
The organized disorder of Stuart Kauffman.
Stanley Miller ponders the eternally mysterious origin of life.

6 • The End of Social Science 144

Edward Wilson’s fear of a final theory of sociobiology.
Noam Chomsky on mysteries and puzzles.
The eternal vexation of Clifford Geertz.

7 • The End of Neuroscience 161

Francis Crick, the Mephistopheles of biology, takes on consciousness.
Gerald Edelman postures around the riddle.
John Eccles, the last of the dualists.
Roger Penrose and the quasi-quantum mind.
The counterattack of the mysterians.
Is Daniel Dennett a mysterian?
Marvin Minsky’s fear of single-mindedness.
The triumph of materialism.

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 CONTENTS • xi

8 • The End of Chaoplexity 195

What is chaoplexity?
Christopher Langton and the poetry of artificial life.
Per Bak’s self-organized criticality.
Cybernetics and other catastrophes.
Philip Anderson on the meaning of “More Is Different.”
Murray Gell-Mann denies the existence of “something else.”
Ilya Prigogine and the end of certainty.
Mitchell Feigenbaum is refuted by a table.

9 • The End of Limitology 233

Pondering “The Limits of Scientific Knowledge” in Santa Fe.
A meeting on the Hudson River with Gregory Chaitin.
Francis Fukuyama disses science.
The Star Trek factor.

10 • Scientific Theology, or The End of Machine Science 254

The out-of-sight prophecy of J. D. Bernal.
Hans Moravec’s squabbling mind children.
Freeman Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity.
The “bunkrapt” vision of Frank Tipler.
What would the Omega Point want to do?

Epilogue: The Terror of God 269

A mystical experience.
The meaning of the Omega Point.
Charles Hartshorne and the Socinian heresy.
Why scientists are ambivalent toward truth.
Is God chewing his fingernails?

Afterword: Loose Ends 276

 
Acknowledgments 293
Notes 295
Selected Bibliography 315
Index 319

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 Preface to the 2015 Edition
REBOOTING THE END OF SCIENCE

H
ere’s what a fanatic I am: When I have a captive audience of inno-
cent youths, I expose them to my evil meme.
Since 2005, I’ve taught history of science to undergraduates at
Stevens Institute of Technology, an engineering school perched on the
bank of the Hudson River. After we get through ancient Greek “sci-
ence,” I make my students ponder this question: Will our theories of
the cosmos seem as wrong to our descendants as Aristotle’s theories
seem to us?
I assure them there is no correct answer, then tell them the answer
is “No,” because Aristotle’s theories were wrong and our theories are
right. The earth orbits the sun, not vice versa, and our world is made
not of earth, water, fire and air but of hydrogen, carbon and other ele-
ments that are in turn made of quarks and electrons.
Our descendants will learn much more about nature, and they
will invent gadgets even cooler than smartphones. But their scientific
version of reality will resemble ours, for two reasons: First, ours—
as sketched out, for example, by Neil deGrasse Tyson in his terrific
re-launch of Cosmos—is in many respects true; most new knowledge
will merely extend and fill in our current maps of reality rather than
forcing radical revisions. Second, some major remaining mysteries—
Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly,
does a chunk of meat make a mind?—might be unsolvable.
That’s my end-of-science argument in a nutshell, and I believe it
as much today as I did when I was finishing my book twenty years
ago. That’s why I keep writing about my thesis, and why I make my
xiii

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 xiv • REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE

students ponder it—even though I hope I’m wrong, and I’m oddly
relieved when my students reject my pessimistic outlook.
My meme has spread far and wide, in spite of its unpopularity, and
often intrudes even in upbeat discussions about science’s future. A few
brave souls have suggested that maybe there’s something to this end-
of-science idea.1 But most pundits reject it in ritualistic fashion, as if
performing an exorcism.2
Allusions to my book often take this form: “In the mid-1990s, this guy
John Horgan said science is ending. But look at all that we’ve learned
lately, and all that we still don’t know! Horgan is as wrong as those fools
at the end of the nineteenth century who said physics was finished!”
This preface to a new edition of The End of Science updates my
argument, going beyond “Loose Ends,” the Afterword for the 1997
paperback, which fended off the first volley of attacks. Science has
accomplished a lot over the past eighteen years, from the completion
of the Human Genome Project to the discovery of the Higgs boson, so
it’s not surprising that folks only sketchily familiar with my argument
find it preposterous.
But so far my prediction that there would be no great “revelations or
revolutions”—no insights into nature as cataclysmic as heliocentrism,
evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang—has held up
just fine.
In some ways, science is in even worse shape today than I would have
guessed back in the 1990s. In The End of Science, I predicted that sci-
entists, as they struggle to overcome their limitations, would become
increasingly desperate and prone to hyperbole. This trend has become
more severe and widespread than I anticipated. In my thirty-plus years
of covering science, the gap between the ideal of science and its messy,
all-too-human reality has never been greater than it is today.
Over the past decade, statistician John Ioannidis has analyzed the
peer-reviewed scientific literature and concluded that “most current
published research findings are false.”3 Ioannidis blames the problem
on increasingly fierce competition of scientists for attention and grants.
“Much research is conducted for reasons other than the pursuit of

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 REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE • xv

truth,” he wrote in 2011. “Conflicts of interest abound, and they influ-

ence outcomes.”4
Since 1975 the number of biomedical and life-science articles
retracted because of fraud has surged tenfold, according to a 2012
study.5 Many more papers probably should be retracted but aren’t
because their flaws never come to light. “There are errors in a lot more
of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on
than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think,” The Economist
announced in a 2013 cover story, “Trouble at the Lab.”6
Science always has adversaries, from religious fundamentalists to
global-warming deniers, but lately it has become its own worst enemy.
Scientists are beginning to resemble lawyers and politicians, who too
often abandon their noble ideals for the crass pursuit of wealth, power,
and prestige.
Even setting aside the enormous problems of misconduct and unre-
liability of results, some prominent scientists have become arrogant,
and dismissive of criticism, in ways that ill-serve their profession. Some
seem intent on transforming science from a truth-seeking method into
an ideology—scientism—which harshly denigrates nonscientific ways
of engaging with the world, in a manner all too reminiscent of reli-
gious fundamentalism.
In his 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel
Kahneman reveals all the ways in which our minds can fool us, con-
firming our preconceptions. Scientists like to cite Kahneman’s find-
ings when they bash creationists and climate-change skeptics. But as
Kahneman himself emphasizes, scientists, too, can succumb to confir-
mation bias.7
I remain hopeful that science can regain its ethical bearings and
help us solve our social problems: poverty, climate change, overpop-
ulation, militarism. I’m often called a pessimist, but I’m an optimist
about what matters most. I’ll return to what matters most at the end of
this essay—after explaining how my thesis accommodates advances in
physics, biology, neuroscience, and chaoplexity (my snarky portman-
teau term for chaos and complexity).

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Physics Stumbles as the Cosmos Speeds Up

P article physics, the grand goals of which entranced me when I

started covering science more than three decades ago, is in such dis-
array that I almost hesitate to knock it. In 2012 the Large Hadron Col-
lider finally yielded solid evidence of the Higgs boson, which confers
mass to other particles and was first postulated in the early 1960s.
The Higgs has been dubbed, with hype that serves as its own par-
ody, the “God particle.” Its detection was almost comically anti-climac-
tic, measured against physics’ lofty ambitions. The Higgs serves as the
capstone of the standard model of particle physics, a quantum descrip-
tion of electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. But the Higgs doesn’t
take us any closer to physics’ ultimate goal than climbing a tree takes
us to the moon.
For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of finding a
unified theory—sometimes called a “theory of everything”—that wraps
up all of nature’s forces, including gravity. They hoped this theory might
solve the most profound of all mysteries: How did the universe come to
be, and why does it take the form we observe and not some other form?
As Einstein put it, did God have any choice in making the universe?
In The End of Science, I bash string theory, the leading candidate for
a theory of everything, because it postulates particles too small to be
observed by any conceivable experiment. In 2002, I bet Michio Kaku
$1,000 that by 2020 no one would win a Nobel Prize for string theory or
any other unified theory.8 Does anyone else want a piece of this action?
Research on string theory—sometimes called M (for membrane)
theory—has if anything regressed over the last decade. Physicists real-
ized that the theory comes in virtually infinite versions (10500, accord-
ing to one estimate), each of which “predicts” a different universe.
Leonard Susskind and other string advocates have brazenly rede-
fined this flaw as a feature, claiming that all of the universes allowed
by string theory actually exist; our observable cosmos is just a minus-
cule bubble in an oceanic “multiverse.”
Asked why we happen to live in this particular cosmos, multiverse
enthusiasts cite the anthropic principle, which decrees that our cosmos
must have the form we observe, because otherwise we wouldn’t be

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 REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE • xvii

here to observe it.9 The anthropic principle is tautology masquerading

as explanation.
Philosopher Karl Popper, whom I profile in The End of Science,
denounced psychoanalysis and Marxism for being so vague and flexible
that they could not be proven wrong, or “falsified,” by any conceivable
finding. Falsification has been widely embraced as our best criterion for
distinguishing science from pseudo-science.10
Confronted with complaints that string and multiverse theories can-
not be falsified, true believers like Sean Carroll now assert that falsi-
fication is overrated. Other high-profile physicists—notably Stephen
Hawking and Lawrence Krauss—denigrate philosophy as worthless.11
Physicists’ hubris is epitomized by Krauss’s 2012 book The Universe
from Nothing, which asserts that physicists have already discovered why
there is something rather than nothing. Krauss’s “answer” is just stale,
hand-wavy speculation that leans heavily on quantum uncertainty,
which clever theorists can employ to explain away anything.
Moreover, Krauss begs the question of where his version of “noth-
ing”—the primordial quantum vacuum that supposedly spawned our
world—came from.12 In a blurb he must regret, biologist Richard Daw-
kins compares Krauss to Darwin. “If On the Origin of Species was biol-
ogy’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism,” Dawkins gushes, “we may
come to see A Universe from Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”
I understand the desire of atheists like Dawkins, Krauss, and Hawk-
ing to supplant faith-based explanations of creation with empirical
ones—and, more broadly, to counter superstition with reason. But
when they defend pseudo-scientific nonsense like multiverses and the
anthropic principle, they hurt their cause more than they help it.
Physics has produced genuine thrills since The End of Science was
published, including the most dramatic scientific discovery of the last
twenty years. In the late 1990s, astronomers peering at supernovas in
distant galaxies—which provide a measure of the universe’s size and
expansion—discovered that the rate of expansion is growing.
I didn’t expect this astonishing finding to hold up, but it did; the
discoverers of the acceleration of the universe won the Nobel Prize
in 2011. Early on, some physicists predicted that cosmic acceleration
might be analogous to radioactivity and other anomalies that triggered

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revolutionary shifts in physics at the dawn of the twentieth century.

But so far, the cosmic acceleration remains just a fascinating twist of
big bang cosmology.

We Are Still Alone

A nother major discovery to emerge from astronomy is that many

stars have planets orbiting them. When I started my career, astron-
omers had not confirmed the existence of a single exoplanet. Now,
with the help of exquisitely sensitive telescopes and ingenious signal-
processing methods, they have discerned thousands. Extrapolating
from these data, astronomers estimate that the Milky Way may harbor
as many planets as stars.
But we still can’t answer our most urgent question: Are we alone?
As I said in The End of Science, I fervently hope extraterrestrial life is
detected in my lifetime, because that could blow science wide open. But
given the enormous distances to even the closest exoplanets—which
would take millennia for our fastest spacecraft to reach—chances of
such a discovery remain vanishingly slight.13
Scientists still can’t figure out how life arose on Earth more than
three billion years ago. A 2011 report in the New York Times on origin-
of-life research highlights the same theories I examined in The End of
Science.14 Directed panspermia, which holds that aliens planted the
seeds of life on earth—and which comes awfully close to intelligent
design—is apparently making a comeback.

Where Are All the Designer Babies?

O n some fronts, of course, biology is barreling along at a prodigious

clip. In 2003, fifty years after Francis Crick and James Watson deci-
phered the double helix, the Human Genome Project finished (more
or less) decoding all our DNA. Francis Collins, the project’s director,
called it “an amazing adventure into ourselves,” as a result of which
medical advances would be “significantly accelerated.”15

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 REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE • xix

The federal project was completed ahead of time and under bud-
get, because of the surging power and plummeting costs of gene-
sequencing machines and other biotechnologies. These advances have
inspired triumphal rhetoric about how we are on the verge of a pro-
found new understanding of and control over ourselves—as well as the
usual hand-wringing about designer babies.
But so far the medical advances promised by Francis Collins have
not materialized. Over the past twenty-five years, researchers have car-
ried out some 2,000 clinical trials of gene therapies, which treat dis-
eases by tweaking patients’ DNA.16 At this writing, no gene therapies
have been approved for commercial sale in the United States (although
in 2012 one was approved in Europe). Tellingly, cancer mortality
rates—in spite of countless alleged “breakthroughs”—also remain
extremely high.17
We still lack basic understanding of how genes make us who we are.
Behavioral genetics seeks to identify variations in genes that underpin
variations between people—in, for example, temperament and suscep-
tibility to mental illnesses. The field has announced countless dramatic
“discoveries”—genes for homosexuality, high IQ, impulsivity, violent
aggression, schizophrenia—but so far it has not produced a single
robust finding.18
Other lines of investigations, while intriguing, have complicated
rather than clarified our understanding of how genes work. Research-
ers have shown that evolution and embryonic development can interact
in surprising ways (evo devo); that subtle environmental factors can
affect genes’ expression (epigenetics); and that supposedly inert sections
of our genome (junk DNA) might actually serve some purpose after all.
Biology’s plight recalls that of physics in the 1950s, when accelerators
churned out weird new particles hard to reconcile with conventional
quantum physics. Confusion yielded to clarity after Murray Gell-Mann
and others conjectured that neutrons and protons are composed of
triplets of strange particles called “quarks.”
Could some novel idea—as bold as the quark—help clarify genetics,
perhaps in ways that help the field fulfill its medical potential? I hope
so. Could biology be on the verge of a profound paradigm shift, akin to
the quantum revolution in physics?

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I doubt it. Biology’s framework of neo-Darwinian theory plus DNA-

based genetics has proven to be remarkably resilient, and my guess is
that it will easily absorb any surprises, just as quantum field theory
absorbed quarks.
Ironically, as research undermines simple biological models, some
prominent biologists have advocated extremely deterministic, reduc-
tionist models of human behavior. Jerry Coyne asserts that free will is
an illusion,19 and Richard Wrangham and Edward Wilson contend that
humans are innately warlike.20
Racist theories of intelligence have even resurfaced. In 2007 James
Watson—the grand old man of modern genetics—said that the prob-
lems of blacks stem from their innate inferiority.21 When it comes to
arrogance and overreaching, physicists are hardly alone.

The Neural Code, Panpsychism, and DARPA

O f all the initial objections to The End of Science, the one I took most
to heart was that I didn’t delve deeply enough into research on the
human mind, which has more potential to produce “revelations or rev-
olutions” than any other scientific endeavor. I agreed, so much so that I
devoted my next two books to mind-related topics.
The Undiscovered Mind (1999) critiques psychiatry, neuroscience,
evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence and other fields that
seek to explain the mind and heal its disorders. Rational Mysticism
(2003) explores mystical states of consciousness, with which I’ve been
obsessed since my acid-addled youth.
I’ve continued tracking neuroscience over the past decade. I’m
especially intrigued by efforts to crack the “neural code.”22 This is the
algorithm, or set of rules, that supposedly transforms electrochemi-
cal impulses in our brains into perceptions, memories, emotions,
decisions.
A solution to the neural code could have profound consequences,
intellectual and practical. It could help solve ancient philosoph-
ical conundrums such as the mind-body problem, with which Plato
wrestled, and the riddle of free will. It could lead to better theories

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 REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE • xxi

of and treatments for brain-based disorders, from schizophrenia to

Alzheimer’s.
The neural code is arguably the most important problem in sci-
ence—and the hardest. Like the origin of life, the neural code has
spawned a surfeit of theories with contradictory claims and assump-
tions. Whereas all organisms share a remarkably similar genetic code,
the neural code of humans may differ from the codes of other animals.
In fact, each individual brain may employ many neural codes, which
keep evolving in response to new stimuli.
A solution to the neural code could provide mind-science with the
unifying principle it desperately needs. But for now mind-science
remains in what philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a “pre-scientific”
state, lurching from one fad to another. Even battered old paradigms
like psychoanalysis and behaviorism still have adherents.
It gets worse. Christof Koch, who for decades has led the effort to
explain consciousness in neural terms—and who used to be my go-to
source on brain research—recently started espousing panpsychism.23
This idea, which dates back to Buddha and Plato, holds that conscious-
ness pervades even nonliving matter. Like rocks.
In The End of Science, I coined the term “ironic science” to describe
propositions so speculative and fuzzy—string and multiverse theo-
ries come to mind—that they should be viewed as fictions. I predicted
that as conventional science yields diminishing returns, ironic science
will proliferate. Panpsychism represents a splendid fulfillment of my
prediction.
Mind-science’s lack of progress is also reflected in the abysmal state
of psychiatry. In The Undiscovered Mind, I argued that pharmaceutical
treatments for depression and other mental disorders are not as effec-
tive as adherents claim. In retrospect, my critique was too mild. Recent
investigations—notably the 2010 book Anatomy of an Epidemic, by jour-
nalist Robert Whitaker—present evidence that psychiatric medications
may in the aggregate hurt patients more than they help.
The funding of mind-science also troubles me. Over the last few
decades, psychiatry has begun to resemble a marketing arm of the
pharmaceutical industry. 24 Meanwhile, neuroscientists have become
increasingly dependent on the U.S. military, which has a keen interest

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in research that can boost its soldiers’ cognitive capacities and degrade
those of enemies.
In 2013, President Barack Obama announced that the government
was investing more than $100 million a year in a new initiative called
BRAIN, for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro-
technologies. The major sponsor of BRAIN is the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Neuroscientists have accepted—
indeed, eagerly sought—this funding without any significant debate
over ethical propriety.

Big Data and the Singularity

C ould persistent, precipitous progress in digital technologies lead to

breakthroughs in physics, genetics, neuroscience, and other fields?
This is the hope of “Big Data” enthusiasts. I’m mightily impressed by
some digital technologies. Just now, I used my MacBook Air and Goo-
gle to learn—in less than a minute!—who coined the term “Big Data”
(see the answer in the Notes).25 My car’s GPS navigator, too, seems
almost magical.
But the hoopla over Big Data leaves me cold. It reminds me of the
rhetoric of chaoplexologists whom I critiqued in The End of Science. Like
chaoplexologists, Big Data adherents profess an almost religious faith
in the power of computers to solve problems that have resisted tradi-
tional scientific methods.
Some Big Data manifestos are weirdly anti-intellectual. In 2008
WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson prophesied that computers
crunching “petabytes” of data would bring about “the end of theory.”26
By uncovering subtle correlations in data, he explained, computers
will enable us to predict and manipulate phenomena without having
to comprehend them. Science can advance “without coherent models,”
Anderson wrote, adding, “It’s time to ask: What can science learn from
Google?”
That same year, brilliant Wall Streeters equipped with the most
powerful computer models money can buy failed to foresee one of the
worst economic crashes in history. Anderson suggested that Big Data

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 REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE • xxiii

can yield power without comprehension, but Wall Street’s computers

didn’t yield either.
The wackiest prophecy inspired by digital technologies is the Sin-
gularity. The term, borrowed from physics, refers to a gigantic leap
forward in intelligence—of machines, humans, or some cyborg
hybrid—catalyzed by advances in computer science and other fields.
Oh, and these super-smart beings will be immortal.
Although I didn’t mention the term “Singularity” in The End of Sci-
ence, I presented the basic idea, which was explored decades ago by
visionaries like Freeman Dyson and Hans Moravec. I called their spec-
ulation “scientific theology,” because it didn’t even deserve to be called
“ironic science.”
Modern Singularitarians, notably computer scientist Ray Kurzweil,
insist that the Singularity will happen soon, within a generation.27
They base their predictions on exponential progress in digital technol-
ogies but ignore the stagnation in genetics, neuroscience, and other
fields that I’ve highlighted above.
Some very smart, successful people believe in the Singularity. These
include the founders of Google, who helped Kurzweil establish a “Sin-
gularity University” and in 2013 hired him as their director of engi-
neering. I empathize with the desire of Singularitarians to live forever
and boost their IQs 1,000-fold.28 But the Singularity is a cult for people
who have faith in science and technology rather than in God. It is “The
Rapture” for nerds.

Progress Toward What Matters Most

I’m often asked what would make me admit I’m wrong about science
ending. Sometimes my responses are glib: I’ll admit I was wrong
when Ray Kurzweil successfully uploads his digitized psyche into a
smartphone. Or aliens land in Times Square and announce that the
young-earth creationists are right. Or we invent warp-drive spaceships
that allow us to squirt down wormholes into parallel universes.
Here is a more serious answer: My book serves up many mini-
arguments—for example, that string theory will never be confirmed,

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 xxiv • REBOOTiNG THE END OF SCIENCE

and that the mind-body problem will never be solved—that could turn
out to be wrong. But nothing can shake my faith in my meta-argu-
ment: Science gets things right, it converges on the truth, but it will
never give us absolute truth. Sooner or later science must bump up
against limits.29
I see no limits, however, to our ability to create a better world. In
my 2012 book The End of War, I argue that humanity can achieve per-
manent peace, not in some distant future, but soon. We don’t have to
turn into robots, or abolish capitalism or religion, or return to a hunt-
er-gatherer lifestyle. We just have to recognize that war is stupid and
immoral and put more effort into nonviolent conflict resolution.
In my classes, I often make my students read President John F. Ken-
nedy’s inaugural speech, in which he envisions a world without war,
poverty, infectious disease, and tyranny. When I ask if they think Ken-
nedy’s vision is plausible or just utopian hogwash, most students go
with hogwash. Paradoxically, students who reject my end-of-science
argument as too pessimistic are in other respects distressingly gloomy
about humanity’s prospects.
I point out to my students that humanity has taken huge strides
toward every one of the goals mentioned by Kennedy. The world is
healthier, wealthier, freer, and more peaceful than it was one hundred
years ago—or when Kennedy gave his speech in 1961. Because my col-
lege sits on the Hudson River across from Manhattan, I can point out
a window and note that the water and air around New York City are
much cleaner than during Kennedy’s era. I wrap up these classroom
riffs by exclaiming, “Things are getting better!”
We may never achieve immortality, or colonize other star systems,
or find a unified theory that unlocks all the secrets of existence. But
with the help of science, we can create a world in which all people, and
not just a lucky elite, flourish. And that is what matters most.
Hoboken, New Jersey, 2015

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 introduction
SEARCHING FOR THE ANSWER

I
t was in the summer of 1989, during a trip to upstate New York, that
I began to think seriously about the possibility that science, pure
science, might be over. I had flown to the University of Syracuse to
interview Roger Penrose, a British physicist who was a visiting scholar
there. Before meeting Penrose, I had struggled through galleys of his
dense, difficult book, The Emperor’s New Mind, which to my astonish-
ment became a best-seller several months later, after being praised in
the New York Times Book Review.1 In the book, Penrose cast his eye across
the vast panorama of modern science and found it wanting. This knowl-
edge, Penrose asserted, for all its power and richness, could not possibly
account for the ultimate mystery of existence, human consciousness.
The key to consciousness, Penrose speculated, might be hidden in
the fissure between the two major theories of modern physics: quan-
tum mechanics, which describes electromagnetism and the nuclear
forces, and general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. Many phys-
icists, beginning with Einstein, had tried and failed to fuse quantum
mechanics and general relativity into a single, seamless “unified” the-
ory. In his book, Penrose sketched out what a unified theory might
look like and how it might give rise to thought. His scheme, which
involved exotic quantum and gravitational effects percolating through
the brain, was vague, convoluted, utterly unsupported by evidence
from physics or neuroscience. But if it turned out to be in any sense
right, it would represent a monumental achievement, a theory that in
one stroke would unify physics and solve one of philosophy’s most vex-
ing problems, the link between mind and matter. Penrose’s ambition
xxv

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 xxvi • SEARCHiNG FOR THE ANSWER

alone, I thought, would make him an excellent subject for a profile in

Scientific American, which employed me as a staff writer.2
When I arrived at the airport in Syracuse, Penrose was waiting for
me. He was an elfin man, capped with a shock of black hair, who seemed
simultaneously distracted and acutely alert. As he drove us back to the
Syracuse campus, he kept wondering aloud if he was going in the right
direction. He seemed awash in mysteries. I found myself in the discon-
certing position of recommending that he take this exit, or make that
turn, although I had never been in Syracuse before. In spite of our com-
bined ignorance, we managed to make our way without incident to the
building where Penrose worked. On entering Penrose’s office we dis-
covered that a colleague had left a brightly colored aerosol can labeled
Superstring on his desk. When Penrose pushed the button on the top of
the can, a lime green, spaghetti-like strand shot across the room.
Penrose smiled at this little insider’s joke. Superstring is the name
not only of a child’s toy, but also of an extremely small and extremely
hypothetical stringlike particle posited by a popular theory of physics.
According to the theory, the wriggling of these strings in a 10-dimen-
sional hyperspace generates all the matter and energy in the universe
and even space and time. Many of the world’s leading physicists felt
that superstring theory might turn out to be the unified theory they
had sought for so long; some even called it a theory of everything.
Penrose was not among the faithful. “It couldn’t be right,” he told me.
“It’s just not the way I’d expect the answer to be.” I began to realize,
as Penrose spoke, that to him “the answer” was more than a mere the-
ory of physics, a way of organizing data and predicting events. He was
talking about The Answer: the secret of life, the solution to the riddle of
the universe.
Penrose is an admitted Platonist. Scientists do not invent the truth;
they discover it. Genuine truths exude a beauty, a rightness, a self-evi-
dent quality that gives them the power of revelation. Superstring the-
ory did not possess these traits, in Penrose’s mind. He conceded that
the “suggestion” he set forth in The Emperor’s New Mind—it did not
merit the term theory yet, he admitted—was rather ungainly. It might
turn out to be wrong, certainly in its details. But he felt sure that it was
closer to the truth than was superstring theory. In saying that, I asked,

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 SEARCHiNG FOR THE ANSWER • xxvii

was Penrose implying that one day scientists would find The Answer
and thus bring their quest to an end?
Unlike some prominent scientists, who seem to equate tentativity
with weakness, Penrose actually thinks before he responds, and even
as he responds. “I don’t think we’re close,” he said slowly, squinting out
his office window, “but it doesn’t mean things couldn’t move fast at
some stage.” He cogitated some more. “I guess this is rather suggesting
that there is an answer,” he continued, “although perhaps that’s too
pessimistic.” This final comment stopped me short. What is so pessi-
mistic, I asked, about a truth seeker thinking that the truth is attain-
able? “Solving mysteries is a wonderful thing to do,” Penrose replied.
“And if they were all solved, somehow, that would be rather boring.”
Then he chuckled, as if struck by the oddness of his own words.3
Long after leaving Syracuse, I mulled over Penrose’s remarks. Was
it possible that science could come to an end? Could scientists, in effect,
learn everything there is to know? Could they banish mystery from the
universe? It was hard for me to imagine a world without science, and
not only because my job depended on it. I had become a science writer
in large part because I considered science—pure science, the search for
knowledge for its own sake—to be the noblest and most meaningful
of human endeavors. We are here to figure out why we are here. What
other purpose is worthy of us?
I had not always been so enamored of science. In college, I passed
through a phase during which literary criticism struck me as the most
thrilling of intellectual endeavors. Late one night, however, after
too many cups of coffee, too many hours spent slogging through yet
another interpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, I had a crisis of faith.
Very smart people had been arguing for decades over the meaning of
Ulysses. But one of the messages of modern criticism, and of modern
literature, was that all texts are “ironic”: they have multiple meanings,
none of them definitive.4 Oedipus Rex, The Inferno, even the Bible are in
a sense “just kidding,” not to be taken too literally. Arguments over
meaning can never be resolved, since the only true meaning of a text
is the text itself. Of course, this message applied to the critics, too. One
was left with an infinite regress of interpretations, none of which rep-
resented the final word. But everyone still kept arguing! To what end?

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For each critic to be more clever, more interesting, than the rest? It all
began to seem pointless.
Although I was an English major, I took at least one course in science
or mathematics every semester. Working on a problem in calculus or
physics represented a pleasant change of pace from messy humanities
assignments; I found great satisfaction in arriving at the correct answer
to a problem. The more frustrated I became with the ironic outlook
of literature and literary criticism, the more I began to appreciate the
crisp, no-nonsense approach of science. Scientists have the ability to
pose questions and resolve them in a way that critics, philosophers, his-
torians cannot. Theories are tested experimentally, compared to real-
ity, and those found wanting are rejected. The power of science cannot
be denied: it has given us computers and jets, vaccines and thermonu-
clear bombs, technologies that, for better or worse, have altered the
course of history. Science, more than any other mode of knowledge—
literary criticism, philosophy, art, religion—yields durable insights
into the nature of things. It gets us somewhere. My mini-epiphany led,
eventually, to my becoming a science writer. It also left me with this
criterion for science: science addresses questions that can be answered,
at least in principle, given a reasonable amount of time and resources.
Before my meeting with Penrose, I had taken it for granted that
science was open-ended, even infinite. The possibility that scientists
might one day find a truth so potent that it would obviate all further
investigations had struck me as wishful thinking at best, or as the kind
of hyperbole required to sell science (and science books) to the masses.
The earnestness, and ambivalence, with which Penrose contemplated
the prospect of a final theory forced me to reassess my own views of
science’s future. Over time, I became obsessed with the issue. What are
the limits of science, if any? Is science infinite, or is it as mortal as we
are? If the latter, is the end in sight? Is it upon us?
After my original conversation with Penrose, I sought out other sci-
entists who were butting their heads against the limits of knowledge:
particle physicists who dreamed of a final theory of matter and energy;
cosmologists trying to understand precisely how and even why our
universe was created; evolutionary biologists seeking to determine
how life began and what laws governed its subsequent unfolding;

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 SEARCHiNG FOR THE ANSWER • xxix

neuroscientists probing the processes in the brain that give rise to con-
sciousness; explorers of chaos and complexity, who hoped that with
computers and new mathematical techniques they could revitalize
science. I also spoke to philosophers, including some who allegedly
doubted whether science could ever achieve objective, absolute truths.
I wrote articles about a number of these scientists and philosophers for
Scientific American.
When I first thought about writing a book, I envisioned it as a series
of portraits, warts and all, of the fascinating truth seekers and truth
shunners I have been fortunate enough to interview. I intended to
leave it to readers to decide whose forecasts about the future of science
made sense and whose did not. After all, who really knew what the
ultimate limits of knowledge might be? But gradually, I began to imag-
ine that I knew; I convinced myself that one particular scenario was
more plausible than all the others. I decided to abandon any pretense of
journalistic objectivity and write a book that was overtly judgmental,
argumentative, and personal. While still focusing on individual sci-
entists and philosophers, the book would present my views as well.
That approach, I felt, would be more in keeping with my conviction
that most assertions about the limits of knowledge are, finally, deeply
idiosyncratic.
It has become a truism by now that scientists are not mere
knowledge-acquisition machines; they are guided by emotion and intu-
ition as well as by cold reason and calculation. Scientists are rarely so
human, I have found, so at the mercy of their fears and desires, as when
they are confronting the limits of knowledge. The greatest scientists
want, above all, to discover truths about nature (in addition to acquir-
ing glory, grants, and tenure and improving the lot of humankind);
they want to know. They hope, and trust, that the truth is attainable,
not merely an ideal or asymptote, which they eternally approach. They
also believe, as I do, that the quest for knowledge is by far the noblest
and most meaningful of all human activities.
Scientists who harbor this belief are often accused of arrogance.
Some are arrogant, supremely so. But many others, I have found, are
less arrogant than anxious. These are trying times for truth seekers.
The scientific enterprise is threatened by technophobes, animal-rights

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 xxx • SEARCHiNG FOR THE ANSWER

activists, religious fundamentalists, and, most important, stingy politi-

cians. Social, political, and economic constraints will make it more dif-
ficult to practice science, and pure science in particular, in the future.
Moreover, science itself, as it advances, keeps imposing limits on its
own power. Einstein’s theory of special relativity prohibits the trans-
mission of matter or even information at speeds faster than that of
light; quantum mechanics dictates that our knowledge of the micro-
realm will always be uncertain; chaos theory confirms that even with-
out quantum indeterminacy many phenomena would be impossible
to predict; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem denies us the possi-
bility of constructing a complete, consistent mathematical description
of reality. And evolutionary biology keeps reminding us that we are
animals, designed by natural selection not for discovering deep truths
of nature, but for breeding.
Optimists who think they can overcome all these limits must face
yet another quandary, perhaps the most disturbing of all. What will sci-
entists do if they succeed in knowing what can be known? What, then,
would be the purpose of life? What would be the purpose of humanity?
Roger Penrose revealed his anxiety over this dilemma when he called
his dream of a final theory pessimistic.
Given these troubling issues, it is no wonder that many scientists
whom I interviewed for this book seemed gripped by a profound
unease. But their malaise, I will argue, has another, much more imme-
diate cause. If one believes in science, one must accept the possibility—
even the probability—that the great era of scientific discovery is over.
By science I mean not applied science, but science at its purest and
grandest, the primordial human quest to understand the universe and
our place in it. Further research may yield no more great revelations or
revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.

The Anxiety of Scientific Influence

In trying to understand the mood of modern scientists, I have found

that ideas from literary criticism can serve some purpose after all. In
his influential 1973 essay, The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom likened

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 SEARCHiNG FOR THE ANSWER • xxxi

the modern poet to Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.5 Just as Satan fought
to assert his individuality by defying the perfection of God, so must
the modern poet engage in an Oedipal struggle to define himself or
herself in relation to Shakespeare, Dante, and other masters. The effort
is ultimately futile, Bloom said, because no poet can hope to approach,
let alone surpass, the perfection of such forebears. Modern poets are all
essentially tragic figures, latecomers.
Modern scientists, too, are latecomers, and their burden is much
heavier than that of poets. Scientists must endure not merely Shake-
speare’s King Lear, but Newton’s laws of motion, Darwin’s theory of nat-
ural selection, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. These theories
are not merely beautiful; they are also true, empirically true, in a way
that no work of art can be. Most researchers simply concede their inabil-
ity to supersede what Bloom called “the embarrassments of a tradition
grown too wealthy to need anything more.”6 They try to solve what
philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has patronizingly called “puzzles,”
problems whose solution buttresses the prevailing paradigm. They
settle for refining and applying the brilliant, pioneering discoveries of
their predecessors. They try to measure the mass of quarks more pre-
cisely, or to determine how a given stretch of DNA guides the growth
of the embryonic brain. Others become what Bloom derided as a “mere
rebel, a childish inverter of conventional moral categories.”7 The rebels
denigrate the dominant theories of science as flimsy social fabrications
rather than rigorously tested descriptions of nature.
Bloom’s “strong poets” accept the perfection of their predecessors
and yet strive to transcend it through various subterfuges, including
a subtle misreading of the predecessors’ work; only by so doing can
modern poets break free of the stultifying influence of the past. There
are strong scientists, too, those who are seeking to misread and there-
fore to transcend quantum mechanics or the big bang theory or Dar-
winian evolution. Roger Penrose is a strong scientist. For the most
part, he and others of his ilk have only one option: to pursue science
in a speculative, postempirical mode that I call ironic science. Ironic
science resembles literary criticism in that it offers points of view, opin-
ions, which are, at best, interesting, which provoke further comment.
But it does not converge on the truth. It cannot achieve empirically

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verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in

their basic description of reality.
The most common strategy of the strong scientist is to point to all
the shortcomings of current scientific knowledge, to all the questions
left unanswered. But the questions tend to be ones that may never be
definitively answered given the limits of human science. How, exactly,
was the universe created? Could our universe be just one of an infinite
number of universes? Could quarks and electrons be composed of still
smaller particles, ad infinitum? What does quantum mechanics really
mean? (Most questions concerning meaning can only be answered
ironically, as literary critics know.) Biology has its own slew of insol-
uble riddles. How, exactly, did life begin on earth? Just how inevitable
was life’s origin and its subsequent history?
The practitioner of ironic science enjoys one obvious advantage
over the strong poet: the appetite of the reading public for scientific
“revolutions.” As empirical science ossifies, journalists such as myself,
who feed society’s hunger, will come under more pressure to tout the-
ories that supposedly transcend quantum mechanics or the big bang
theory or natural selection. Journalists are, after all, largely responsi-
ble for the popular impression that fields such as chaos and complexity
represent genuinely new sciences superior to the stodgy old reduc-
tionist methods of Newton, Einstein, and Darwin. Journalists, myself
included, have also helped Roger Penrose’s ideas about consciousness
win an audience much larger than they deserve given their poor stand-
ing among professional neuroscientists.
I do not mean to imply that ironic science has no value. Far from it.
At its best ironic science, like great art or philosophy or, yes, literary
criticism, induces wonder in us; it keeps us in awe before the mystery
of the universe. But it cannot achieve its goal of transcending the truth
we already have. And it certainly cannot give us—in fact, it protects us
from—The Answer, a truth so potent that it quenches our curiosity once
and for all time. After all, science itself decrees that we humans must
always be content with partial truths.
Through most of this book, I will examine science as it is practiced
today, by humans. (Chapter 2 takes up philosophy.) In the final two chap-
ters I will consider the possibility—advanced by a surprising number of

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scientists and philosophers—that one day we humans will create intel-

ligent machines that can transcend our puny knowledge. In my favor-
ite version of this scenario, machines transform the entire cosmos into
a vast, unified, information-processing network. All matter becomes
mind. This proposal is not science, of course, but wishful thinking. It
nonetheless raises some interesting questions, questions normally left
to theologians. What would an all-powerful cosmic computer do? What
would it think about? I can imagine only one possibility. It would try to
answer The Question, the one that lurks behind all other questions, like
an actor playing all the parts of a play: Why is there something rather
than nothing? In its effort to find The Answer to The Question, the univer-
sal mind may discover the ultimate limits of knowledge.

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9780465065929-text.indd 34 2/2/15 3:24 PM
 CHAPTER ONE
THE END OF PROGRESS

I
n 1989, just a month after my meeting with Roger Penrose in Syra-
cuse, Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota held a symposium
with the provocative but misleading title, “The End of Science?” The
meeting’s premise was that belief in science—rather than science itself—
was coming to an end. As one organizer put it, “There is an increas-
ing feeling that science as a unified, universal, objective endeavor is
over.”1 Most of the speakers were philosophers who had challenged the
authority of science in one way or another. The meeting’s great irony
was that one of the scientists who spoke, Gunther Stent, a biologist at
the University of California at Berkeley, had for years promulgated a
much more dramatic scenario than the one posited by the symposium.
Stent had asserted that science itself might be ending, and not because
of the skepticism of a few academic sophists. Quite the contrary. Sci-
ence might be ending because it worked so well.
Stent is hardly a fringe figure. He was a pioneer of molecular biology;
he founded the first department dedicated to that field at Berkeley in the
1950s and performed experiments that helped to illuminate the machin-
ery of genetic transmission. Later, after switching from genetics to the
study of the brain, he was named chairman of the neurobiology depart-
ment of the National Academy of Sciences. Stent is also the most astute
analyst of the limits of science whom I have encountered (and by astute
I mean of course that he articulates my own inchoate premonitions).
In the late 1960s, while Berkeley was racked with student protests, he
wrote an astonishingly prescient book, now long out of print, called The
Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress. Published in 1969, it
1

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 2 • THE END OF SCiENCE

contended that science—as well as technology, the arts, and all progres-
sive, cumulative enterprises—was coming to an end.2
Most people, Stent acknowledged, consider the notion that science
might soon cease to be absurd. How can science possibly be nearing
an end when it has been advancing so rapidly throughout this century?
Stent turned this inductive argument on its head. Initially, he granted,
science advances exponentially through a positive feedback effect;
knowledge begets more knowledge, and power begets more power.
Stent credited the American historian Henry Adams with having fore-
seen this aspect of science at the turn of the twentieth century.3
Adams’s law of acceleration, Stent pointed out, has an interesting
corollary. If there are any limits to science, any barriers to further
progress, then science may well be moving at unprecedented speed just
before it crashes into them. When science seems most muscular, tri-
umphant, potent, that may be when it is nearest death. “Indeed, the
dizzy rate at which progress is now proceeding,” Stent wrote in Golden
Age, “makes it seem very likely that progress must come to a stop soon,
perhaps in our lifetime, perhaps in a generation or two.”4
Certain fields of science, Stent argued, are limited simply by the
boundedness of their subject matter. No one would consider human
anatomy or geography, for example, to be infinite endeavors. Chemis-
try, too, is bounded. “[T]hough the total number of possible chemical
reactions is very great and the variety of reactions they can undergo
vast, the goal of chemistry of understanding the principles governing
the behavior of such molecules is, like the goal of geography, clearly
limited.”5 That goal, arguably, was achieved in the 1930s, when the
chemist Linus Pauling showed how all chemical interactions could be
understood in terms of quantum mechanics.6
In his own field of biology, Stent asserted, the discovery of DNA’s
twin-corkscrew structure in 1953 and the subsequent deciphering of the
genetic code had solved the profound problem of how genetic informa-
tion is passed on from one generation to the next. Biologists had only
three major questions left to explore: how life began, how a single fer-
tilized cell develops into a multicellular organism, and how the central
nervous system processes information. When those goals are achieved,
Stent said, the basic task of biology, pure biology, will be completed.

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 THE END OF PROGRESS • 3

Stent acknowledged that biologists could, in principle, continue

exploring specific phenomena and applying their knowledge forever.
But according to Darwinian theory, science stems not from our desire
for truth per se, but from our compulsion to control our environment
in order to increase the likelihood that our genes will propagate. When
a given field of science begins to yield diminishing practical returns,
scientists may have less incentive to pursue their research and society
may be less inclined to pay for it.
Moreover, just because biologists complete their empirical investi-
gations, Stent asserted, does not mean that they will have answered
all relevant questions. For example, no purely physiological theory can
ever really explain consciousness, since the “processes responsible for
this wholly private experience will be seen to degenerate into seem-
ingly quite ordinary, workaday reactions, no more or less fascinating
than those that occur in, say, the liver.”7
Unlike biology, Stent wrote, the physical sciences seem to be open-
ended. Physicists can always attempt to probe more deeply into matter
by smashing particles against each other with greater force, and astrono-
mers can always strive to see further into the universe. But in their efforts
to gather data from ever-more-remote regimes, physicists will inevitably
confront various physical, economic, and even cognitive limits.
Over the course of this century, physics has become more and more
difficult to comprehend; it has outrun our Darwinian epistemology,
our innate concepts for coping with the world. Stent rejected the old
argument that “yesterday’s nonsense is today’s common sense.”8 Soci-
ety may be willing to support continued research in physics as long
as it has the potential to generate powerful new technologies, such
as nuclear weapons and nuclear power. But when physics becomes
impractical as well as incomprehensible, Stent predicted, society will
surely withdraw its support.
Stent’s prognosis for the future was an odd mixture of optimism
and pessimism. He predicted that science, before it ends, might help
to solve many of civilization’s most pressing problems. It could elimi-
nate disease and poverty and provide society with cheap, pollution-free
energy, perhaps through the harnessing of fusion reactions. As we gain
more dominion over nature, however, we may lose what Nietzsche

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 4 • THE END OF SCiENCE

called our “will to power”; we may become less motivated to pursue

further research—especially if such research has little chance of yield-
ing tangible benefits.
As society becomes more affluent and comfortable, fewer young
people may choose the increasingly difficult path of science or even
of the arts. Many may turn to more hedonistic pursuits, perhaps even
abandoning the real world for fantasies induced by drugs or electronic
devices feeding directly into the brain. Stent concluded that sooner or
later, progress would “stop dead in its tracks,” leaving the world in a
largely static condition that he called “the new Polynesia.” The advent
of beatniks and hippies, he surmised, signaled the beginning of the end
of progress and the dawn of the new Polynesia. He closed his book
with the sardonic comment that “millennia of doing arts and sciences
will finally transform the tragicomedy of life into a happening.”9

A Trip to Berkeley

I n the spring of 1992 I traveled to Berkeley to see how Stent thought

his predictions had held up over the years.10 Strolling toward the uni-
versity from my hotel, I passed what appeared to be the detritus of the
sixties: men and women with long gray hair and ragged clothes asking
for spare change. Once on the campus, I made my way to the universi-
ty’s biology building, a hulking, concrete complex shadowed by dusty
eucalyptus trees. I took an elevator one floor up to Stent’s laboratory
and found it locked. A few minutes later the elevator door slid open
and out walked Stent, a red-faced, sweaty man wearing a yellow bicyle
helmet and rolling a dirt-encrusted mountain bike.
Stent had moved to the United States from Germany as a youth, and
his gruff voice and attire still bore traces of his origins. He wore wire-
rimmed glasses, a blue, short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, dark slacks,
and shiny black shoes. He led me through his laboratory, crammed
with microscopes, centrifuges, and scientific glassware, to a small
office at the rear. The hall outside his office was adorned with pho-
tographs and paintings of Buddha. When Stent closed the door of his
office behind us, I saw that he had tacked to the door’s inner surface

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a poster from the 1989 meeting at Gustavus Adolphus College. The

top half of the poster was covered with the word SCIENCE, written in
huge, luridly colored letters. The letters were melting, oozing down-
ward into a pool of Day-Glo protoplasm. Beneath this psychedelic pud-
dle big black letters asked, “The End of Science?”
Stent, at the beginning of our interview, seemed rather suspicious.
He asked pointedly if I was following the legal travails of the journal-
ist Janet Malcolm, who had just lost a round in her interminable legal
battle with a former profile subject, the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.
I mumbled something to the effect that Malcolm’s trangressions were
too minor to merit any punishment, but that her methods did seem
rather careless. If I were writing something critical about a person as
obviously volatile as Masson, I told Stent, I would be sure to have all
my quotes on tape. (As I spoke, my own tape recorder was silently spin-
ning between us.)
Gradually, Stent relaxed and began to tell me about his life. Born
in Berlin to Jewish parents in 1924, he escaped from Germany in 1938
and moved in with a sister living in Chicago. He obtained a doctor-
ate in chemistry at the University of Illinois, but upon reading Erwin
Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? he became entranced by the mystery of
genetic transmission. After working at the California Institute of Tech-
nology with the eminent biophysicist Max Delbrück, Stent obtained a
professorship at Berkeley in 1952. In these early years of molecular biol-
ogy, Stent said, “none of us knew what we were doing. Then Watson
and Crick found the double helix, and within a few weeks we realized
we were doing molecular biology.”
Stent began pondering the limits of science in the 1960s, partly in
reaction to Berkeley’s free-speech movement, which challenged the
value of Western rationalism and technological progress and other
aspects of civilization that Stent held dear. The university appointed
him to a committee to “deal with this, to calm things down,” by
talking to students. Stent sought to fulfill this mandate—and to resolve
his own inner conflicts over his role as a scientist—by delivering a
series of lectures. These lectures became The Coming of the Golden Age.
I told Stent that I could not determine, after finishing The Com-
ing of the Golden Age, whether he believed that the new Polynesia, the

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era of social and intellectual stasis and universal leisure, would be an

improvement over our present situation. “I could never decide this!”
he exclaimed, looking genuinely distressed. “People called me a pessi-
mist, but I thought I was an optimist.” He certainly did not think such
a society would be in any sense Utopian. After the horrors wreaked by
totalitarian states in this century, he explained, it was no longer possi-
ble to take the idea of Utopia seriously.
Stent felt that his predictions had held up reasonably well. Although
hippies had vanished (except for the pitiful relics on Berkeley’s streets),
American culture had become increasingly materialistic and anti-in-
tellectual; hippies had evolved into yuppies. The cold war had ended,
although not through the gradual merging of communist and capitalist
states that Stent had envisioned. He admitted that he had not antici-
pated the resurgence, in the wake of the cold war, of long-repressed
ethnic conflicts. “I’m very depressed at what’s happening in the Bal-
kans,” he said. “I didn’t think that would happen.” Stent was also sur-
prised by the persistence of poverty and of racial conflict in the United
States, but he believed these problems would eventually diminish in
importance. (Aha, I thought. He was an optimist after all.)
Stent was convinced that science was showing signs of the closure
he had predicted in Golden Age. Particle physicists were having diffi-
culty convincing society to pay for their increasingly expensive exper-
iments, such as the superconducting supercollider. As for biologists,
they still had much to learn about how, say, a fertilized cell is trans-
formed into a complex, multicellular organism, such as an elephant,
and about the workings of the brain. “But I think the big picture is
basically over,” he said. Evolutionary biology in particular “was over
when Darwin published The Origin of Species” Stent said. He scoffed
at the hope of some evolutionary biologists—notably Edward Wilson
of Harvard—that they could remain occupied indefinitely by doing a
thorough survey of all life on earth, species by species. Such an enter-
prise would be a mindless “glass bead game,” Stent complained.
He then plunged into a diatribe against environmentalism. It was
at heart an antihuman philosophy, one that contributed to the low
self-esteem of American youth and poor black children in particular.
Alarmed that my favorite Cassandra was revealing himself to be a

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crank, I changed the subject to consciousness. Did Stent still consider

consciousness to be an unsolvable scientific problem, as he had sug-
gested in Golden Age? He replied that he thought very highly of Francis
Crick, who late in his career had turned his attention to consciousness.
If Crick felt that consciousness was scientifically tractable, Stent said,
then that possibility must be taken seriously.
Stent was still convinced, though, that a purely physiological expla-
nation of consciousness would not be as comprehensible or as mean-
ingful as most people would like, nor would it help us to solve moral
and ethical questions. Stent thought the progress of science might give
religion a clearer role in the future rather than eliminate it entirely, as
many scientists had once hoped. Although it could not compete with
science’s far more compelling stories about the physical realm, religion
retained some value in offering moral guidance. “Humans are animals,
but we’re also moral subjects. The task of religion is more and more in
the moral realm.”
When I asked about the possibility that computers might become
intelligent and create their own science, Stent snorted in derision. He
had a dim view of artificial intelligence, and particularly of its more
visionary enthusiasts. Computers may excel at precisely defined tasks
such as mathematics and chess, he pointed out, but they still perform
abysmally when confronted with the kind of problems—recognizing
a face or a voice or walking down a crowded sidewalk—that humans
solve effortlessly. “They’re full of it,” Stent said of Marvin Minsky and
others who have predicted that one day we humans will be able to
download our personalities into computers. “I wouldn’t rule out the
possibility that in the twenty-third century you might have an artificial
brain,” he added, “but it would need experience.” One could design a
computer to become an expert in restaurants, “but this machine would
never know what a steak tastes like.”
Stent was similarly skeptical of the claims of investigators of chaos
and complexity that with computers and sophisticated mathematics
they would be able to transcend the science of the past. In The Coming of
the Golden Age, Stent discussed the work of one of the pioneers of chaos
theory, Benoit Mandelbrot. Beginning in the early 1960s, Mandelbrot
showed that many phenomena are intrinsically indeterministic: they

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exhibit behavior that is unpredictable and apparently random. Scien-

tists can only guess at the causes of individual events and cannot pre-
dict them with any accuracy.
Investigators of chaos and complexity were attempting to create
effective, comprehensible theories of the same phenomena studied by
Mandelbrot, Stent said. He had concluded in Golden Age that these inde-
terministic phenomena would resist scientific analysis, and he saw no
reason to change that assessment. Quite the contrary. The work emerg-
ing from those fields demonstrated his point that science, when pushed
too far, always culminates in incoherence. So Stent did not think that
chaos and complexity would bring about the rebirth of science? “No,”
he replied with a rakish grin. “It’s the end of science.”

What Science Has Accomplished

W e obviously are nowhere near the new Polynesia that Stent envi-
sioned, in part because applied science has not come nearly as far
as Stent had hoped (feared?) when he wrote The Coming of the Golden
Age. But I have come to the conclusion that Stent’s prophecy has, in one
very important sense, already come to pass. Pure science, the quest for
knowledge about what we are and where we came from, has already
entered an era of diminishing returns. By far the greatest barrier to
future progress in pure science is its past success. Researchers have
already mapped out physical reality, ranging from the microrealm of
quarks and electrons to the macrorealm of planets, stars, and galax-
ies. Physicists have shown that all matter is ruled by a few basic forces:
gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
Scientists have also stitched their knowledge into an impressive, if
not terribly detailed, narrative of how we came to be. The universe
exploded into existence 15 billion years ago, give or take 5 billion years
(astronomers may never agree on an exact figure), and is still expand-
ing outward. Some 4.5 billion years ago, the detritus of an exploding
star, a supernova, condensed into our solar system. Sometime during
the next few hundred million years, for reasons that may never be
known, single-celled organisms bearing an ingenious molecule called

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DNA emerged on the still-hellish earth. These Adamic microbes gave

rise, by means of natural selection, to an extraordinary array of more
complex creatures, including Homo sapiens.
My guess is that this narrative that scientists have woven from their
knowledge, this modern myth of creation, will be as viable 100 or even
1,000 years from now as it is today. Why? Because it is true. Moreover,
given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social,
and cognitive limits constraining further research, science is unlikely
to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already gen-
erated. There will be no great revelations in the future comparable to
those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick.

The Anticlimax of Immortality

A pplied science will continue for a long time to come. Scientists will
keep developing versatile new materials; faster and more sophisti-
cated computers; genetic-engineering techniques that make us health-
ier, stronger, longer-lived; perhaps even fusion reactors that provide
cheap energy with few environmental side effects (although given the
drastic cutbacks in funding, fusion’s prospects now seem dimmer than
ever). The question is, will these advances in applied science bring
about any surprises, any revolutionary shifts in our basic knowledge?
Will they force scientists to revise the map they have drawn of the uni-
verse’s structure or the narrative they have constructed of our cosmic
creation and history? Probably not. Applied science in this century has
tended to reinforce rather than to challenge the prevailing theoreti-
cal paradigms. Lasers and transistors confirm the power of quantum
mechanics, just as genetic engineering bolsters belief in the DNA-based
model of evolution.
What constitutes a surprise? Einstein’s discovery that time and space,
the I beams of reality, are made of rubber was a surprise. So was the
observation by astronomers that the universe is expanding, evolv-
ing. Quantum mechanics, which unveiled a probabilistic element, a
Lucretian swerve, at the bottom of things, was an enormous surprise;
God does play dice (Einstein’s disapproval notwithstanding). The later

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finding that protons and neutrons are made of smaller particles called
quarks was a much lesser surprise, because it merely extended quantum
theory to a deeper domain; the foundations of physics remained intact.
Learning that we humans were created not de novo by God, but
gradually, by the process of natural selection, was a big surprise. Most
other aspects of human evolution—those concerning where, when,
and how, precisely, Homo sapiens evolved—are details. These details
may be interesting, but they are not likely to be surprising unless they
show that scientists’ basic assumptions about evolution are wrong. We
may learn, say, that our sudden surge in intelligence was catalyzed by
the intervention of alien beings, as in the movie 2001. That would be
a very big surprise. In fact, any proof that life exists—or even once
existed—beyond our little planet would constitute a huge surprise.
Science, and all human thought, would be reborn. Speculation about
the origin of life and its inevitability would be placed on a much more
empirical basis.
But how likely is it that we will discover life elsewhere? In retrospect,
the space programs of both the United States and the USSR represented
elaborate displays of saber rattling rather than the opening of a new
frontier for human knowledge. The prospects for space exploration on
anything more than a trivial level seem increasingly unlikely. We no
longer have the will or the money to indulge in technological muscle
flexing for its own sake. Humans, made of flesh and blood, may some-
day travel to other planets here in our solar system. But unless we find
some way to transcend Einstein’s prohibition against faster-than-light
travel, chances are that we will never even attempt to visit another
star, let alone another galaxy. A spaceship that can travel one million
miles an hour, a velocity at least one order of magnitude greater than
any current technology can attain, would still take almost 3,000 years
to reach our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri.11
The most dramatic advance in applied science I can imagine is
immortality. Many scientists are now attempting to identify the pre-
cise causes of aging. It is conceivable that if they succeed, scientists may
be able to design versions of Homo sapiens that can live indefinitely.
But immortality, although it would represent a triumph of applied sci-
ence, would not necessarily change our fundamental knowledge of the

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universe. We would not have any better idea of why the universe came
to be and of what lies beyond its borders than we do now. Moreover,
evolutionary biologists suggest that immortality may be impossible
to achieve. Natural selection designed us to live long enough to breed
and raise our children. As a result, senescence does not stem from any
single cause or even a suite of causes; it is woven inextricably into the
fabric of our being.12

That’s What They Thought 100 Years Ago

I t is easy to understand why so many people find it hard to believe that

science, pure or impure, might be ending. Just a century ago, no one
could imagine what the future held in store. Television? Jets? Space sta-
tions? Nuclear weapons? Computers? Genetic engineering? It must be
as impossible for us to know the future of science—pure or applied—
as it would have been for Thomas Aquinas to anticipate Madonna or
microwave ovens. There are marvels, utterly unpredictable, lying in
wait for us just as there were for our ancestors. We will only fail to
seize these treasures if we decide that they do not exist and cease striv-
ing to find them. The prophecy can only be self-fulfilling.
This position is often expressed as the that’s-what-they-thought-at-
the-end-of-the-nineteenth-century argument. The argument goes like
this: As the nineteenth century wound down, physicists thought they
knew everything. But no sooner had the twentieth century begun,
than Einstein and other physicists discovered—invented?—relativity
theory and quantum mechanics. These theories eclipsed Newtonian
physics and opened up vast new vistas for modern physics and other
branches of science. Moral: Anyone who predicts that science is near-
ing its end will surely turn out to be as shortsighted as those nine-
teenth-century physicists.
Those who believe science is finite have a standard retort for this
argument: the earliest explorers, because they could not find the edge
of the earth, might well have concluded that it was infinite, but they
would have been wrong. Moreover, it is by no means a matter of his-
torical record that late-nineteenth-century physicists felt they had

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wrapped things up. The best evidence for a sense of completion is a

speech given in 1894 by Albert Michelson, whose experiments on the
velocity of light helped to inspire Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

While it is never safe to say that the future of Physical Science has
no marvels even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems
probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been
firmly established and that further advances are to be sought
chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the
phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the sci-
ence of measurement shows its importance—where quantitative
results are more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent
physicist has remarked that the future truths of Physical Science
are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.13

Michelson’s remark about the sixth place of decimals has been so

widely attributed to Lord Kelvin (after whom the Kelvin, a unit of
temperature, is named) that some authors simply credit him with the
quote.14 But historians have found no evidence that Kelvin made such
a statement. Moreover, at the time of Michelson’s remarks, physicists
were vigorously debating fundamental issues, such as the viability of
the atomic theory of matter, according to the historian of science Ste-
phen Brush of the University of Maryland. Michelson was so absorbed
in his optics experiments, Brush suggested, that he was “oblivious to
the violent controversies raging among theorists at the time.” The
alleged “Victorian calm in physics,” Brush concluded, is a “myth.”15

The Apocryphal Patent Official

O ther historians, predictably, disagree with Brush’s assessment.16

Questions concerning the mood of a given era can never be com-
pletely resolved, but the view that scientists in the last century were
complacent about the state of their field has clearly been exaggerated.
Historians have provided a definitive ruling on another anecdote
favored by those reluctant to accept that science might be mortal. The

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 THE END OF PROGRESS • 13

story alleges that in the mid-1800s the head of the U.S. Patent Office
quit his job and recommended that the office be shut down because
there would soon be nothing left to invent.
In 1995, Daniel Koshland, editor of the prestigious journal Science,
repeated this story in an introduction to a special section on the future
of science. In the section, leading scientists offered predictions about
what their fields might accomplish over the next 20 years. Koshland,
who, like Gunther Stent, is a biologist at the University of California
at Berkeley, exulted that his prognosticators “clearly do not agree with
that commissioner of patents of yesteryear. Great discoveries with
great import for the future of science are in the offing. That we have
come so far so fast is not an indication that we have saturated the dis-
covery market, but rather that discoveries will come even faster.”17
There were two problems with Koshland’s essay. First, the contribu-
tors to his special section envisioned not “great discoveries” but, for the
most part, rather mundane applications of current knowledge, such as
better methods for designing drugs, improved tests for genetic disor-
ders, more discerning brain scans, and the like. Some predictions were
negative in nature. “Anyone who expects any human-like intelligence
from a computer in the next 50 years is doomed to disappointment,”
proclaimed the physicist and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson.
Second, Koshland’s story about the commissioner of patents was
apocryphal. In 1940, a scholar named Eber Jeffery examined the patent
commissioner anecdote in an article entitled “Nothing Left to Invent,”
published in the Journal of the Patent Office Society.18 Jeffery traced the
story to congressional testimony delivered in 1843 by Henry Ellsworth,
then the commissioner of patents. Ellsworth remarked at one point,
“The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity
and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improve-
ment must end.”
But Ellsworth, far from recommending that his office be shut down,
asked for extra funds to cope with the flood of inventions he expected in
agriculture, transportation, and communications. Ellsworth did indeed
resign two years later, in 1845, but in his resignation letter he made
no reference to closing the patent office; rather, he expressed pride at
having expanded it. Jeffery concluded that Ellsworth’s statement about

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“that period when human improvement must end” represented “a

mere rhetorical flourish intended to emphasize the remarkable strides
forward in inventions then current and to be expected in the future.”
But perhaps Jeffery was not giving Ellsworth enough credit. Ellsworth
was, after all, anticipating the argument that Gunther Stent would
make more than a century later: the faster science moves, the faster it
will reach its ultimate, inevitable limits.
Consider the implications of the alternative position, the one implic-
itly advanced by Daniel Koshland. He insisted that because science has
advanced so rapidly over the past century or so, it can and will continue
to do so, possibly forever. But this inductive argument is deeply flawed.
Science has only existed for a few hundred years, and its most spectac-
ular achievements have occurred within the last century. Viewed from
a historical perspective, the modern era of rapid scientific and techno-
logical progress appears to be not a permanent feature of reality, but
an aberration, a fluke, a product of a singular convergence of social,
intellectual, and political factors.

The Rise and Fall of Progress

I n his 1932 book, The Idea of Progress, the historian J. B. Bury stated:
“Science has been advancing without interruption during the last
three or four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new prob-
lems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for explo-
ration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt, they
have always found means to advance further. But what assurance have
we that they will not come up against impassable barriers?” [Italics in the
original.]19
Bury had demonstrated through his own scholarship that the con-
cept of progress was only a few hundred years old at most. From the
era of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, most truth seekers
had a degenerative view of history; the ancient Greeks had achieved
the acme of mathematical and scientific knowledge, and civilization
had gone downhill from there. Those who followed could only try
to recapture some remnant of the wisdom epitomized by Plato and

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Aristotle. It was such founders of modern, empirical science as Isaac

Newton, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Gottfried Leibniz who
first set forth the idea that humans could systematically acquire and
accumulate knowledge through investigations of nature. These ur-sci-
entists believed that the process would be finite, that we could attain
complete knowledge of the world and then construct a perfect society,
a utopia, based on that knowledge and on Christian precepts. (The new
Polynesia!)
Only with the advent of Darwin did certain intellectuals become so
enamored with progress that they insisted it might be, or should be,
eternal. “In the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Spe-
cies,” Gunther Stent wrote in his 1978 book, The Paradoxes of Progress,
“the idea of progress was raised to the level of a scientific religion. This
optimistic view came to be so widely embraced in the industrialized
nations that the claim that progress could presently come to an end
is now widely regarded [to be] as outlandish a notion as was in earlier
times the claim that the Earth moves around the sun.”20
It is not surprising that modern nation-states became fervent propo-
nents of the science-is-infinite creed. Science spawned such marvels as
The Bomb, nuclear power, jets, radar, computers, and missiles. In 1945
the physicist Vannevar Bush (a distant relative of former presidents
George H. W. and George W. Bush) proclaimed in Science: The End-
less Frontier that science was “a largely unexplored hinterland” and an
“essential key” to U.S. military and economic security.21 Bush’s essay
served as a blueprint for the construction of the National Science Foun-
dation and other federal organizations that thereafter supported basic
research on an unparalleled scale.
The Soviet Union was perhaps even more devoted than its capitalist
rival to the concept of scientific and technological progress. The Sovi-
ets seemed to have taken their lead from Friedrich Engels, who in Dia-
lectics of Nature sought to show off his grasp of Newton’s inverse square
law of gravity in the following passage.

What Luther’s burning of the papal Bull was in the religious

field, in the field of natural science was the great work of Coper-
nicus.  .  .  . But from then on the development of science went

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forward in great strides, increasing, so to speak, proportionately

to the square of the distance in time of its point of departure, as
if it wanted to show the world that for the motion of the highest
product of organic matter, the human mind, the law of inverse
squares holds good, as it does for the motion of inorganic matter.22

Science, in the view of Engels, could and would continue striding

forward, at an accelerating pace, forever.
Of course, powerful social, political, and economic forces now
oppose this vision of boundless scientific and technological progress.
The cold war, which was a major impetus for basic research in the
United States and the Soviet Union, is over; the United States and the
former Soviet republics have much less incentive to build space stations
and gigantic accelerators simply to demonstrate their power. Society is
also increasingly sensitive to the adverse consequences of science and
technology, such as pollution, nuclear contamination, and weapons of
mass destruction.
Even political leaders, who have traditionally been the staunch-
est defenders of the value of scientific progress, have begun voicing
antiscience sentiments. The Czech poet and president Václav Havel
declared in 1992 that the Soviet Union epitomized and therefore eter-
nally discredited the “cult of objectivity” brought about by science.
Havel expressed the hope that the dissolution of the communist state
would bring about “the end of the modern era,” which had been “dom-
inated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the
world—and Being as such—is a wholly knowable system governed by
a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally
direct for his own benefit.”23
This disillusionment with science was foreseen early in this century
by Oswald Spengler, a German schoolteacher who became the first
great prophet of the end of science. In his massive tome, The Decline of
the West, published in 1918, Spengler argued that science proceeds in
a cyclic fashion, with romantic periods of investigation of nature and
the invention of new theories giving way to periods of consolidation
during which scientific knowledge ossifies. As scientists become more
arrogant and less tolerant of other belief systems, notably religious

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ones, Spengler declared, society will rebel against science and embrace
religious fundamentalism and other irrational systems of belief. Spen-
gler predicted that the decline of science and the resurgence of irratio-
nality would begin at the end of the second millennium.24
Spengler’s analysis was, if anything, too optimistic. His view of sci-
ence as cyclic implied that science might one day be resurrected and
undergo a new period of discovery. Science is not cyclic, however, but
linear; we can only discover the periodic table and the expansion of
the universe and the structure of DNA once. The biggest obstacle to
the resurrection of science—and especially pure science, the quest for
knowledge about who we are and where we came from—is science’s
past success.

No More Endless Horizons

S cientists are understandably loath to state publicly that they have

entered an era of diminishing returns. No one wants to be recalled
as the equivalent of those allegedly shortsighted physicists of a century
ago. There is always the danger, too, that predictions of the demise
of science will become self-fulfilling. But Gunther Stent is hardly the
only prominent scientist to violate the taboo against such prophecies.
In 1971, Science published an essay titled “Science: Endless Horizons or
Golden Age?” by Bentley Glass, an eminent biologist and the president
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which
publishes Science. Glass weighed the two scenarios for science’s future
posited by Vannevar Bush and Gunther Stent and reluctantly came
down on the side of Stent. Not only is science finite, Glass argued, but
the end is in sight. “We are like the explorers of a great continent,”
Glass proclaimed, “who have penetrated to its margins in most points
of the compass and have mapped the major mountain chains and riv-
ers. There are still innumerable details to fill in, but the endless hori-
zons no longer exist.”25
According to Glass, a close reading of Bush’s Endless Frontier essay
suggests that he, too, viewed science as a finite enterprise. Nowhere
did Bush specifically state that any fields of science could continue

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generating new discoveries forever. In fact, Bush described scientific

knowledge as an “edifice” whose form “is predestined by the laws
of logic and the nature of human reasoning. It is almost as though it
already existed.” Bush’s choice of this metaphor, Glass commented,
reveals that he considered scientific knowledge to be finite in extent.
Glass proposed that the “bold title” of Bush’s essay was “never intended
to be taken literally, but supposed merely to imply that from our pres-
ent viewpoint so much yet remains before us to be discovered that the
horizons seem virtually endless.”
In 1979, in the Quarterly Review of Biology, Glass presented evidence
to back up his view that science was approaching a culmination.26 His
analysis of the rate of discoveries in biology showed that they had not
kept pace with the exponential increase in researchers and funding.
“We have been so impressed by the undeniable acceleration in the rate
of magnificent achievements that we have scarcely noticed that we are
well into an era of diminishing returns,” Glass stated. “That is, more
and more scientific effort and expenditure of money must be allocated
in order to sustain our progress. Sooner or later this will have to stop,
because of the insuperable limits to scientific manpower and expendi-
ture. So rapid has been the growth of science in our own century that
we have been deluded into thinking that such a rate of progress can be
maintained indefinitely.”
When I spoke to him in 1994, Glass confessed that many of his col-
leagues had been dismayed that he had even broached the subject of
science’s limits, let alone prophesied its demise.27 But Glass had felt
then, and still felt, that the topic was too important to ignore. Obvi-
ously science as a social enterprise has some limits, Glass said. If sci-
ence had continued to grow at the same rate as it did earlier in this
century, he pointed out, it would soon have consumed the entire bud-
get of the industrialized world. “I think it’s rather evident to everybody
that there must be brakes put on the amount of funding for science,
pure science.” This slowdown, he observed, was evident in the decision
of the U.S. Congress in 1993 to terminate the superconducting super-
collider, the gargantuan particle accelerator that physicists had hoped
would propel them beyond quarks and electrons into a deeper realm of
microspace, all for a mere $8 billion.

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Even if society were to devote all its resources to research, Glass

added, science would one day still reach the point of diminishing
returns. Why? Because science works; it solves its problems. After all,
astronomers have already plumbed the farthest reaches of the uni-
verse; they cannot see what, if anything, lies beyond its borders. More-
over, most physicists think that the reduction of matter into smaller
and smaller particles will eventually end, or may have already ended
for all practical purposes. Even if physicists unearth particles buried
beneath quarks and electrons, that knowledge will make little or no
difference to biologists, who have learned that the most significant bio-
logical processes occur at the molecular level and above. “There’s a
limit to biology there,” Glass explained, “that you don’t expect to be
able to ever break through, just because of the nature of the constitu-
tion of matter and energy.”
In biology, Glass said, the great revolutions may be in the past. “It’s
hard to believe, for me, anyway, that anything as comprehensive and
earthshaking as Darwin’s view of the evolution of life or Mendel’s
understanding of the nature of heredity will be easy to come by again.
After all, these have been discovered!” Biologists certainly have much
to learn, Glass emphasized, about diseases such as cancer and AIDS;
about the process whereby a single fertilized cell becomes a complex,
multicellular organism; about the relation between brain and mind.
“There are going to be new additions to the structure of knowledge.
But we have made some of the biggest possible advances. And it’s just a
question of whether there are any more really big changes in our con-
ceptual universe that are going to be made.”

Hard Times Ahead for Physics

In 1992, the monthly journal Physics Today published an essay entitled

“Hard Times,” in which Leo Kadanoff, a prominent physicist at the
University of Chicago, painted a bleak picture for the future of physics.
“Nothing we do is likely to arrest our decline in numbers, support or
social value,” Kadanoff declared. “Too much of our base depended on
events that are now becoming ancient history: nuclear weapons and

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radar during World War II, silicon and laser technology thereafter,
American optimism and industrial hegemony, socialist belief in ratio-
nality as a way of improving the world.” Those conditions have largely
vanished, Kadanoff contended; both physics and science as a whole are
now besieged by environmentalists, animal-rights activists, and others
with an antiscientific outlook. “In recent decades, science has had high
rewards and has been at the center of social interest and concern. We
should not be surprised if this anomaly disappears.”28
Kadanoff, when I spoke to him over the telephone two years later,
sounded even gloomier than he had been in his essay.29 He laid out
his worldview for me with a muffled melancholy, as if he were suf-
fering from an existential head cold. Rather than discussing science’s
social and political problems, as he had in his article in Physics Today,
he focused on another obstacle to scientific progress: science’s past
achievements. The great task of modern science, Kadanoff explained,
has been to show that the world conforms to certain basic physical laws.
“That is an issue which has been explored at least since the Renaissance
and maybe a much longer period of time. For me, that’s a settled issue.
That is, it seems to me that the world is explainable by law.” The most
fundamental laws of nature are embodied in the theory of general rel-
ativity and in the so-called standard model of particle physics, which
describes the behavior of the quantum realm with exquisite precision.
Just a half century ago, Kadanoff recalled, many reputable scientists
still clung to the romantic doctrine of vitalism, which holds that life
springs from some mysterious élan vital that cannot be explained in
terms of physical laws. As a result of the findings of molecular biol-
ogy—beginning with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953—
“there are relatively few well-educated people” who admit to belief in
vitalism, Kadanoff said.
Of course, scientists still have much to learn about how the funda-
mental laws generate “the richness of the world as we see it.” Kadanoff
himself is a leader in the field of condensed-matter physics, which stud-
ies the behavior not of individual subatomic particles, but of solids
or liquids. Kadanoff has also been associated with the field of chaos,
which addresses phenomena that unfold in predictably unpredictable
ways. Some proponents of chaos—and of a closely related field called

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complexity—have suggested that with the help of powerful computers

and new mathematical methods they will discover truths that surpass
those revealed by the “reductionist” science of the past. Kadanoff has
his doubts. Studying the consequences of fundamental laws is “in a way
less interesting” and “less deep,” he said, than showing that the world
is lawful. “But now that we know the world is lawful,” he added, “we
have to go on to other things. And yes, it probably excites the imagina-
tion of the average human being less. Maybe with good reason.”
Kadanoff pointed out that particle physics has not been terribly
exciting lately either. Experiments over the past few decades have
merely confirmed existing theories rather than revealing new phe-
nomena requiring new laws; the goal of finding a unified theory of all
of nature’s forces seems impossibly distant. In fact, no field of science
has yielded any truly deep discoveries for a long time, Kadanoff said.
“The truth is, there is nothing—there is nothing—of the same order
of magnitude as the accomplishments of the invention of quantum
mechanics or of the double helix or of relativity. Just nothing like that
has happened in the last few decades.” Is this state of affairs permanent?
I asked. Kadanoff was silent for a moment. Then he sighed, as if try-
ing to exhale all his world-weariness. “Once you have proven that the
world is lawful,” he replied, “to the satisfaction of many human beings,
you can’t do that again.”

Whistling to Keep Our Courage Up

O ne of the few modern philosophers to devote serious thought to the

limits of science is Nicholas Rescher of the University of Pittsburgh.
In his 1978 book, Scientific Progress, Rescher deplored the fact that Stent,
Glass, and other prominent scientists seemed to think that science
might be approaching a cul-de-sac. Rescher intended to provide “an
antidote to this currently pervasive tendency of thought” by demon-
strating that science is at least potentially infinite.30 But the scenario
he sketched out over the course of his book was hardly optimistic. He
argued that science, as a fundamentally empirical, experimental dis-
cipline, faces economic constraints. As scientists try to extend their

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theories into more remote domains—seeing further into the uni-

verse, deeper into matter—their costs will inevitably escalate and their
returns diminish.
“Scientific innovation is going to become more and more difficult
as we push out further and further from our home base toward more
remote frontiers. If the present perspective is even partly correct, the
half-millennium commencing around 1650 will eventually come to
be regarded among the great characteristic developmental transfor-
mations of human history, with the age of The Science Explosion as
unique in its own historical structure as The Bronze Age or The Indus-
trial Revolution or The Population Explosion.”31
Rescher tacked what he apparently thought was a happy coda onto
his depressing scenario: science will never end; it will just go slower
and slower and slower, like Zeno’s tortoise. Nor should scientists ever
conclude that their research must degenerate into the mere filling in
of details; it is always possible that one of their increasingly expensive
experiments will have revolutionary import, comparable to that of
quantum mechanics or Darwinian theory.
Bentley Glass, in a review of Rescher’s book, called these prescrip-
tions “whistling to keep one’s courage up in the face of what, for most
practitioners of science, is a bleak and imminent prospect.”32 When I
telephoned Rescher in August 1992, he acknowledged that his analysis
had been in most respects a grim one. “We can only investigate nature
by interacting with it,” he said. “To do that we must push into regions
never investigated before, regions of higher density, lower temperature,
or higher energy. In all these 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.”
But Rescher insisted that “big plums, first-rate discoveries,” might—
must!—lie ahead. He could not say whence those discoveries might
arise. “It’s like the jazz musician who was asked where jazz is going,
and he said, ‘If I knew we’d be there by now.’” Rescher, finally, fell
back on the that’s-what-they-thought-at-the-end-of-the-last-century
argument. The fact that such scientists as Stent, Glass, and Kadanoff
seemed to fear that science was drawing to a close, Rescher said, gave
him confidence that some marvelous discovery was pending. Rescher,

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like many other would-be seers, had succumbed to wishful thinking.

He admitted that he felt that the end of science would be a tragedy for
humanity. If the quest for knowledge ended, what would become of us?
What would give our existence meaning?

The Meaning of Francis Bacon’s Plus Ultra

T he second most common response to the suggestion that science is

ending—after “that’s what they thought at the end of the last cen-
tury”—is the old maxim “Answers raise new questions.” Kant wrote in
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that “every answer given on prin-
ciples of experience begets a fresh question, which likewise requires
its answer and thereby clearly shows the insufficiency of all physical
modes of explanation to satisfy reason.”33 But Kant also suggested
(anticipating the arguments of Gunther Stent), that the innate struc-
ture of our minds constrains both the questions we put to nature and
the answers we glean from it.
Of course, science will continue to raise new questions. Most are
trivial, in that they concern details that do not affect our basic under-
standing of nature. Who really cares, except specialists, about the
precise mass of the top quark, the existence of which was finally con-
firmed in 1994 after research costing billions of dollars? Other ques-
tions are profound but unanswerable. In fact, the most persistent foil
to the completion of science—to the attainment of the truly satisfying
theory that Roger Penrose and others dream of—is the human ability
to invent unanswerable questions. Presented with a purported theory
of everything, someone always can and will ask: But how do we know
that quarks or even superstrings (in the unlikely event that they are
one day shown to exist) are not composed of still smaller entities—ad
infinitum? How do we know that the visible universe is not just one
of an infinite number of universes? Was our universe necessary or just
a cosmic fluke? What about life? Are computers capable of conscious
thought? Are amoebas?
No matter how far empirical science goes, our imaginations can
always go farther. That is the greatest obstacle to the hopes—and

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fears—of scientists that we will find The Answer, a theory that quenches
our curiosity forever. Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern sci-
ence, expressed his belief in the vast potential of science with the Latin
term plus ultra, “more beyond.”34 But plus ultra does not apply to science
per se, which is a tightly constrained method for examining nature.
Plus ultra applies, rather, to our imaginations. Although our imagina-
tions are constrained by our evolutionary history, they will always be
capable of venturing beyond what we truly know.
Even in the new Polynesia, Gunther Stent suggested, a few per-
sistent souls will keep striving to transcend the received wisdom. Stent
called these truth seekers “Faustian” (a term he borrowed from Oswald
Spengler). I call them strong scientists (a term I coopted from Harold
Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence). By raising questions that science can-
not answer, strong scientists can continue the quest for knowledge in
the speculative mode that I call ironic science even after empirical sci-
ence—the kind of science that answers questions—has ended.
The poet John Keats coined the term negative capability to describe
the ability of certain great poets to remain “in uncertainties, myster-
ies, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” As
an example, Keats singled out his fellow poet Samuel Coleridge, who
“would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the pene-
tralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with
half-knowledge.”35 The most important function of ironic science is to
serve as humanity’s negative capability. Ironic science, by raising unan-
swerable questions, reminds us that all our knowledge is half-knowl-
edge; it reminds us of how little we know. But ironic science does not
make any significant contributions to knowledge itself. Ironic science
is thus less akin to science in the traditional sense than to literary criti-
cism—or to philosophy.

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 CHAPTER TWO
THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

T
wentieth-century science has given rise to a marvelous paradox.
The same extraordinary progress that has led to predictions that
we may soon know everything that can be known has also nur-
tured doubts that we can know anything for certain. When one theory
so rapidly succeeds another, how can we ever be sure that any the-
ory is true? In 1987 two British physicists, T. Theocharis and M. Psi-
mopoulos, excoriated this skeptical philosophical position in an essay
entitled “Where Science Has Gone Wrong.” Published in the British
journal Nature, the essay blamed the “deep and widespread malaise”
in science on philosophers who had attacked the notion that science
could achieve objective knowledge. The article printed photographs of
four particularly egregious “betrayers of the truth”: Karl Popper, Imre
Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend.1
The photographs were grainy, black-and-white shots of the sort that
adorn a lurid exposé about a venerable banker who has been caught
swindling retirees. These, clearly, were intellectual transgressors of the
worst sort. Feyerabend, whom the essayists called “the worst enemy of
science,” was the most wicked-looking of the bunch. Smirking at the
camera over glasses perched on the tip of his nose, he was clearly either
anticipating or relishing the perpetration of some diabolical prank. He
looked like an intellectual version of Loki, the Norse god of mischief.
The main complaint of Theocharis and Psimopoulos was silly.
The skepticism of a few academic philosophers has never represented
a serious threat to the massive, well-funded bureaucracy of science.
Many scientists, particularly would-be revolutionaries, find the ideas
25

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of Popper et al. comforting; if our current knowledge is provisional,

there is always the possibility that great revelations lie ahead. Theo-
charis and Psimopoulos did make one intriguing assertion, however,
that the ideas of the skeptics are “flagrantly self-refuting—they negate
and destroy themselves.” It would be interesting, I thought, to put this
argument to the philosophers and see how they responded.
Eventually I had the opportunity to do just that with all the “betray-
ers of the truth” except for Lakatos, who died in 1974. During my inter-
views, I also tried to find out whether these philosophers were really
as skeptical, as doubtful of science’s ability to achieve truth, as some
of their own statements implied. I came away convinced that Popper,
Kuhn, and Feyerabend each believed very much in science; in fact,
their skepticism was motivated by their belief. Their biggest failing,
perhaps, was to credit science with more power than it actually has.
They feared that science might extinguish our sense of wonder and
therefore bring science itself—and all forms of knowledge seeking—
to an end. They were trying to protect humanity, scientists included,
from the naive faith in science exemplified by such scientists as Theo-
charis and Psimopoulos.
As science has grown in power and prestige over the past century,
too many philosophers have served as science’s public relations agents.
This trend can be traced to such thinkers as Charles Sanders Peirce, an
American who founded the philosophy of pragmatism but could not
keep a job or a wife and died penniless and miserable in 1914. Peirce
offered this definition of absolute truth: it is whatever scientists say it is
when they come to the end of their labors.2
Much of philosophy since Peirce has merely elaborated on his view.
The dominant philosophy in Europe early in this century was logical
positivism, which asserted that we can only know that something is
true if it can be logically or empirically demonstrated. The positivists
upheld mathematics and science as the supreme sources of truth. Pop-
per, Kuhn, and Feyerabend—each in his own way and for his own rea-
sons—sought to counter this fawning attitude toward science. These
philosophers realized that in an age when science is ascendant, the
highest calling of philosophy should be to serve as the negative capabil-
ity of science, to infuse scientists with doubt. Only thus can the human

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quest for knowledge remain open-ended, potentially infinite; only thus

can we remain awestruck before the mystery of the cosmos.
Of the three great skeptics I interviewed, Popper was the first to
make his mark.3 His philosophy stemmed from his effort to distinguish
pseudo-science, such as Marxism or astrology or Freudian psychology,
from genuine science, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity. The latter,
Popper decided, was testable; it made predictions about the world that
could be empirically checked. The logical positivists had said as much.
But Popper denied the positivist assertion that scientists can prove a
theory through induction, or repeated empirical tests or observations.
One never knows if one’s observations have been sufficient; the next
observation might contradict all that preceded it. Observations can
never prove a theory but can only disprove, or falsify it. Popper often
bragged that he had “killed” logical positivism with this argument.4
Popper expanded his falsification tenet into a philosophy that he
called critical rationalism. One scientist ventures a proposal and others
try to bat it down with contrary arguments or experimental evidence.
Popper viewed criticism, and even conflict, as essential for progress of
all kinds. Just as scientists approach the truth through what he calls
“conjecture and refutation,” so do species evolve through competition
and societies through political debate. A “human society without con-
flict,” he once wrote, “would be a society not of friends but of ants.”5
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, Popper asserted
that politics, even more than science, required the free play of ideas
and criticism. Dogmatism inevitably led not to Utopia, as Marxists and
fascists alike claimed, but to totalitarian repression.
I began to discern the paradox lurking at the heart of Popper’s
work—and persona—when, prior to meeting him, I asked other philos-
ophers about him. Queries of this kind usually elicit rather dull, generic
praise, but in this case my interlocutors had nothing good to say. They
revealed that this man who inveighed against dogmatism was himself
almost pathologically dogmatic and demanding of fealty from students.
There was an old joke about Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
should have been titled The Open Society by One of Its Enemies.
To arrange my interview with Popper, I telephoned the London
School of Economics, where he had taught since the late 1940s. A

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secretary there said that Popper generally worked at his home in Ken-
ley, a suburb south of London, and gave me his number. I called, and
a woman with an imperious, German-accented voice answered. Mrs.
Mew, assistant to “Sir Karl.” Before Sir Karl would see me, I had to send
her a sample of my writings. She gave me a reading list that would
prepare me for my meeting: a dozen or so books by Sir Karl. Even-
tually, after several faxes and telephone calls, she set a date. She also
provided directions to the train station near Sir Karl’s house. When I
asked her for directions from the train station to the house, Mrs. Mew
assured me that all the cab drivers knew where Sir Karl lived. “He’s
quite famous.”
“Sir Karl Popper’s house, please,” I said as I climbed into a cab at
Kenley station. “Who?” the driver replied. Sir Karl Popper? The famous
philosopher? Never heard of him, the driver said. He was familiar
with the street on which Popper lived, however, and we found Pop-
per’s home—a two-story cottage surrounded by scrupulously trimmed
grass and shrubs—with little difficulty.6
A tall, handsome woman dressed in dark pants and shirt and with
short, dark hair answered the door: Mrs. Mew. She was only slightly
less forbidding in person than over the telephone. As she led me into
the house, she told me that Sir Karl was quite tired. He had undergone
a spate of interviews and congratulations brought on by his 90th birth-
day the previous month, and he had been working too hard preparing
an acceptance speech for the Kyoto Award, known as Japan’s Nobel. I
should expect to speak to him for only an hour at the most.
I was trying to lower my expectations when Popper made his
entrance. He was stooped, equipped with a hearing aid, and surpris-
ingly short; I had assumed that the author of such autocratic prose
would be tall. Yet he was as kinetic as a bantamweight boxer. He bran-
dished an article I had written for Scientific American about how quan-
tum mechanics was compelling some physicists to abandon the view
of physics as a wholly objective enterprise.7 “I don’t believe a word of
it,” he declared in an Austrian-accented growl. “Subjectivism” has no
place in physics, quantum or otherwise. “Physics,” he exclaimed, grab-
bing a book from a table and slamming it down, “is that!” (This from
a man who cowrote a book espousing dualism, the notion that ideas

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 THE END OF PHilOSOPHY • 29

and other constructs of the human mind exist independently of the

material world.8)
Once seated, he kept darting away to forage for books or articles
that could buttress a point. Striving to dredge a name or date from his
memory, he kneaded his temples and gritted his teeth as if in agony. At
one point, when the word mutation briefly eluded him, he slapped his
forehead repeatedly and with alarming force, shouting, “Terms, terms,
terms!”
Words poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum
that I began to lose hope that I could ask any of my prepared ques-
tions. “I am over 90 and I can still think,” he declared, as if suspecting
that I doubted it. He tirelessly touted a theory of the origin of life pro-
posed by a former student, Günther Wächtershäuser, a German pat-
ent attorney who had a Ph.D. in chemistry.9 Popper kept emphasizing
that he had known all the titans of twentieth-century science: Einstein,
Schrödinger, Heisenberg. Popper blamed Bohr, whom he knew “very
well,” for having introduced subjectivism into physics. Bohr was “a
marvelous physicist, one of the greatest of all time, but he was a miser-
able philosopher, and one couldn’t talk to him. He was talking all the
time, allowing practically only one or two words to you and then at
once cutting in.”
As Mrs. Mew turned to leave, Popper abruptly asked her to find
one of his books. She disappeared for a few minutes and then returned
empty-handed. “Excuse me, Karl, I couldn’t find it,” she reported.
“Unless I have a description, I can’t check every bookcase.”
“It was actually, I think, on the right of this corner, but I have taken
it away maybe . . .” His voice trailed off. Mrs. Mew somehow rolled her
eyes without really rolling them and vanished.
He paused a moment, and I desperately seized the opportunity to
ask a question. “I wanted to ask you about . . .”
“Yes! You should ask me your questions! I have wrongly taken the
lead. You can ask me all your questions first.”
As I began to question Popper about his views, it became apparent
that his skeptical philosophy stemmed from a deeply romantic, ideal-
ized view of science. He thus denied the assertion, often made by the
logical positivists, that science can ever be reduced to a formal, logical

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system, in which raw data are methodically converted into truth. A

scientific theory, Popper insisted, is an invention, an act of creation as
profoundly mysterious as anything in the arts. “The history of science
is everywhere speculative,” Popper said. “It is a marvelous history. It
makes you proud to be a human being.” Framing his face in his out-
stretched hands, Popper intoned, “I believe in the human mind.”
For similar reasons, Popper had battled throughout his career
against the doctrine of scientific determinism, which he felt was anti-
thetical to human creativity and freedom and thus to science itself.
Popper claimed to have realized long before modern chaos theorists
that not only quantum systems but even classical, Newtonian ones are
inherently unpredictable; he had delivered a lecture on this subject in
the 1950s. Waving at the lawn outside the window he said, “There is
chaos in every grass.”
When I asked Popper if he thought that science was incapable of
achieving absolute truth, he exclaimed, “No no!” and shook his head
vehemently. He, like the logical positivists before him, believed that a
scientific theory could be “absolutely” true. In fact, he had “no doubt”
that some current scientific theories were absolutely true (although
he refused to say which ones). But he rejected the positivist belief
that we can ever know that a theory is true. “We must distinguish
between truth, which is objective and absolute, and certainty, which is
subjective.”
If scientists believed too much in their own theories, Popper real-
ized, they might stop seeking truth. And that would be a tragedy, since
for Popper truth seeking was what made life worth living. “To search
for the truth is a kind of religion,” he said, “and I think it is also an
ethical belief.” Popper’s conviction that the search for knowledge must
never cease is reflected in the title of his autobiography, Unended Quest.
He thus scoffed at the hope of some scientists to achieve a complete
theory of nature, one that answers all questions. “Many people think
that the problems can be solved; many people think the opposite. I think
we have gone very far, but we are much further away. I must show you
one passage that bears on this.” He shuffled off again and returned with
his book Conjectures and Refutations. Opening it, he read his own words
with reverence: “In our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”

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 THE END OF PHilOSOPHY • 31

Popper also believed that science could never answer questions

about the meaning and purpose of the universe. For these reasons he
had never completely repudiated religion, although he had long ago
abandoned the Lutheranism of his youth. “We know very little, and we
should be modest and not pretend we know anything about ultimate
questions of this kind.”
Yet Popper abhorred those modern philosophers and sociologists
who claim that science is incapable of achieving any truth and who
argue that scientists adhere to theories for cultural and political rea-
sons rather than rational ones. Such critics, Popper charged, resent
being viewed as inferior to genuine scientists and are trying to “change
their status in the pecking order.” I suggested that these critics sought
to describe how science is practiced, whereas he, Popper, tried to show
how it should be practiced. Somewhat to my surprise, Popper nodded.
“That is a very good statement,” he said. “You can’t see what science is
without having in your head an idea of what science should be.” Popper
had to agree that scientists often fell short of the ideal he had set for
them. “Since scientists got subsidies for their work, science isn’t exactly
what it should be. This is unavoidable. There is a certain corruption,
unfortunately. But I don’t talk about that.”
Popper then proceeded to talk about it. “Scientists are not as self-
critical as they should be,” he asserted. “There is a certain wish that
you, people like you”—he jabbed a finger at me—“should bring them
before the public.” He stared at me a moment, then reminded me that
he had not sought this interview. “Far from it,” he said. “You know
that I have really made not only no attempt but have not encouraged
you.” Popper then plunged into an excruciatingly technical critique—
involving triangulation and other arcana—of the big bang theory. “It’s
always the same,” he summed up. “The difficulties are underrated. It
is presented in a spirit as if this all has scientific certainty, but scientific
certainty doesn’t exist.”
I asked Popper if he felt that biologists were also too committed to
Darwin’s theory of natural selection; in the past he had suggested that
the theory was tautological and thus pseudo-scientific.10 “That was per-
haps going too far,” Popper said, waving his hand dismissively. “I’m
not dogmatic about my own views.” Suddenly, he pounded the table

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and exclaimed, “One ought to look for alternative theories! This”—he

waved the paper by Günther Wächtershäuser on the origin of life—
“is an alternative theory. It seems to be a better theory.” That doesn’t
mean that the theory is true, Popper quickly added. “The origin of life
will forever remain untestable, probably,” Popper said. Even if scien-
tists create life in a laboratory, he explained, they can never be sure
that life actually began in the same way.
It was time to launch my big question. Was his own falsification
concept falsifiable? Popper glared at me. Then his expression softened,
and he placed his hand on mine. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said
gently, “but it is a silly question.” Peering searchingly into my eyes, he
inquired whether one of his critics had persuaded me to ask this ques-
tion. Yes, I lied. “Exactly,” he said, looking pleased.
“The first thing you do in a philosophy seminar when somebody
proposes an idea is to say it doesn’t satisfy its own criteria. It is one of
the most idiotic criticisms one can imagine!” His falsification concept,
he said, is a criterion for distinguishing between empirical modes of
knowledge, namely, science, and nonempirical ones, such as philos-
ophy. Falsification itself is “decidably unempirical”; it belongs not to
science but to philosophy, or “metascience,” and it does not even apply
to all of science. Popper was admitting, essentially, that his critics were
right: falsification is a mere guideline, a rule of thumb, sometimes help-
ful and sometimes not.
Popper said he had never before responded to the question I had just
posed. “I found it too stupid to be answered. You see the difference?”
he asked, his voice gentle again. I nodded. The question seemed a bit
silly to me, too, I said, but I just thought I should ask. He smiled and
squeezed my hand, murmuring, “Yes, very good.”
Since Popper seemed so agreeable, I mentioned that one of his for-
mer students had accused him of not tolerating criticism of his own
ideas. Popper’s eyes blazed. “It is completely untrue! I was happy when
I got criticism! Of course, not when I would answer the criticism, like
I have answered it when you gave it to me, and the person would still
go on with it. That is the thing which I found uninteresting and would
not tolerate.” If that happened, Popper would order the student out of
his class.

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The light in the kitchen was acquiring a ruddy hue when Mrs. Mew
stuck her head in the door and informed us that we had been talking
for more than three hours. How much longer, she inquired a bit pee-
vishly, did we expect to continue? Perhaps she had better call me a cab?
I looked at Popper, who had broken into a bad-boy grin but did appear
to be drooping.
I slipped in a final question: Why in his autobiography did Popper
say that he was the happiest philosopher he knew? “Most philosophers
are really deeply depressed,” he replied, “because they can’t produce
anything worthwhile.” Looking pleased with himself, Popper glanced
over at Mrs. Mew, who wore an expression of horror. Popper’s own
smile abruptly faded. “It would be better not to write that,” he said,
turning back to me. “I have enough enemies, and I better not answer
them in this way.” He stewed a moment and added, “But it is so.”
I asked Mrs. Mew if I could have a copy of the speech Popper was
going to deliver at the Kyoto Award ceremony in Japan. “No, not now,”
she said curtly. “Why not?” Popper inquired. “Karl,” she replied, “I’ve
been typing the second lecture nonstop, and I’m a bit . . .” She sighed.
“You know what I mean?” Anyway, she added, she did not have a final
version. “What about an uncorrected version?” Popper asked. Mrs.
Mew stalked off.
She returned and shoved a copy of Popper’s lecture at me. “Have
you got a copy of Propensities?” Popper asked her.11 She pursed her lips
and stomped into the room next door, while Popper explained the
book’s theme to me. The lesson of quantum mechanics and even of
classical physics, Popper said, is that nothing is determined, nothing
is certain, nothing is completely predictable; there are only propensi-
ties for certain things to occur. “For example,” Popper added, “in this
moment there is a certain propensity that Mrs. Mew may find a copy
of my book.”
“Oh, please!” Mrs. Mew exclaimed from the next room. She
returned, no longer making any attempt to hide her annoyance. “Sir
Karl, Karl, you have given away the last copy of Propensities. Why do
you do that?”
“The last copy was given away in your presence,” he declared.
“I don’t think so,” she retorted. “Who was it?”

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“I can’t remember,” he muttered sheepishly.

Outside, a black cab pulled into the driveway. I thanked Popper and
Mrs. Mew for their hospitality and took my leave. As the cab pulled
away, I asked the driver if he knew whose house this was. No, he didn’t.
Someone famous, was it? Yes, actually: Sir Karl Popper. Who? Karl Pop-
per, I replied, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.
“Is that right?” murmured the driver.
Popper has always been popular among scientists—and with good
reason, since he depicted science as an endless romantic adventure. An
editorial in Nature once called Popper, quite justly, “the philosopher for
science” [italics added].12 But Popper’s fellow philosophers have been
less kind. His oeuvre, they point out, is rife with contradictions. Popper
argued that science could not be reduced to a method, but his falsifica-
tion scheme was just such a method. Moreover, the arguments that he
used to kill the possibility of absolute verification could also be used
to kill falsification. If it is always possible that future observations will
contradict a theory, then it is also possible that future observations may
resurrect a theory that has previously been falsified. It is more reason-
able to assume, critics of Popper have argued, that just as some scientific
theories can be falsified, so some can be confirmed; there is no point in
remaining uncertain, after all, that the earth is round and not flat.
When Popper died in 1994, two years after I met him, the Economist
hailed him as having been “the best-known and most widely read of liv-
ing philosophers.”13 It praised, in particular, his insistence on antidog-
matism in the political realm. But the obituary also noted that Popper’s
treatment of induction (the basis of his falsification scheme) had been
rejected by later philosophers. “According to his own theories, Pop-
per should have welcomed this fact,” the Economist noted drily, “but he
could not bring himself to do so. The irony is that, here, Popper could
not admit he was wrong.” Popper’s antidogmatism, when applied to
science, had become a kind of dogmatism.
Although Popper abhorred psychoanalysis, his own work, finally,
may be best understood in psychoanalytic terms. His relationship with
authority figures—from scientific giants, such as Bohr, to his assistant,
Mrs. Mew—was obviously complex, alternating between defiance and
deference. In what is perhaps the single most revealing passage in his

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autobiography, Popper mentioned that his parents were both Austrian

Jews who had converted to Lutheranism. He then argued that the fail-
ure of other Jews to assimilate themselves into Germanic culture—and
their prominent roles in leftist politics—contributed to the emergence
of fascism and state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the 1930s: “anti-Semi-
tism was an evil, to be feared by Jews and non-Jews alike, and . . . it was
the task of all people of Jewish origin to do their best not to provoke
it.”14 Popper was coming close to blaming the Jews for the Holocaust.

The Structure of Thomas Kuhn

“
Look,” Thomas Kuhn said. The word was weighted with weariness,
as if Kuhn was resigned to the fact that I would misinterpret him,
but he was still going to try—no doubt in vain—to make his point.
Kuhn uttered the word often. “Look,” he said again. He leaned his gan-
gly frame and long face forward, and his big lower lip, which ordinarily
curled up amiably at the corners, sagged. “For Christ’s sake, if I had
my choice of having written the book or not having written it, I would
choose to have written it. But there have certainly been aspects involv-
ing considerable upset about the response to it.”
“The book” was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which may be
the most influential treatise ever written on how science does (or does
not) proceed. It is notable for having spawned the trendy term para-
digm. It also fomented the now trite idea that personalities and politics
play a large role in science. The book’s most profound argument was
less obvious: scientists can never truly understand the real world or
even each other.15
Given this theme, one might think that Kuhn would have expected
his own message to be at least partially misunderstood. But when I
interviewed Kuhn in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology (of all places) some three decades after the publication of
Structure, he seemed to be deeply pained by the breadth of misunder-
standing of his book. He was particularly upset by claims that he had
described science as irrational. “If they had said ‘arational’ I wouldn’t
have minded at all,” he said with no trace of a smile.

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Kuhn’s fear of compounding the confusion over his work had made
him a bit press shy. When I first telephoned him to ask for an interview,
he turned me down. “Look. I think not,” he said. He revealed that Sci-
entific American, my employer, had given Structure “the worst review
I can remember.” (The squib was indeed dismissive; it called Kuhn’s
argument “much ado about very little.” But what did Kuhn expect
from a magazine that celebrates science?16) Pointing out that I had not
been at the magazine then—the review ran in 1964—I begged him to
reconsider. Kuhn finally, reluctantly, agreed.
When we at last sat down together in his office, Kuhn expressed
nominal discomfort at the notion of delving into the roots of his
thought. “One is not one’s own historian, let alone one’s own psycho-
analyst,” he warned me. He nonetheless traced his view of science to
an epiphany he experienced in 1947, when he was working toward
a doctorate in physics at Harvard. While reading Aristotle’s Physics,
Kuhn had become astonished at how “wrong” it was. How could some-
one who wrote so brilliantly on so many topics be so misguided when
it came to physics?
Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out his dormitory win-
dow (“I can still see the vines and the shade two-thirds of the way
down”), when suddenly Aristotle “made sense.” Kuhn realized that
Aristotle invested basic concepts with different meanings than did
modern physicists. Aristotle used the term motion, for example, to refer
not just to change in position but to change in general—the reddening
of the sun as well as its descent toward the horizon. Aristotle’s physics,
understood on its own terms, was simply different from, rather than
inferior to, Newtonian physics.
Kuhn left physics for philosophy, and he struggled for 15 years to
transform his epiphany into the theory set forth in The Structure of Sci-
entific Revolutions. The keystone of his model was the concept of a par-
adigm. Paradigm, pre-Kuhn, referred merely to an example that serves
an educational purpose; amo, amas, amat, for instance, is a paradigm for
teaching conjugations in Latin. Kuhn used the term to refer to a col-
lection of procedures or ideas that instruct scientists, implicitly, what to
believe and how to work. Most scientists never question the paradigm.
They solve puzzles, problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the

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scope of the paradigm rather than challenge it. Kuhn called this “mop-
ping up,” or “normal science.” There are always anomalies, phenom-
ena that the paradigm cannot account for or that even contradict it.
Anomalies are often ignored, but if they accumulate they may trigger
a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by
Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.
Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn
held that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative act. The pro-
poser of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants (to borrow
Newton’s phrase) and then bashes them over the head. He or she is
often young or new to the field, that is, not fully indoctrinated. Most
scientists yield to a new paradigm reluctantly. They often do not under-
stand it, and they have no objective rules by which to judge it. Dif-
ferent paradigms have no common standard for comparison; they are
“incommensurable,” to use Kuhn’s term. Proponents of different par-
adigms can argue forever without resolving their differences because
they invest basic terms—motion, particle, space, time—with different
meanings. The conversion of scientists is thus both a subjective and
a political process. It may involve sudden, intuitive understanding—
like that finally achieved by Kuhn as he pondered Aristotle. Yet scien-
tists often adopt a paradigm simply because it is backed by others with
strong reputations or by a majority of the community.
Kuhn’s view diverged from Popper’s in several important respects.
Kuhn (like other critics of Popper) argued that falsification is no more
possible than verification; each process implies the existence of abso-
lute standards of evidence, which transcend any individual paradigm.
A new paradigm may solve puzzles better than the old one does, and it
may yield more practical applications. “But you cannot simply describe
the other science as false,” Kuhn said. Just because modern physics has
spawned computers, nuclear power, and CD players does not mean it
is truer, in an absolute sense, than Aristotle’s physics. Similarly, Kuhn
denied that science is constantly approaching the truth. At the end of
Structure he asserted that science, like life on earth, does not evolve
toward anything, but only away from something.
Kuhn described himself to me as a “post-Darwinian Kantian.” Kant,
too, believed that without some sort of a priori paradigm the mind cannot

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impose order on sensory experience. But whereas Kant and Darwin each
thought that we are all born with more or less the same innate paradigm,
Kuhn argued that our paradigms keep changing as our culture changes.
“Different groups, and the same group at different times,” Kuhn told me,
“can have different experiences and therefore in some sense live in dif-
ferent worlds.” Obviously all humans share some responses to experi-
ence, simply because of their shared biological heritage, Kuhn added. But
whatever is universal in human experience, whatever transcends culture
and history, is also “ineffable,” beyond the reach of language. Language,
Kuhn said, “is not a universal tool. It’s not the case that you can say any-
thing in one language that you can say in another.”
But isn’t mathematics a kind of universal language? I asked. Not
really, Kuhn replied, since it has no meaning; it consists of syntacti-
cal rules without any semantic content. “There are perfectly good
reasons why mathematics can be considered a language, but there is
a very good reason why it isn’t.” I objected that although Kuhn’s view
of the limits of language might apply to certain fields with a metaphys-
ical cast, such as quantum mechanics, it did not hold in all cases. For
example, the claim of a few biologists that AIDS is not caused by the
so-called AIDS virus is either right or wrong; language is not the cru-
cial issue. Kuhn shook his head. “Whenever you get two people inter-
preting the same data in different ways,” he said, “that’s metaphysics.”
So, were his own ideas true or not? “Look,” Kuhn responded with
even more weariness than usual; obviously he had heard this question
many times before. “I think this way of talking and thinking that I am
engaged in opens up a range of possibilities that can be investigated.
But it, like any scientific construct, has to be evaluated simply for its
utility—for what you can do with it.”
But then Kuhn, having set forth his bleak view of the limits of sci-
ence and indeed of all human discourse, proceeded to complain about
the many ways in which his book had been misinterpreted and mis-
used, especially by admirers. “I’ve often said I’m much fonder of my
critics than my fans.” He recalled students approaching him to say,
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Kuhn, for telling us about paradigms. Now that we
know about them we can get rid of them.” He insisted that he did not
believe that science was entirely political, a reflection of the prevailing

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power structure. “In retrospect, I begin to see why this book fed into
that, but boy, was it not meant to, and boy, does it not mean to.”
His protests were to no avail. He had a painful memory of sitting in
on a seminar and trying to explain that the concepts of truth and fal-
sity are perfectly valid, and even necessary—within a paradigm. “The
professor finally looked at me and said, ‘Look, you don’t know how
radical this book is.’” Kuhn was also upset to find that he had become
the patron saint of all would-be scientific revolutionaries. “I get a lot of
letters saying, ‘I’ve just read your book, and it’s transformed my life.
I’m trying to start a revolution. Please help me,’ and accompanied by a
book-length manuscript.”
Kuhn declared that, although his book was not intended to be
pro-science, he is pro-science. It is the rigidity and discipline of science,
Kuhn said, that makes it so effective at problem solving. Moreover, sci-
ence produces “the greatest and most original bursts of creativity” of
any human enterprise. Kuhn conceded that he was partly to blame for
some of the antiscience interpretations of his model. After all, in Struc-
ture he did call scientists committed to a paradigm “addicts”; he also
compared them to the brainwashed characters in Orwell’s 1984.17 Kuhn
insisted that he did not mean to be condescending by using such terms
as mopping up or puzzle solving to describe what most scientists do. “It
was meant to be descriptive.” He ruminated a bit. “Maybe I should
have said more about the glories that result from puzzle solving, but I
thought I was doing that.”
As for the word paradigm, Kuhn conceded that it had become “hope-
lessly overused” and was “out of control.” Like a virus, the word spread
beyond the history and philosophy of science and infected the intel-
lectual community at large, where it came to signify virtually any
dominant idea. A 1974 New Yorker cartoon captured the phenomenon.
“Dynamite, Mr. Gerston!” gushed a woman to a smug-looking man.
“You’re the first person I ever heard use ‘paradigm’ in real life.” The
low point came during the Bush administration, when White House
officials introduced an economic plan called “the New Paradigm”
(which was really just warmed-over Reaganomics).18
Kuhn admitted, again, that the fault was partly his, since in Struc-
ture he had not defined paradigm as crisply as he might have. At one

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point paradigm referred to an archetypal experiment, such as Galil-

eo’s legendary (and probably apocryphal) dropping of weights from the
Leaning Tower of Pisa. Elsewhere the term referred to “the entire con-
stellation of beliefs” that binds a scientific community together. (Kuhn
denied, however, that he had defined paradigm in 21 different ways, as
one critic claimed.19 ) In a postscript to later editions of Structure, Kuhn
recommended that paradigm be replaced with the term exemplar, but it
never caught on. He eventually gave up all hope of explaining what he
really meant. “If you’ve got a bear by the tail, there comes a point at
which you’ve got to let it go and stand back,” he sighed.
One of the sources of Structure’s power and persistence is its pro-
found ambiguity; it appeals to relativists and to science worshipers
alike. Kuhn acknowledged that “a lot of the success of the book and
some of the criticisms are due to its vagueness.” (One wonders whether
Kuhn’s writing style is intended or innate; his speech is as profoundly
tangled, as suffused with subjunctives and qualifiers, as is his prose.)
Structure is clearly a work of literature, and as such it is subject to many
interpretations. According to literary theory, Kuhn himself cannot be
trusted to provide a definitive account of his own work. Here is one
possible interpretation of Kuhn’s text, and of Kuhn. Kuhn focused on
what science is rather than on what it should be; he had a much more
realistic, hard-nosed, psychologically accurate view of science than did
Popper. Kuhn realized that, given the power of modern science and the
tendency of scientists to believe in theories that have withstood many
tests, science may well enter a phase of permanent normalcy, in which
no further revolutions, or revelations, are possible.
Kuhn also accepted, as Popper could not, that science might not con-
tinue forever, even in a normal state. “There was a beginning to it,”
Kuhn said. “There are lots of societies that don’t have it. It takes very
special conditions to support it. Those social conditions are now get-
ting harder to find. Of course it could end.” Science might even end,
Kuhn said, because scientists cannot make any further headway, even
given adequate resources.
Kuhn’s recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what
Charles Sanders Peirce defined as the truth about nature—made it
even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science’s

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authority, to deny that science could ever arrive at absolute truth. “The
one thing I think you shouldn’t say is that now we’ve found out what
the world is really like,” Kuhn said. “Because that’s not what I think the
game is about.”
Kuhn has tried, throughout his career, to remain true to that origi-
nal epiphany he experienced in his dormitory at Harvard. During that
moment Kuhn saw—he knew!—that reality is ultimately unknow-
able; any attempt to describe it obscures as much as it illuminates. But
Kuhn’s insight forced him to take the untenable position that because
all scientific theories fall short of absolute, mystical truth, they are all
equally untrue; because we cannot discover The Answer, we cannot
find any answers. His mysticism led him toward a position as absurd
as that of the literary sophists who argue that all texts—from The Tem-
pest to an ad for a new brand of vodka—are equally meaningless, or
meaningful.
At the end of Structure, Kuhn briefly raised the question of why
some fields of science converge on a paradigm while others, artlike,
remain in a state of constant flux. The answer, he implied, was a matter
of choice; scientists within certain fields were simply unwilling to com-
mit themselves to a single paradigm. I suspect Kuhn avoided pursuing
this issue because he could not abide the answer. Some fields, such as
economics and other social sciences, never adhere for long to a single
paradigm because they address questions for which no paradigm will
suffice. Fields that achieve consensus, or normalcy, to borrow Kuhn’s
term, do so because their paradigms correspond to something real in
nature, something true.

Finding Feyerabend

T o say that the ideas of Popper and Kuhn are flawed is not to say that
they cannot serve as useful tools for analyzing science. Kuhn’s nor-
mal-science model accurately describes what most scientists now do:
fill in details, solve relatively trivial puzzles that buttress rather than
challenge the prevailing paradigm. Popper’s falsification criterion can
help to distinguish between empirical science and ironic science. But

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each philosopher, by pushing his ideas too far, by taking them too seri-
ously, ends up in an absurd, self-contradicting position.
How does a skeptic avoid becoming Karl Popper, pounding the
table and shouting that he is not dogmatic? Or Thomas Kuhn, trying
to communicate precisely what he means when he talks about the
impossibility of true communication? There is only one way. One must
embrace—even revel in—paradox, contradiction, rhetorical excess.
One must acknowledge that skepticism is a necessary but impossible
exercise. One must become Paul Feyerabend.
Feyerabend’s first and still most influential book, Against Method, was
published in 1975 and has been translated into 16 languages.20 It argues
that philosophy cannot provide a methodology or rationale for sci-
ence, since there is no rationale to explain. By analyzing such scientific
milestones as Galileo’s trial before the Vatican and the development of
quantum mechanics, Feyerabend sought to show that there is no logic
to science; scientists create and adhere to scientific theories for what
are ultimately subjective and even irrational reasons. According to Fey-
erabend, scientists can and must do whatever is necessary to advance.
He summed up his anticredo with the phrase “anything goes.” Feyer-
abend once derided Popper’s critical rationalism as “a tiny puff of hot
air in the positivistic teacup.”21 He agreed with Kuhn on many points,
in particular on the incommensurability of scientific theories, but he
argued that science is rarely as normal as Kuhn contended. Feyerabend
also accused Kuhn—quite rightly—of avoiding the implications of his
own view; he remarked, to Kuhn’s dismay, that Kuhn’s sociopolitical
model of scientific change applied nicely to organized crime.22
Feyerabend’s penchant for posturing made it all too easy to reduce
him to a grab bag of outrageous sound bites. He once likened science
to voodoo, witchcraft, and astrology. He defended the right of reli-
gious fundamentalists to have their version of creation taught along-
side Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools.23 His entry in the
1991 Who’s Who in America ended with the following remark: “My life
has been the result of accidents, not of goals and principles. My intel-
lectual work forms only an insignificant part of it. Love and personal
understanding are much more important. Leading intellectuals with

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their zeal for objectivity kill these personal elements. They are crimi-
nals, not the liberators of mankind.”
Feyerabend’s Dadaesque rhetoric concealed a deadly serious point:
the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too
often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because
he truly believed that it had no more claim to truth than did astrol-
ogy. Quite the contrary. Feyerabend attacked science because he recog-
nized—and was horrified by—its power, its potential to stamp out the
diversity of human thought and culture. He objected to scientific cer-
tainty for moral and political, rather than for epistemological, reasons.
At the end of his 1987 book, Farewell to Reason, Feyerabend revealed
just how deep his relativism ran. He addressed an issue that “has
enraged many readers and disappointed many friends—my refusal to
condemn even an extreme fascism and my suggestion that it should be
allowed to thrive.”24 The point was particularly touchy because Feyer-
abend had served in the German army during World War II. It would
be all too easy, Feyerabend argued, to condemn Nazism, but it was that
very moral self-righteousness and certitude that made Nazism possible.

I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an attitude

that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in the treatment of
minorities in industrial democracies; in education, education to
a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time
consists of turning wonderful young people into colorless and
self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the
nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of
deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to
start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into
insignificance. It shows itself in the killing of nature and of “prim-
itive” cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived
of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellec-
tuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs
and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own sorry
image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians
who blackmail their patients with fear, mutilate them and then

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persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of many

so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals,
study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty. As far
as I am concerned there exists no difference between the hench-
men of Auschwitz and these “benefactors of mankind.”25

By the time I tried to track Feyerabend down in 1992, he had retired

from the University of California at Berkeley. No one there knew
where he was; colleagues assured me that my efforts to find him would
be in vain. At Berkeley, he had had a telephone that allowed him to
make calls but not receive them. He would accept invitations to confer-
ences and then fail to show up. By mail, he would invite colleagues to
visit him. But when they arrived and knocked on the door of his house
in the hills overlooking Berkeley, no one would answer.
Later, while skimming Isis, a journal of the history and philosophy
of science (titled this way long before the acronym for a terrorist group),
I found a short review by Feyerabend of a book of essays. The review
displayed Feyerabend’s talent for one-liners. In response to a denigrat-
ing remark the author had made about religion, Feyerabend retorted,
“Prayer may not be very efficient when compared to celestial mechanics,
but it surely holds its own vis-à-vis some parts of economics.”26
I called the editor of Isis to ask if he knew how I could contact Fey-
erabend, and he gave me an address near Zurich, Switzerland. I mailed
Feyerabend a fawning letter explaining that I wanted to interview him.
To my delight, he responded with a chatty, handwritten note saying
an interview would be fine. He divided his time between his home
in Switzerland and his wife’s place in Rome. He enclosed a telephone
number for Rome and a photograph of himself wearing an apron and
a big grin and standing before a sink full of dishes. The photograph, he
explained, “shows me at my favorite activity, washing dishes for my
wife in Rome.” In mid-October I received another letter from Feyer-
abend. “This is to tell you that I should be (93%) in New York during
the week from October 25 to November 1 and that we might make an
interview then. I’ll give you a call as soon as I arrive.”
So it happened that one chilly night just a few days before Hallow-
een I met Feyerabend at a luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment. The

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apartment belonged to a former student who had wisely abandoned

philosophy for real estate—apparently with some success. She greeted
me and led me into her kitchen, where Feyerabend was sitting at a
table sipping a glass of red wine. He thrust himself up from a chair and
stood crookedly to greet me, as if he suffered from a stiff back; only
then did I remember that Feyerabend had been shot in the back and
permanently crippled during World War II.
Feyerabend had the energy and angular face of a leprechaun. When
we sat down and began talking, he declaimed, sneered, wheedled, and
whispered—depending on his point or plot—while whirling his hands
like a conductor. Self-deprecation spiced his hubris. He called himself
“lazy” and “a bigmouth.” When I asked about his position on a certain
point, he winced. “I have no position!” he said. “If you have a position,
it is always something screwed down.” He twisted an invisible screw-
driver into the table. “I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously,
and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!”
Watching this performance with an indulgent smile was Feyer-
abend’s wife, Grazia Borrini, an Italian physicist whose manner was
as calm as Feyerabend’s was manic. Borrini had taken Feyerabend’s
class while pursuing a second degree in public health at Berkeley in
1983; they married six years later. Borrini entered the conversation spo-
radically, for example, after I asked why Feyerabend thought scientists
were so infuriated by his writings.
“I have no idea,” he said, the very picture of innocence. “Are they?”
Borrini interjected that she had been infuriated when she first heard
about Feyerabend’s ideas from another physicist. “Someone was taking
away from me the keys of the universe,” she explained. It was only
when she read his books herself that she realized Feyerabend’s views
were much more subtle and astute than his critics claimed. “This is
what I think you should want to write about,” Borrini said to me, “the
great misunderstanding.”
“Oh, forget it, he’s not my press agent,” Feyerabend said.
Like Popper, Feyerabend had been born and raised in Vienna. He
studied acting and opera as a teenager. At the same time, he became
intrigued with science after attending lectures by an astronomer. Far
from seeing his two passions as irreconcilable, Feyerabend envisioned

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himself becoming both an opera singer and an astronomer. “I would

spend my afternoons practicing singing, and my evenings on the stage,
and then late at night I would observe the stars,” he said.
Then came the war. Germany occupied Austria in 1938, and in 1942
the 18-year-old Feyerabend enlisted in an officers’ school. Although he
hoped his training period would outlast the war, he ended up in charge
of 3,000 men on the Russian front. While fighting against (actually
fleeing from) the Russians in 1945, he was shot in the lower back. “I
couldn’t get up,” Feyerabend recalled, “and I still remember this vision:
‘Ah, I shall be in a wheelchair rolling up and down between rows of
books.’ I was very happy.”
He gradually recovered the ability to walk, although only with the
help of a cane. Resuming his studies at the University of Vienna after the
war, he switched from physics to history, grew bored, returned to physics,
grew bored again, and finally settled on philosophy. His talent for advanc-
ing absurd positions through sheer cleverness led to a growing suspicion
that rhetoric rather than truth is crucial for carrying an argument. “Truth
itself is a rhetorical term,” Feyerabend asserted. Jutting out his chin he
intoned, “ ‘I am searching for the truth.’ Oh boy, what a great person.”
Feyerabend studied under Popper at the London School of Econom-
ics in 1952 and 1953. There he met Lakatos, another brilliant student
of Popper. It was Lakatos who, years later, urged Feyerabend to write
Against Method. “He was my best friend,” Feyerabend said of Lakatos.
Feyerabend taught at the University of Bristol until 1959 and then
moved to Berkeley, where he befriended Kuhn.
Like Kuhn, Feyerabend denied that he was antiscience. What he
did claim, first, was that there is no scientific method. “That is exactly
how it works in the sciences,” Feyerabend said. “You have certain ideas
that work, and then some new situation turns up and you try some-
thing else. It’s opportunism. You need a toolbox full of different kinds
of tools. Not only a hammer and pins and nothing else.” This is what
he meant by his much-maligned phrase “anything goes” (and not, as is
commonly thought, that one scientific theory is as good as any other).
Restricting science to a particular methodology—even one as loosely
defined as Popper’s falsification scheme or Kuhn’s normal science
mode—would destroy it, Feyerabend said.

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Feyerabend also objected to the claim that science is superior to

other modes of knowledge. He was particularly enraged at the ten-
dency of Western states to foist the products of science—whether the
theory of evolution, nuclear power plants, or gigantic particle acceler-
ators—on people against their will. “There is separation between state
and church,” he complained, “but none between state and science!”
Science “provides fascinating stories about the universe, about the
ingredients, about the development, about how life came about, and
all this stuff,” Feyerabend said. But the prescientific “mythmakers,” he
emphasized, such as singers, court jesters, and bards, earned their liv-
ing, whereas most modern scientists are supported by taxpayers. “The
public is the patron and should have a say in the matter.”
Feyerabend added, “Of course I go to extremes, but not to the
extremes people accuse me of, namely, throw out science. Throw out
the idea science is first. That’s all right. It has to be science from case to
case.” After all, scientists disagree among themselves on many issues.
“People should not take it for granted when a scientist says, ‘Everybody
has to follow this way.’”
If he was not antiscience, I asked, what did he mean by his statement
in Who’s Who that intellectuals are criminals? “I thought so for a long
time,” Feyerabend responded, “but last year I crossed it out, because
there are lots of good intellectuals.” He turned to his wife. “I mean,
you are an intellectual.” “No, I am a physicist,” she replied firmly. Fey-
erabend shrugged. “What does it mean, ‘intellectual’? It means people
who think about things longer than other people, perhaps. But many of
them just ran over other people, saying, ‘We have figured it out.’”
Feyerabend noted that many nonindustrialized people had done fine
without science. The !Kung bushmen in Africa “survive in surround-
ings where any Western person would come in and die after a few
days,” he said. “Now you might say people in this society live much
longer, but the question is, what is the quality of life, and that has not
been decided.”
But didn’t Feyerabend realize how annoyed most scientists would
be by that kind of statement? Even if the bushmen are happy, they are
ignorant, and isn’t knowledge better than ignorance? “What’s so great
about knowledge?” Feyerabend replied. “They are good to each other.

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They don’t beat each other down.” People have a perfect right to reject
science if they so choose, Feyerabend said.
Did that mean fundamentalist Christians also had the right to have
creationism taught alongside the theory of evolution in schools? “I
think that ‘right’ business is a tricky business,” Feyerabend responded,
“because once somebody has a right they can hit somebody else over
the head with that right.” He paused. Ideally, he said, children should
be exposed to as many different modes of thought as possible so they
can choose freely among them. He shifted uneasily in his seat. Sensing
an opening, I pointed out that he had not really answered my question
about creationism. Feyerabend scowled. “This is a dried-out business.
It doesn’t interest me very much. Fundamentalism is not the old rich
Christian tradition.” But American fundamentalists are very powerful,
I persisted, and they use the kinds of things Feyerabend says to attack
the theory of evolution. “But science has been used to say some people
have a low intelligence quotient,” he retorted. “So everything is used
in many different ways. Science can be used to beat down all sorts of
other people.”
But shouldn’t educators point out that scientific theories are differ-
ent from religious myths? I asked. “Of course. I would say that science
is very popular nowadays,” he replied. “But then I have also to let the
other side get in as much evidence as possible, because the other side is
always given a short presentation.” Anyway, so-called primitive people
often know far more about their environments, such as the properties
of local plants, than do so-called experts. “So to say these people are
ignorant is just—this is ignorance!”
I unloaded my self-refuting question: Wasn’t there something con-
tradictory about the way he used all the techniques of Western ratio-
nalism to attack Western rationalism? Feyerabend refused to take the
bait. “Well, they are just tools, and tools can be used in any way you see
fit,” he said mildly. “They can’t blame me that I use them.” Feyerabend
seemed bored, distracted. Although he would not admit it, 1 suspected
he was tired of being a radical relativist, of defending the colorful belief
systems of the world—astrology, creationism, even fascism!—against
the bully of rationalism.

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Feyerabend’s eyes glittered again, however, when he began talking

about a book he was working on. Tentatively titled The Conquest of
Abundance, it addressed the human passion for reductionism. “All
human enterprises,” Feyerabend explained, seek to reduce the natu-
ral diversity, or “abundance,” inherent in reality. “First of all the per-
ceptual system cuts down this abundance or you couldn’t survive.”
Religion, science, politics, and philosophy represent our attempts to
compress reality still further. Of course, these attempts to conquer
abundance simply create new abundances, new complexities. “Lots of
people have been killed, in political wars. I mean, certain opinions are
not liked.” Feyerabend, I realized, was talking about our quest for The
Answer, the theory to end all theories.
But The Answer will—must—forever remain beyond our grasp,
according to Feyerabend. He ridiculed the belief of some scientists
that they might someday capture reality in a single theory of every-
thing. “Let them have their belief, if it gives them joy. Let them also
give talks about that. ‘We touch the infinite!’ And some people say”—
bored voice—“‘Ya ya, he says he touches the infinite.’ And some people
say”—thrilled voice—“‘Ya ya! He says he touches the infinite!’ But to
tell the little children in school, ‘Now that is what the truth is,’ that is
going much too far.”
Any description of reality is necessarily inadequate, Feyerabend
said. “You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human
being—according to today’s cosmology!—can figure it all out? This to
me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out
is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this
universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They
think they have found me out!’”
A medieval philosopher named Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite,
Feyerabend said, had argued that to see God directly is to see nothing
at all. “This to me makes a lot of sense. I can’t explain why. This big
thing, out of which everything comes, you don’t have the means. Your
language has been created by dealing with things, chairs, and a few
instruments. And just on this tiny earth!” Feyerabend paused, lost in
a kind of exaltation. “God is emanations, you know? And they come

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down and become more and more material. And down, down at the
last emanation, you can see a little trace of it and guess at it.”
Surprised by this outburst, I asked Feyerabend if he was religious.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic,
and then he became a “vigorous” atheist. “And now my philosophy has
taken a completely different shape. It can’t just be that the universe—
Boom!—you know, and develops. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Of
course, many scientists and philosophers have argued that it is point-
less to speculate about the sense, or meaning, or purpose of the uni-
verse. “But people ask it, so why not? So all this will be stuffed into this
book, and the question of abundance will come out of it, and it will
take me a long time.”
As I prepared to leave, Feyerabend asked how my wife’s birthday
party had gone the previous night. (I had told Feyerabend about my
wife’s birthday in the course of arranging my meeting with him.) Fine,
I replied. “You’re not drifting apart?” Feyerabend persisted, scrutiniz-
ing me. “It wasn’t the last birthday you will ever celebrate with her?”
Borrini glared at him, aghast. “Why should it be?”
“I don’t know!” Feyerabend exclaimed, throwing his hands up.
“Because it happens!” He turned back to me. “How long have you been
married?” Three years, I said. “Ah, just the beginning. The bad things
will come. Just wait 10 years.” Now you really sound like a philosopher,
I said. Feyerabend laughed. He confessed that he had been married and
divorced three times before he met Borrini. “Now for the first time I
am so happy to be married.”
I said that I had heard his marriage to Borrini had made him more
easygoing. “Well, this may be two things,” Feyerabend replied. “Get-
ting older you don’t have the energy not to be easygoing. And she’s
certainly made a big difference also.” He beamed at Borrini, and she
beamed back.
Turning to Borrini, I mentioned the photograph that her husband had
sent of himself washing dishes, along with the note saying that perform-
ing this chore for his wife was the most important thing he did now.
Borrini snorted. “Once in a blue moon,” she said.
“What do you mean, once in a blue moon!” Feyerabend bellowed.
“Every day I wash dishes!”

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“Once in a blue moon,” Borrini repeated firmly. I decided to believe

the physicist rather than the philosopher.
A little more than a year after my meeting with Feyerabend, the
New York Times reported, to my dismay, that the “anti-science philos-
opher” had been killed by a brain tumor.27 I called Borrini in Zurich
to offer my condolences—and, yes, to satisfy my craven journalistic
curiosity. She was distraught. It had happened so quickly. Paul had
complained of headaches, and then a few months later. . . . Composing
herself, she told me, proudly, that Feyerabend had kept working until
the end. Just before he died, he finished a draft of his autobiography.
(The book, with the typically Feyerabendian title Killing Time, was pub-
lished in 1995. In the final pages, which Feyerabend wrote in his final
days, he concluded that love is all that matters in life.)28 What about the
book on abundance? I asked. No, Paul did not have time to finish that,
Borrini murmured.
Recalling Feyerabend’s excoriation of the medical profession, I
could not resist asking, did her husband seek medical treatment for
his tumor? Of course, she replied. He had had “total confidence” in his
doctors’ diagnosis and had been willing to accept any treatment they
recommended; the tumor had simply been detected too late for any-
thing to be done.

Why Philosophy Is So Hard

T heocharis and Psimopoulos, the authors of the essay in Nature titled

“Where Science Has Gone Wrong,” were right after all: the ideas of
Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend are “self-refuting.” All skeptics, finally,
fall on their own swords. They become what the critic Harold Bloom
derided in The Anxiety of Influence as “mere rebels.” Their most potent
argument against scientific truth is historical: given the rapid turnover
of scientific theories over the past century or so, how can we be sure
that any current theory will endure? Actually, modern science has been
much less revolutionary—and more conservative—than the skeptics,
and Kuhn in particular, have suggested. Particle physics rests on the
firm foundation of quantum mechanics, and modern genetics bolsters

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rather than undermines Darwin’s theory of evolution. The skeptics’

historical arguments are much more devastating when turned against
philosophy. If science cannot achieve absolute truth, then what stand-
ing should be accorded philosophy, which has exhibited much less abil-
ity to resolve its problems? Philosophers themselves have recognized
their plight. In After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, published in 1987,
fourteen prominent philosophers considered whether their discipline
had a future. The consensus was philosophical: maybe, maybe not.29
One philosopher who has pondered the “chronic lack of progress” of
his calling is Colin McGinn, a native of England who has taught at Rut-
gers University since 1992. McGinn, when I met him in his apartment
on Manhattan’s upper West Side in August 1994, was disconcertingly
youthful. (Of course, I expect all philosophers to have furrowed brows
and hairy ears.) He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, and moccasins. He is a
compact man, with a defiantly jutting chin and pale blue eyes; he could
pass for Anthony Hopkins’s younger brother.
When I solicited McGinn’s opinion of Popper, Kuhn, and Feyera-
bend, his mouth curled in distaste. They were “sloppy,” “irresponsi-
ble”; Kuhn especially was full of “absurd subjectivism and relativism.”
Few modern philosophers took his views seriously any more. “I don’t
think that science is provisional in an interesting sense at all,” McGinn
asserted. “Some of it’s provisional, but some of it isn’t!” Is the periodic
table provisional? Or Darwin’s theory of natural selection?
Philosophy, on the other hand, does not achieve this kind of resolu-
tion, McGinn said. It does not advance in the sense that “you have this
problem and you work on it and you solve it, and then you go on to the
next problem.” Certain philosophical problems have been “clarified”;
certain approaches have fallen out of fashion. But the great philosoph-
ical questions—What is truth? Does free will exist? How can we know
anything?—are as unresolved today as they ever were. That fact should
not be surprising, McGinn remarked, since modern philosophy can be
defined as the effort to solve problems lying beyond the scope of empir-
ical, scientific inquiry.
McGinn pointed out that many philosophers in this century—nota-
bly Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivists—have simply
declared that philosophical problems are pseudo-problems, illusions

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stemming from language or “diseases of thought.” Some of these

“eliminativists,” in order to solve the mind-body problem, have even
denied that consciousness exists. That view “can have political con-
sequences that you might not want to accept,” McGinn said. “It ends
up reducing human beings to nothing. It pushes you toward extreme
materialism, toward behaviorism.”
McGinn offered a different, and, he suggested, more palatable
explanation: the great problems of philosophy are real, but they are
beyond our cognitive ability. We can pose them, but we cannot solve
them—any more than a rat can solve a differential equation. McGinn
said this idea came to him in a late-night epiphany when he still lived
in England; only later did he realize that he had encountered a similar
idea in the writings of the linguist Noam Chomsky (whose views will
be aired in Chapter 6). In his 1993 book, Problems in Philosophy, McGinn
suggested that perhaps in a million years philosophers would acknowl-
edge that his prediction was correct.30 Of course, he told me, philoso-
phers probably would cease struggling to achieve the impossible much
sooner.
McGinn suspected that science, too, was approaching a cul-de-sac.
“People have great confidence in science and the scientific method,”
he said, “and it’s worked well within its own limits for a few hundred
years. But from a larger perspective who’s to say that it’s going to
carry on and conquer everything?” Scientists, like philosophers, are
constrained by their cognitive limits. “It’s hubris to think we’ve some-
how now got the perfect cognitive instrument in our heads,” he said.
Moreover, the end of the cold war has removed a major motivation for
investment in science, and as the sense of completion in science grows,
fewer bright young people will be attracted to scientific careers.
“So it wouldn’t surprise me if sometime during the next century
people started veering away from studying science as much, except just
to learn what they need to know about things, and started to go back
into the humanities.” In the future, we will look back on science as “a
phase, a brilliant phase. People do forget that just 1,000 years ago there
was just religious doctrine; that was it.” After science has ended, “reli-
gion may start to appeal to people again.” McGinn, who is a professed
atheist, looked rather pleased with himself, and well he might. During

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our little chat in his airy apartment, with car honks and bus growls and
the odor of greasy Chinese food drifting through the window, he had
pronounced the impending doom of not just one but two major modes
of human knowledge: philosophy and science.

Fearing the Zahir

O f course, philosophy will never really end. It will simply continue

in a more overtly ironic, literary mode, like that already practiced
by Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein, or Feyerabend. One of my favorite lit-
erary philosophers is the Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. More
than any philosopher I know of, Borges has explored the complex psy-
chological relationship that we have toward the truth. In “The Zahir,”
Borges told the story of a man who becomes obsessed with a coin he
received as change from a storekeeper.31 The seemingly nondescript
coin is a Zahir, an object that is an emblem of all things, of the mystery
of existence. A Zahir can be a compass, a tiger, a stone, anything. Once
beheld, it cannot be forgotten. It grips the mind of the beholder until
all other aspects of reality become insignificant, trivial.
At first, the narrator struggles to free his mind of the Zahir, but he
eventually accepts his fate. “I shall pass from thousands of apparitions
to one alone: from a very complex dream to a very simple dream. Oth-
ers will dream that I am mad, and I shall dream of the Zahir. And when
everyone dreams of the Zahir day and night, which will be a dream
and which a reality, the earth or the Zahir?”32 The Zahir, of course,
is The Answer, the secret of life, the theory to end all theories. Popper,
Kuhn, and Feyerabend tried to protect us from The Answer with doubt
and reason, Borges with terror.

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 CHAPTER THREE
THE END OF PHYSICS

T
here are no more dedicated, not to say obsessive, seekers of The
Answer than modern particle physicists. They want to show that
all the complicated things of the world are really just manifesta-
tions of one thing. An essence. A force. A loop of energy wriggling
in a 10-dimensional hyperspace. A sociobiologist might suspect that a
genetic influence lurks behind this reductionist impulse, since it seems
to have motivated thinkers since the dawn of civilization. God, after
all, was conceived by the same impulse.
Einstein was the first great modern Answer seeker. He spent his
later years trying to find a theory that would unify quantum mechan-
ics with his theory of gravity, general relativity. To him, the purpose
of finding such a theory was to determine whether the universe was
inevitable or, as he put it, “whether God had any choice in creating the
world.” But Einstein, no doubt believing that science made life mean-
ingful, also suggested that no theory could be truly final. He once said
of his own theory of relativity, “[It] will have to yield to another one,
for reasons which at present we do not yet surmise. I believe that the
process of deepening the theory has no limits.”1
Most of Einstein’s contemporaries saw his efforts to unify physics
as a product of his dotage and quasi-religious tendencies. But in the
1970s, the dream of unification was revived by several advances. First,
physicists showed that just as electricity and magnetism are aspects of
a single force, so electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (which
governs certain kinds of nuclear decay) are manifestations of an under-
lying “electroweak” force. Researchers also developed a theory for the
55

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strong nuclear force, which grips protons and neutrons together in the
nuclei of atoms. The theory, called quantum chromodynamics, posits
that protons and neutrons are composed of even more elementary par-
ticles, called quarks. Together, the electroweak theory and quantum
chromodynamics constitute the standard model of particle physics.
Emboldened by this success, workers forged far beyond the standard
model in search of a deeper theory. Their guide was a mathematical
property called symmetry, which allows the elements of a system to
undergo transformations—analogous to rotation or reflection in a mir-
ror—without being fundamentally altered. Symmetry became the sine
qua non of particle physics. In search of theories with deeper symme-
tries, theorists began to jump to higher dimensions. Just as an astro-
naut rising above the two-dimensional plane of the earth can more
directly apprehend its global symmetry, so can theorists discern the
more subtle symmetries underlying particle interactions by viewing
them from a higher-dimensional standpoint.
One of the most persistent problems in particle physics stems from
the definition of particles as points. In the same way that division by
zero yields an infinite and hence meaningless result, so do calculations
involving pointlike particles often culminate in nonsense. In construct-
ing the standard model, physicists were able to sweep these problems
under the rug. But Einsteinian gravity, with its distortions of space and
time, seemed to demand an even more radical approach.
In the early 1980s, many physicists came to believe that superstring
theory represented that approach. The theory replaced pointlike parti-
cles with minute loops that eliminated the absurdities arising in calcu-
lations. Just as vibrations of violin strings give rise to different notes, so
could the vibrations of these strings generate all the forces and particles
of the physical realm. Superstrings could also banish one of the bug-
bears of particle physics: the possibility that there is no ultimate foun-
dation for physical reality but only an endless succession of smaller and
smaller particles, nestled inside each other like Russian dolls. According
to superstring theory, there is a fundamental scale beyond which all
questions concerning space and time become meaningless.
The theory suffers from several problems, however. First, there seem
to be countless possible versions, and theorists have no way of knowing

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which one is correct. Moreover, superstrings are thought to inhabit not

only the four dimensions in which we live (the three dimensions of
space plus time), but also six extra dimensions that are somehow “com-
pactified,” or rolled up into infinitesimal balls, in our universe. Finally,
the strings are as small in comparison to a proton as a proton is in com-
parison to the solar system. They are more distant from us, in a sense,
than are the quasars that lurk at the farthest edge of the visible uni-
verse. The superconducting supercollider, which was to take physicists
much deeper into the microrealm than had any previous accelerator,
would have been 54 miles in circumference. To probe the realm super-
strings are thought to inhabit, physicists would have to build a particle
accelerator 1,000 light-years around. (The entire solar system is only
one light-day around.) And not even an accelerator that size could allow
us to see the extra dimensions where superstrings dance.

Glashow’s Gloom

O ne of the pleasures of being a science writer is feeling superior to

run-of-the-mill newshounds. The most primitive species of reporter,
to my mind, is the type who tracks down a woman who has watched
her only son stabbed to death by a crazed crackhead and asks, “How
do you feel?” Yet in the fall of 1993 I found myself stuck with a similar
assignment. I was just beginning an article on the future of particle
physics when the U.S. Congress killed, once and for all, the supercon-
ducting supercollider. (Contractors had already spent more than $2 bil-
lion and dug a tunnel in Texas 15 miles long.) Over the next few weeks
I had to confront particle physicists who had just seen their brightest
hope for the future brutally aborted and ask, “How do you feel?”
The gloomiest place I visited was the department of physics at Har-
vard University. The head of the department was Sheldon Glashow,
who had shared a Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam
for developing the electroweak portion of the standard model. In 1989,
Glashow had spoken, along with the biologist Gunther Stent, at the
symposium titled “The End of Science?” at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Glashow offered a spirited rebuttal of the meeting’s “absurd” premise,

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that philosophical skepticism was eroding belief in science as a “uni-

fied, universal, objective endeavor.” Does anyone really doubt the exis-
tence of the moons of Jupiter, which Galileo discovered centuries ago?
Does anyone really doubt the modern theory of disease? “Germs are
seen and killed,” Glashow declared, “not imagined and unimagined.”
Science is “certainly slowing down,” Glashow conceded, but not
because of attacks from ignorant, antiscientific sophists. His own field
of particle physics “is threatened from an entirely different direction:
from its very success.” The last decade of research has generated count-
less confirmations of the standard model of particle physics “but has
revealed not the slightest flaw, not the tiniest discrepancy. . . . We have
no experimental hint or clue that could guide us to build a more ambi-
tious theory.” Glashow added the obligatory hopeful coda: “Nature’s
road has often seemed impassable, but we have always overcome.”2
In other statements, Glashow has not hewed to this blithe opti-
mism. He was once a leader in the quest for a unified theory. In the
1970s, he proposed several such theories, although none as ambitious
as superstring theory. But with the advent of superstrings, Glashow
became disillusioned with the quest for unification. Those working
on superstrings and other unified theories were not doing physics at
all any more, Glashow contended, because their speculations were so
far beyond any possible empirical test. Glashow and a colleague com-
plained in one essay that “contemplation of superstrings may evolve
into an activity as remote from conventional particle physics as particle
physics is from chemistry, to be conducted at schools of divinity by
future equivalents of medieval theologians.” They added that “for the
first time since the Dark Ages, we can see how our noble search may
end, with faith replacing science once again.”3 When particle physics
passes beyond the realm of the empirical, Glashow seemed to be sug-
gesting, it may succumb to skepticism, to relativism, after all.
I interviewed Glashow at Harvard in November 1993, shortly after
the demise of the superconducting supercollider. His dimly lit office,
lined with dark, heavily varnished bookcases and cabinets, was as sol-
emn as a funeral parlor. Glashow himself, a large man chewing rest-
lessly on a cold cigar stub, seemed slightly incongruous there. He had
the snowy, tousled hair that seems de rigueur for Nobel laureates in

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physics, and his glasses were as thick as telescope lenses. Yet one could
still detect, beneath the patina of the Harvard professor, the tough,
fast-talking New York kid that Glashow had once been.
Glashow was devastated by the death of the supercollider. Physics,
he emphasized, cannot proceed on pure thought alone, in spite of what
superstring enthusiasts said. Superstring theory “hasn’t gotten any-
where despite all the hoopla,” he grumbled. More than a century ago
some physicists tried to invent unified theories; they failed, of course,
because they knew nothing about electrons or protons or neutrons or
quantum mechanics. “Now, are we so arrogant as to believe we have
all the experimental information we need right now to construct that
holy grail of theoretical physics, a unified theory? I think not. I think
certainly there are surprises that natural phenomena have in store for
us, and we’re not going to find them unless we look.”
But isn’t there much to do in physics besides unification? “Of course
there is,” Glashow replied sharply. Astrophysics, condensed-matter
physics, and even subfields within particle physics are not concerned
with unification. “Physics is a very large house filled with interest-
ing puzzles,” he said (using Thomas Kuhn’s term for problems whose
solutions merely reinforce the prevailing paradigm). “Of course there
will be things done. The question is whether we’re getting anywhere
toward this holy grail.” Glashow believed that physicists would con-
tinue to seek “some little interesting tidbit someplace. Something
amusing, something new. But it’s not the same as the quest as I was
fortunate enough to know it in my professional lifetime.”
Glashow could not muster much optimism concerning the pros-
pects for his field, given the politics of science funding. He had to admit
that particle physics was not terribly useful. “Nobody can make the
claim that this kind of research is going to produce a practical device.
That would just be a lie. And given the attitude of governments today,
the type of research that I fancy doesn’t have a very good future.”
In that case, could the standard model be the final theory of parti-
cle physics? Glashow shook his head. “Too many questions left unan-
swered,” he said. Of course, he added, the standard model would be
final in a practical sense if physicists could not forge beyond it with
more powerful accelerators. “There will be the standard theory, and

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that will be the last chapter in the elementary physics story.” It is always
possible that someone will find a way of generating extremely high
energies relatively cheaply. “Maybe someday it will get done. Someday,
someday, someday.”
The question is, Glashow continued, what will particle physicists do
while they are waiting for that someday to come? “I guess the answer
is going to be that the [particle-physics] establishment is going to do
boring things, futzing around until something becomes available. But
they would never admit that it’s boring. Nobody will say, ‘I do boring
things.’” Of course, as the field becomes less interesting and funding
dwindles, it will cease attracting new talent. Glashow noted that sev-
eral promising graduate students had just left Harvard for Wall Street.
“Goldman Sachs in particular discovered that theoretical physicists are
very good people to have.”

The Smartest Physicist of Them All

O ne reason that superstring theory became so popular in the mid-

1980s was that a physicist named Edward Witten decided it repre-
sented the best hope for the future of physics. I first saw Witten in the
late 1980s when I was eating lunch with another scientist in the cafeteria
of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A man walked by our
table holding a tray of food. He had a lantern jaw and a strikingly high
forehead, bounded by thick black glasses across the bottom and thick
black hair across the top. “Who’s that?” I asked my companion. “Oh,
that’s Ed Witten,” my lunchmate replied. “He’s a particle physicist.”
A year or two later, making idle chitchat between sessions at a
physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smart-
est physicist of them all? Several names kept coming up, including
the Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell-Mann. But the
name mentioned most often was Witten’s. He seemed to evoke a spe-
cial kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He
is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back
for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathe-
matical mind since Newton.

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Witten may also be the most spectacular practitioner of naive

ironic science I have ever encountered. Naive ironic scientists possess
an exceptionally strong faith in their scientific speculations, in spite of
the fact that those speculations cannot be empirically verified. They
believe they do not invent their theories so much as they discover
them; these theories exist independently of any cultural or historical
context and of any particular efforts to find them.
A naive ironic scientist—like a Texan who thinks everyone but Tex-
ans has an accent—does not acknowledge that he or she has adopted
any philosophical stance at all (let alone one that might be described
as ironic). Such a scientist is just a conduit through which truths pass
from the Platonic realm to the world of flesh; background and person-
ality are irrelevant to the scientific work. Thus Witten, when I called
him to request an interview, tried to dissuade me from writing about
him. He told me that he abhorred journalism focusing on scientists’
personalities, and at any rate, many other physicists and mathema-
ticians were much more interesting than he. Witten had been upset
by a profile published in the New York Times Magazine in 1987, which
implied that he had invented superstring theory.4 Actually, Witten
informed me, he had played virtually no role in the creation of super-
string theory; he had simply helped to develop it and promote it after it
had been discovered.
Every science writer occasionally runs into subjects who genuinely
do not want attention from the media, who simply want to be left
alone to do their work. What these scientists often fail to realize is that
this trait makes them more enticing. Intrigued by Witten’s apparently
sincere shyness, I persisted in seeking an interview. Witten asked me
to send him some things I had written. Stupidly, I included a profile of
Thomas Kuhn published in Scientific American. Finally, Witten agreed
to let me come down to talk to him, but he would give me two hours
and not a minute more; I would have to leave at 12 noon, sharp. When
I arrived, he immediately began lecturing me on my shoddy journalis-
tic ethics. I had done society a disservice in repeating Thomas Kuhn’s
view that science is an arational (not irrational) process that does not
converge on the truth. “You should be concentrating on serious and
substantive contributions to the understanding of science,” Witten

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said. Kuhn’s philosophy “isn’t taken very seriously except as a debating

standard, even by its proponents.” Did Kuhn go to a doctor when he
was sick? Did he have radial tires on his car? I shrugged and guessed
that he probably did. Witten nodded triumphantly. That proved, he
declared, that Kuhn believed in science and not in his own relativistic
philosophy.
I said that whether or not one agreed with Kuhn’s views, they were
influential, and provocative, and that one of my aims as a writer was
not only to inform readers but also to provoke them. “Aim to report on
some of the truths that are being discovered, rather than aiming to pro-
voke. That should be the aim of a science writer,” Witten said sternly. I
tried to do both, I replied. “Well, that’s a pretty feeble response,” Wit-
ten said. “Provoking people, or stimulating them intellectually, should
be a by-product of reporting on some of the truths that are being dis-
covered.” This is another mark of the naive ironic scientist: when he or
she says “truth,” there is never any ironic inflection, no smile; the word
is implicitly capitalized. As penance for my journalistic sins, Witten
suggested, I should write profiles of five mathematicians in a row; if I
did not know which mathematicians were worthy of such attention,
Witten would recommend some. (Witten did not realize that he was
providing fodder for those who claimed he was less a physicist than a
mathematician.)
Since high noon was approaching, I tried to turn the interview
toward Witten’s career. He refused to answer any “personal” ques-
tions, such as what his major had been in college or whether he had
considered other careers before becoming a physicist; his history was
unimportant. I knew from background reading that although Witten
was the son of a physicist and had always enjoyed the subject, he had
graduated from Brandeis College in 1971 with a degree in history and
plans to become a political journalist. He succeeded in publishing arti-
cles in The New Republic and the Nation. He nonetheless soon decided
that he lacked the “common sense” for journalism (or so he told one
reporter); he entered Princeton to study physics and obtained his doc-
torate in 1976.
Witten picked up the story from there. In telling me about his
work in physics, he slipped into a highly abstract, impersonal mode of

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speech. He was reciting, not talking, giving me the history of super-

strings, emphasizing not his own role but that of others. He spoke
so softly that I worried that my tape recorder wouldn’t pick him up
over the air conditioner. He paused frequently—for 51 seconds at
one point—casting his eyes down and squeezing his lips together
like a bashful teenager. He seemed to be striving for the same preci-
sion and abstraction in his speech that he achieved in his treatises on
superstrings. Now and then—for no reason that I could discern—he
broke into convulsive, hiccuping laughter as some private joke flitted
through his consciousness.
Witten made a name for himself in the mid-1970s with incisive but
fairly conventional papers on quantum chromodynamics and the elec-
troweak force. He learned of superstring theory in 1975, but his initial
efforts to understand it were stymied by the “opaque” literature. (Yes,
even the smartest person in the world had a hard time understanding
superstring theory.) In 1982, however, a review paper by John Schwarz,
one of the theory’s pioneers, helped Witten to grasp a crucial fact:
Superstring theory does not simply allow for the possibility of gravity;
it demands that gravity exist. Witten called this realization “the great-
est intellectual thrill of my life.” Within a few years, any doubts that
Witten had had about the theory’s potential vanished. “It was clear that
if I didn’t spend my life concentrating on string theory, I would simply
be missing my life’s calling,” he said. He began publicly proclaiming
the theory a “miracle” and predicting that it would “dominate physics
for the next 50 years.” He also generated a flood of papers on the the-
ory. The 96 articles that Witten produced from 1981 through 1990 were
cited by other physicists 12,105 times; no other physicist in the world
approached this level of influence.5
In his early papers, Witten concentrated on creating a superstring
model that was a reasonable facsimile of the real world. But he became
increasingly convinced that the best way to achieve that goal was to
uncover the theory’s “core geometric principles.” These principles, he
said, might be analogous to the non-Euclidean geometry that Einstein
employed to construct his theory of general relativity. Witten’s pur-
suit of these ideas led him deep into topology, which is the study of
the fundamental geometric properties of objects, regardless of their

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particular shape or size. In the eyes of a topologist, a doughnut and a

single-handled coffee mug are equivalent, because each has only one
hole; one object can be transformed into the other without any tearing.
A doughnut and a banana are not equivalent, because one would have
to tear the doughnut to mold it into a banana-shaped object. Topolo-
gists are particularly fond of determining whether seemingly dissim-
ilar knots can actually be transformed into each other without being
cut. In the late 1980s Witten created a technique—which borrowed
from both topology and quantum field theory—that allows mathema-
ticians to uncover deep symmetries between hideously tangled, high-
er-dimensional knots. As a result of his finding, Witten won the 1990
Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics. Witten called
the achievement his “single most satisfying piece of work.”
I asked Witten how he responded to the claims of critics that super-
string theory is not testable and therefore is not really physics at all.
Witten replied that the theory had predicted gravity. “Even though it
is, properly speaking, a postprediction, in the sense that the experi-
ment was made before the theory, the fact that gravity is a consequence
of string theory, to me, is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever.”
He acknowledged, even emphasized, that no one had truly fath-
omed the theory, and that it might be decades before it yielded a precise
description of nature. He would not predict, as others had, that super-
string theory might bring about the end of physics. Nevertheless, he
was serenely confident that it would eventually yield a profound new
understanding of reality. “Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce,” he
said, “and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of
string theory have never been seen.” When I continued to press Wit-
ten on the issue of testability, he grew exasperated. “I don’t think I’ve
succeeded in conveying to you its wonder, its incredible consistency,
remarkable elegance, and beauty.” In other words, superstring theory
is too beautiful to be wrong.
Witten then revealed just how strong his faith was. “Generally
speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of
string theory,” Witten began. “Some of them were discovered first, but
I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth. On
planet earth, they were discovered in this order.” Stepping up to his

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chalkboard, he wrote down general relativity, quantum field theory,

superstrings, and supersymmetry (a concept that serves a vital role in
superstring theory). “But I don’t believe, if there are many civilizations
in the universe, that those four ideas were discovered in that order in
each civilization.” He paused. “I do believe, by the way, that those four
ideas were discovered in any advanced civilization.”
I could not believe my good fortune. Who’s being provocative
now? I asked. “I’m not being provocative,” Witten retorted. “I’m being
provocative in the same way as someone who says the sky is blue is
being provocative, if there is a writer somewhere who has said that the
sky has pink polka dots.”

Particle Aesthetics

I n the early 1990s, when superstring theory was still relatively novel,
several physicists wrote popular books about its implications. In Theo-
ries of Everything, the British physicist John Barrow argued that Gödel’s
incompleteness theorem undermines the very notion of a complete the-
ory of nature.6 Gödel established that any moderately complex system
of axioms inevitably raises questions that cannot be answered by the
axioms. The implication is that any theory will always have loose ends.
Barrow also pointed out that a unified theory of particle physics would
not really be a theory of everything, but only a theory of all particles
and forces. The theory would have little or nothing to say about phe-
nomena that make our lives meaningful, such as love or beauty.
But Barrow and other analysts at least granted that physicists might
achieve a unified theory. That assumption was challenged in The End
of Physics, written by physicist-turned-journalist David Lindley.7 Phys-
icists working on superstring theory, Lindley contended, were no
longer doing physics because their theories could never be validated
by experiments, but only by subjective criteria, such as elegance and
beauty. Particle physics, Lindley concluded, was in danger of becoming
a branch of aesthetics.
The history of physics supports Lindley’s prognosis. Previous the-
ories of physics, however seemingly bizarre, won acceptance among

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physicists and even the public not because they made sense; rather, they
offered predictions that were borne out—often in dramatic fashion—
by observations. After all, even Newton’s version of gravity violates
common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of
space? John Maddox, the editor of Nature, once argued that if Newton
submitted his theory of gravity to a journal today, it would almost cer-
tainly be rejected as too preposterous to believe.8 Newton’s formalism
nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating
the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity, with its malleable space and
time, is even more bizarre. But it became widely accepted as true after
observations confirmed his prediction about how gravity would bend
light passing around the sun. Likewise, physicists do not believe quan-
tum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts
the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy. Theo-
rists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experi-
ments kept bearing out those predictions.
Superstring theory is on shaky ground indeed if it must rely on aes-
thetic judgments. The most influential aesthetic principle in science
was set forth by the fourteenth-century British philosopher William of
Occam. He argued that the best explanation of a given phenomenon is
generally the simplest, the one with the fewest assumptions. This prin-
ciple, called Occam’s razor, was the downfall of the Ptolemaic model
of the solar system in the Middle Ages. To show that the earth was the
center of the solar system, the astronomer Ptolemy was forced to argue
that the planets traced elaborately spiraling epicycles around the earth.
By assuming that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar
system, later astronomers eventually could dispense with epicycles and
replace them with much simpler elliptical orbits.
Ptolemy’s epicycles seem utterly reasonable when compared to the
undetected—and undetectable—extra dimensions required by super-
string theory. No matter how much superstring theorists assure us of
the theory’s mathematical elegance, the metaphysical baggage it carries
with it will prevent it from winning the kind of acceptance—among
either physicists or laypeople—that general relativity or the standard
model of particle physics have.

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Let’s give superstring believers the benefit of the doubt, if only for a
moment. Let’s assume that some future Witten, or even Witten himself,
finds an infinitely pliable geometry that accurately describes the behav-
ior of all known forces and particles. In what sense will such a theory
explain the world? I have talked to many physicists about superstrings,
and none has been able to help me understand what, exactly, a super-
string is. As far as I can tell, it is neither matter nor energy; it is some
kind of mathematical ur-stuff that generates matter and energy and
space and time but does not itself correspond to anything in our world.
Good science writers will no doubt make readers think they under-
stand such a theory. Dennis Overbye, in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, one
of the best books ever written on cosmology, imagines God as a cosmic
rocker, bringing the universe into being by flailing on his 10-dimen-
sional superstring guitar.9 (One wonders, is God improvising, or fol-
lowing a score?) The true meaning of superstring theory, of course, is
embedded in the theory’s austere mathematics. I once heard a profes-
sor of literature liken James Joyce’s gobbledygookian tome Finnegans
Wake to the gargoyles atop the cathedral of Notre Dame, built solely for
God’s amusement. I suspect that if Witten ever finds the theory he so
desires, only he—and God, perhaps—will truly appreciate its beauty.

Nightmares of a Final Theory

W ith his crab-apple cheeks, vaguely Asian eyes, and silver hair still
tinged with red, Steven Weinberg resembles a large, dignified elf.
He would make an excellent Oberon, king of the fairies in A Midsum-
mer Night’s Dream. And like a fairy king, Weinberg has demonstrated
a powerful affinity for the mysteries of nature, an ability to discern
subtle patterns within the froth of data streaming from particle accel-
erators. In his 1993 book, Dreams of a Final Theory, he managed to make
reductionism sound romantic. Particle physics is the culmination of
an epic quest, “the ancient search for those principles that cannot be
explained in terms of deeper principles.”10 The force compelling sci-
ence, he pointed out, is the simple question, why? That question has
led physicists deeper and deeper into the heart of nature. Eventually, he

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contended, the convergence of explanations down to simpler and sim-

pler principles would culminate in a final theory. Weinberg suspected
that superstrings might lead to that ultimate explanation.
Weinberg, like Witten and almost all particle physicists, has a pro-
found faith in the power of physics to achieve absolute truth. But what
makes Weinberg such an interesting spokesperson for his tribe is that
he, unlike Witten, is acutely aware that his faith is just that, a faith;
Weinberg knows that he is speaking with a philosophical accent. If
Edward Witten is a philosophically naive scientist, Weinberg is an
extremely sophisticated one—too sophisticated, perhaps, for the good
of his own field.
I first met Weinberg in New York in March 1993—during the hal-
cyon era before the supercollider was killed—at a dinner held to cele-
brate the publication of Dreams of a Final Theory. He was in an expansive
mood, dispensing jokes and anecdotes about famous colleagues and
wondering what it would be like to chat with the talk-show host Char-
lie Rose later that night. Eager to impress the great Nobel laureate, I
began name-dropping. I mentioned that Freeman Dyson had recently
told me that the whole notion of a final theory was a pipe dream.
Weinberg smiled. The majority of his colleagues, he assured me,
believed in a final theory, although many of them preferred to keep that
belief private. I dropped another name, Jack Gibbons, whom the newly
elected Bill Clinton had just named science advisor. I had recently inter-
viewed Gibbons, I said, and Gibbons had hinted that the United States
alone might not be able to afford the supercollider. Weinberg scowled
and shook his head, muttering something about society’s disturbing
lack of appreciation for the intellectual benefits of basic research.
The irony was that Weinberg himself, in Dreams of a Final Theory,
offered little or no argument as to why society should support further
research in particle physics. He was careful to acknowledge that nei-
ther the superconducting supercollider nor any other earthly accel-
erator could provide direct confirmation of a final theory; physicists
would eventually have to rely on mathematical elegance and con-
sistency as guides. Moreover, a final theory might have no practical
value. Weinberg’s most extraordinary admission was that a final the-
ory might not reveal the universe to be meaningful in human terms.

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Quite the contrary. He reiterated an infamous comment made in an

earlier book: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more
it seems pointless.”11 Although the comment had “dogged him ever
since,” Weinberg refused to back away from it. Instead he elaborated
on the remark: “As we have discovered more and more fundamental
physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us.”12
Weinberg seemed to be acknowledging that all our whys would even-
tually culminate in a because. His vision of the final theory evoked
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. In this science
fiction comedy, published in 1980, scientists finally discover the answer
to the riddle of the universe, and the answer is . . . 42. (Adams was prac-
ticing philosophy of science in an overtly literary mode.)
The superconducting supercollider was dead and buried when I met
Weinberg again in March 1995 at the University of Texas at Austin.
His spacious office was cluttered with periodicals that testified to the
breadth of his interests, including Foreign Affairs, Isis, Skeptical Inquirer,
and American Historical Review, as well as physics journals. Along one
wall ran a chalkboard laced with the obligatory mathematical scrib-
bles. Weinberg spoke with what seemed to be considerable effort. He
kept sighing, grimacing, squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing them,
even as his deep, sonorous voice rolled forward. He had just eaten
lunch and was probably experiencing postprandial fatigue. But I pre-
ferred to think he was brooding over the tragic dilemma of particle
physicists: they are damned if they achieve a final theory and damned
if they don’t.
It is a “terrible time for particle physics,” Weinberg admitted.
“There’s never been a time when there’s been so little excitement in the
sense of experiments suggesting really new ideas or theories being able
to make new and qualitatively different kinds of predictions that are
then borne out by experiments.” With the supercollider dead and plans
for other new accelerators in the United States stalled for lack of fund-
ing, the prospects for the field were gloomy. Oddly enough, brilliant
students were still entering the field, students “better than we deserve,
probably,” Weinberg added.
Although he shared Witten’s belief that physics moves toward abso-
lute truth, Weinberg was acutely aware of the philosophical difficulties

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of defending this position. He recognized that “the techniques by

which we decide on the acceptance of physical theories are extremely
subjective.” It would always be possible for clever philosophers to make
a case that the particle physicists “are just making it up as they go
along.” (In Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg even confessed to hav-
ing a fondness for the writings of the philosophical anarchist Paul Fey-
erabend.) On the other hand, Weinberg told me, the standard model
of particle physics, “whatever the aesthetics were, [has] by now been
tested as few theories have been, and it really works. If in fact it was
just a social construct it would have fallen apart long before this.”
Weinberg realized that physicists would never be able to prove a
theory final in the same way that mathematicians prove theorems;
but if the theory accounted for all experimental data—the masses of
all particles, the strengths of all forces—physicists would eventually
cease questioning it. “I don’t feel I was put here to be sure of anything,”
Weinberg said. “A lot of philosophy of science going back to the Greeks
has been poisoned by the search for certainty, which seems to me a
false search. Science is too much fun to sit around wringing our hands
because we’re not certain about things.”
Even as we spoke, Weinberg suggested, someone might be post-
ing the final, correct version of superstring theory on the Internet. “If
she,”—Weinberg added, with the slightest pause and emphasis on the
she—“got results that agreed with experiment, then you would say,
‘That’s it,’” even if researchers could never provide direct evidence
of the strings themselves or the extra dimensions they supposedly
inhabit; after all, the atomic theory of matter was accepted because
it worked, not because experimenters could make pictures of atoms.
“I agree strings are much farther away from direct perception than
atoms, and atoms are much farther away from direct perception than
chairs, but I don’t see any philosophical discontinuity there.”
There was little conviction in Weinberg’s voice. Deep down, he
surely knew that superstring theory did represent a discontinuity in
physics, a leap beyond any conceivable empirical test. Abruptly, he rose
and began prowling around the room. He picked up odd objects, fon-
dled them distractedly, put them down, while continuing to speak. He
reiterated his belief that a final theory of physics would represent the

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most fundamental possible achievement of science—the bedrock of

all other knowledge. To be sure, some complex phenomena, such as
turbulence, or economics, or life, require their own special laws and
generalizations. But if you ask why those principles are true, Weinberg
added, that question takes you down toward the final theory of phys-
ics, on which everything rests. “That’s what makes science a hierarchy.
And it is a hierarchy. It’s not just a random net.”
Many scientists cannot abide hearing that truth, Weinberg said,
but there is no escaping it. “Their final theory is what our final the-
ory explains.” If neuroscientists ever explain consciousness, for exam-
ple, they will explain it in terms of the brain, “and the brain is what it
is because of historical accidents and because of universal principles of
chemistry and physics.” Science will certainly continue after a final the-
ory, perhaps forever, but it will have lost something. “There will be a
sense of sadness” about the achievement of a final theory, Weinberg said,
since it will bring to a close the great quest for fundamental knowledge.
As Weinberg continued speaking, he seemed to portray the final
theory in increasingly negative terms. Asked whether there would
ever be such a thing as applied superstring theory, Weinberg grimaced.
(In the 1994 book Hyperspace, the physicist Michio Kaku foresaw a day
when advances in superstring theory would allow us to visit other uni-
verses and travel through time.)13 Weinberg cautioned that “the sands
of scientific history are white with the bones of people” who failed to
foresee applications of developments in science, but applied superstring
theory was “hard to conceive.”
Weinberg also doubted that the final theory would resolve all the
notorious paradoxes posed by quantum mechanics. “I tend to think
these are just puzzles in the way we talk about quantum mechanics,”
Weinberg said. One way to eliminate these puzzles, he added, would
be to adopt the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Proposed in the 1950s, this interpretation attempts to explain why the
act of observation by a physicist seems to force a particle such as an
electron to choose only one path out of the many allowed by quantum
mechanics. According to the many-worlds interpretation, the electron
actually follows all possible paths, but in separate universes. This expla-
nation does have its troubling aspects, Weinberg conceded. “There may

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be another parallel time track where John Wilkes Booth missed Lin-
coln and . . .” Weinberg paused. “I sort of hope that whole problem will
go away, but it may not. That may be just the way the world is.”
Is it too much to ask for a final theory to make the world intelligible?
Before I could finish the question, Weinberg was nodding. “Yes, it’s
too much to ask,” he replied. The proper language of science is math-
ematics, he reminded me. A final theory “has to make the universe
appear plausible and somehow or other recognizably logical to people
who are trained in that language of mathematics, but it may be a long
time before that makes sense to other people.” Nor will a final theory
provide humanity with any guidance in conducting its affairs. “We’ve
learned to absolutely disentangle value judgments from truth judg-
ments,” Weinberg said. “I don’t see us going back to reconnect them.”
Science “can certainly help you find out what the consequences of your
actions are, but it can’t tell you what consequences you ought to wish
for. And that seems to me to be an absolute distinction.”
Weinberg had little patience for those who suggest that a final the-
ory will reveal the purpose of the universe, or “the mind of God,” as
Stephen Hawking once put it. Quite the contrary. Weinberg hoped that
a final theory would eliminate the wishful thinking, mysticism, and
superstition that pervades much of human thought, even among phys-
icists. “As long as we don’t know the fundamental rules,” he said, “we
can hope that we’ll find something like a concern for human beings,
say, or some guiding divine plan built into the fundamental rules. But
when we find out that the fundamental rules of quantum mechanics
and some symmetry principles are very impersonal and cold, then it’ll
have a very demystifying effect. At least that’s what I’d like to see.”
His face hardening, Weinberg continued: “I certainly would not dis-
agree with people who say that physics in my style or the Newtonian
style has produced a certain disenchantment. But if that’s the way the
world is, it’s better we find out. I see it as part of the growing up of our
species, just like the child finding out there is no tooth fairy. It’s better
to find out there is no tooth fairy, even though a world with tooth fair-
ies in it is somehow more delightful.”
Weinberg was well aware that many people hungered for a different
message from physics. In fact, earlier that day he had heard that Paul

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Davies, an Australian physicist, had received a million-dollar prize for

“advancing public understanding of God or spirituality.” Davies had
written numerous books, notably The Mind of God, suggesting that the
laws of physics reveal a plan underlying nature, a plan in which human
consciousness may play a central role.14 After telling me about Davies’s
prize, Weinberg chuckled mirthlessly. “I was thinking of cabling Davies
and saying, ‘Do you know of any organization that is willing to offer a
million-dollar prize for work showing that there is no divine plan?’”
In Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg dealt rather harshly with all
this talk of divine plans. He raised the embarrassing issue of human
suffering. What kind of plan is it that allows the Holocaust, and count-
less other evils, to happen? What kind of planner? Many physicists,
intoxicated by the power of their mathematical theories, have sug-
gested that “God is a geometer.” Weinberg retorted, in effect, that he
does not see why we should be interested in a God who seems so little
interested in us, however good he is at geometry.
I asked Weinberg what gave him the fortitude to sustain such
a bleak (and in my view, accurate) vision of the human condition. “I
sort of enjoy my tragic view,” he replied with a little smile. “After all,
which would you rather see, a tragedy or—” he hesitated, his smile
fading. “Well, some people would prefer to see a comedy. But . . . I
think the tragic view adds a certain dimension to life. Anyway, it’s the
best we have.” He stared out his office window, brooding. Fortunately,
perhaps, for Weinberg, his view did not include the infamous tower
from which a deranged University of Texas student, Charles Whitman,
shot 14 people to death in 1966. Weinberg’s office overlooks a graceful
Gothic church that serves as the university’s theological seminary. But
Weinberg did not seem to be looking at the church—or, for that mat-
ter, at anything else in the material world.

No More Surprises

E ven if society musters the will and the money to build larger acceler-
ators and thereby keep particle physics alive—at least temporarily—
how likely is it that physicists will learn something as truly new and

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surprising as, say, quantum mechanics? Not very, according to Hans

Bethe. A professor at Cornell University, Bethe won a Nobel Prize in
1967 for his work on the carbon cycle in stellar fusion; in other words,
he showed how stars shine. He also headed the theoretical division of
the Manhattan Project during World War II. In that capacity he made
what was arguably the most important calculations in the history of
the planet. Edward Teller (who, ironically, later became the scientific
community’s most avid booster of nuclear weapons) had done some
calculations suggesting that the fireball from an atomic blast might
ignite the earth’s atmosphere, triggering a conflagration that would
consume the entire world. The scientists studying Teller’s conjecture
took it very seriously; after all, they were exploring terra incognita.
Bethe then examined the problem and made his own calculations. He
determined that Teller was wrong; the fireball would not spread.15
No one should have to carry out calculations on which the fate of
the earth depends. But if someone must, Bethe would be my choice.
He exudes wisdom and gravitas. When I inquired whether he had
had any lingering doubts, in the moments before the bomb was det-
onated at Alamogordo, about what would happen, he shook his head.
No, he replied. His only concern had been whether the ignition device
would work properly. There was not a trace of braggadocio in Bethe’s
response. He had done the calculations, and he trusted them. (One
wonders whether even Edward Witten would entrust the fate of the
earth to a prediction based on superstrings.)
When I asked him about the future of his field, Bethe said there
were still many open questions in physics, including ones raised by the
standard model. Moreover, important discoveries would continue in
solid-state physics. But none of these advances would bring about rev-
olutionary changes in the foundations of physics, according to Bethe.
As an example, Bethe cited the discovery of so-called high-tempera-
ture superconductors, arguably the most exciting advance in physics
in decades. These materials, first reported in 1987, conduct electricity
with no resistance at relatively high temperatures (which are still well
below zero degrees Celsius). “That didn’t in any way change our under-
standing of electric conduction or even of superconductivity,” Bethe
said. “The basic structure of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics

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without relativity, that basic structure is finished.” In fact, “the under-

standing of atoms, molecules, the chemical bond, and so on, that was
all complete by 1928.” Could there ever be another revolution in phys-
ics like the one that accompanied quantum mechanics? “That’s very
unlikely,” Bethe replied in his unsettlingly matter-of-fact way.
Actually, almost all believers in a final theory agree that whatever
form it takes, it will still be a quantum theory. Steven Weinberg sug-
gested to me that a final theory of physics “might be as far removed
from what we now understand as quantum mechanics was from clas-
sical mechanics.” But he, like Hans Bethe, did not think the final the-
ory would supplant quantum mechanics in any way. “I think we’ll be
stuck with quantum mechanics,” Weinberg said. “So in that sense the
development of quantum mechanics may be more revolutionary than
anything before or after.”
Weinberg’s remarks reminded me of an essay published in Physics
Today in 1990, in which the physicist David Mermin of Cornell Uni-
versity recounted how a certain Professor Mozart (actually Mermin’s
cranky alter ego) had complained that “particle physics over the last 40
or 50 years has been a disappointment. Who would have expected that
in half a century we wouldn’t learn anything really profound!” When
Mermin asked the fictional professor what he meant, he replied, “All
particle physics has taught us about the central mystery is that quan-
tum mechanics still works. Perfectly, as far as anybody can tell. What
a letdown!”16

John Wheeler and the “It from Bit”

B ethe, Weinberg, and Mermin all seemed to suggest that quantum

mechanics is—at least in a qualitative sense—the final theory of
physics. Some physicists and philosophers have proposed that if they
could only understand quantum mechanics, if they could determine its
meaning, they might find The Answer. One of the most influential and
inventive interpreters of quantum mechanics, and of modern physics
in general, is John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler is the archetypal phys-
ics-for-poets physicist. He is famed for his analogies and aphorisms,

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self-made and coopted. Among the one-liners he bestowed on me when

I interviewed him on a warm spring day at Princeton were “If I can’t
picture it, I can’t understand it” (Einstein); “Unitarianism [Wheeler’s
nominal religion] is a feather bed to catch falling Christians” (Darwin);
“Never run after a bus or woman or cosmological theory, because
there’ll always be another one in a few minutes” (a friend of Wheeler’s
at Yale); and “If you haven’t found something strange during the day it
hasn’t been much of a day” (Wheeler).
Wheeler is also renowned for his physical energy. When we left his
third-floor office to get some lunch, he spurned the elevator—”eleva-
tors are hazardous to your health,” he declared—and charged down
the stairs. He hooked an arm inside the banister and pivoted at each
landing, letting centrifugal force whirl him around the hairpin and
down the next flight. “We have contests to see who can take the stairs
fastest,” he said over a shoulder. Outside, Wheeler marched rather than
walked, swinging his fists smartly in rhythm with his stride. He paused
only when we reached a door. Invariably he got there first and yanked
it open for me. After passing through I paused in reflexive deference—
Wheeler was almost 80 at the time—but a moment later he was past
me, barreling toward the next doorway.
The metaphor was so obvious I almost suspected Wheeler had it
in mind. Wheeler had made a career of racing ahead of other scien-
tists and throwing open doors for them. He had helped gain accep-
tance—or at least attention—for some of the most outlandish ideas
of modern physics, from black holes to multiple-universe theories to
quantum mechanics itself. Wheeler might have been dismissed as fun
but flaky long ago if he had not had such unassailable credentials. In
his early twenties, he had traveled to Denmark to study under Niels
Bohr (“because he sees further than any man alive,” Wheeler wrote in
his application for the fellowship). Bohr was to be the most profound
influence on Wheeler’s thought. In 1939, Bohr and Wheeler published
the first paper that successfully explained nuclear fission in terms of
quantum physics.17
Wheeler’s expertise in nuclear physics led to his involvement in the
construction of the first fission-based bomb during World War II and,
in the early years of the cold war, the first hydrogen bomb. After the

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war, Wheeler became one of the leading authorities on general rela-

tivity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. He coined the term black hole in the
late 1960s, and he played a major role in convincing astronomers that
these bizarre, infinitely dense objects predicted by Einstein’s theory
might actually exist. I asked Wheeler what characteristic made him
able to believe in such fantastical objects, which other physicists came
to accept only with great reluctance. “More vividness of imagination,”
he replied. “There’s that phrase of Bohr’s I like so much: ‘You must be
prepared for a surprise, and a very great surprise.’”
Beginning in the 1950s, Wheeler had grown increasingly intrigued
by the philosophical implications of quantum physics. The most widely
accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics was the so-called
orthodox interpretation (although “orthodox” seems an odd descriptor
for such a radical worldview). Also called the Copenhagen interpre-
tation, because it was set forth by Wheeler’s mentor, Bohr, in a series
of speeches in Copenhagen in the late 1920s, it held that subatomic
entities such as electrons have no real existence; they exist in a prob-
abilistic limbo of many possible superposed states until forced into a
single state by the act of observation. The electrons or photons may act
like waves or like particles, depending on how they are experimentally
observed.
Wheeler was one of the first prominent physicists to propose that
reality might not be wholly physical; in some sense, our cosmos might
be a participatory phenomenon, requiring the act of observation—and
thus consciousness itself. In the 1960s Wheeler helped to popularize
the notorious anthropic principle. It holds, essentially, that the universe
must be as it is, because, if it were otherwise, we might not be here
to observe it. Wheeler also began to draw his colleagues’ attention to
some intriguing links between physics and information theory, which
was invented in 1948 by the mathematician Claude Shannon. Just as
physics builds on an elementary, indivisible entity—namely, the quan-
tum—which is defined by the act of observation, so does information
theory. Its quantum is the binary unit, or bit, which is a message repre-
senting one of two choices: heads or tails, yes or no, zero or one.
Wheeler became even more deeply convinced of the importance of
information after concocting a thought experiment that exposed the

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strangeness of the quantum world for all to see. Wheeler’s delayed-

choice experiment is a variation on the classic (but not classical)
two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature
of quantum phenomena. When electrons are aimed at a barrier con-
taining two slits, the electrons act like waves; they go through both
slits at once and form what is called an interference pattern, created
by the overlapping of the waves, when they strike a detector on the
far side of the barrier. If the physicist closes off one slit at a time, how-
ever, the electrons pass through the open slit like simple particles and
the interference pattern disappears. In the delayed-choice experiment,
the experimenter decides whether to leave both slits open or to close
one off after the electrons have already passed through the barrier—with the
same results. The electrons seem to know in advance how the physicist
will choose to observe them. This experiment was carried out in the
early 1990s and confirmed Wheeler’s prediction.
Wheeler accounted for this conundrum with yet another analogy.
He likened the job of a physicist to that of someone playing 20 ques-
tions in its surprise version. In this variant of the old game, one person
leaves the room while the rest of the group—or so the excluded person
thinks—selects some person, place, or thing. The single player then
reenters the room and tries to guess what the others have in mind by
asking a series of questions that can only be answered yes or no. Unbe-
knownst to the guesser, the group has decided to play a trick. The first
person to be queried will think of an object only after the questioner
asks the question. Each person will do the same, giving a response that
is consistent not only with the immediate question but also with all
previous questions.
“The word wasn’t in the room when I came in even though I thought
it was,” Wheeler explained. In the same way, the electron, before the
physicist chooses how to observe it, is neither a wave nor a particle. It
is in some sense unreal; it exists in an indeterminate limbo. “Not until
you start asking a question, do you get something,” Wheeler said. “The
situation cannot declare itself until you’ve asked your question. But the
asking of one question prevents and excludes the asking of another. So
if you ask where my great white hope presently lies—and I always find
it interesting to ask people what’s your great white hope—I’d say it’s in

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the idea that the whole show can be reduced to something similar in a
broad sense to this game of 20 questions.”
Wheeler has condensed these ideas into a phrase that resembles a
Zen koan: “the it from bit.” In one of his free-form essays, Wheeler
unpacked the phrase as follows: “every it—every particle, every field
of force, even the spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its
meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indi-
rectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions,
binary choices, bits.”18
Inspired by Wheeler, an ever-larger group of researchers—includ-
ing computer scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, and biologists,
as well as physicists—began probing the links between information
theory and physics in the late 1980s. Some superstring theorists even
joined in, trying to knit together quantum field theory, black holes, and
information theory with a skein of strings. Wheeler acknowledged that
these ideas were still raw, not yet ready for rigorous testing. He and his
fellow explorers were still “trying to get the lay of the land” and “learn-
ing how to express things that we already know” in the language of
information theory. The effort may lead to a dead end, Wheeler said,
or to a powerful new vision of reality, of “the whole show.”
Wheeler emphasized that science has many mysteries left to explain.
“We live still in the childhood of mankind,” he said. “All these horizons
are beginning to light up in our day: molecular biology, DNA, cosmol-
ogy. We’re just children looking for answers.” He served up another
aphorism: “As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of
our ignorance.” Yet he was also convinced that humans would some-
day find The Answer. In search of a quotation that expressed his faith, he
jumped up and pulled down a book on information theory and physics
to which he had contributed an essay. After flipping it open, he read:
“Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it
all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each
other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have
been so blind for so long!’”19 Wheeler looked up from the book; his
expression was beatific. “I don’t know whether it will be one year or
a decade, but I think we can and will understand. That’s the central
thing I would like to stand for. We can and will understand.”

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Many modern scientists, Wheeler noted, shared his faith that

humans would one day find The Answer. For example, Kurt Gödel,
once Wheeler’s neighbor in Princeton, believed that The Answer might
already have been discovered. “He thought that maybe among the
papers of Leibniz, which in his time had still not been fully smoked
out, we would find the—what was the word—the philosopher’s key,
the magic way to find truth and solve any set of puzzlements.” Gödel
felt that this key “would give a person who understood it such power
that you could only entrust the knowledge of this philosopher’s key to
people of high moral character.”
Yet Wheeler’s own mentor, Bohr, apparently doubted whether sci-
ence or mathematics could achieve such a revelation. Wheeler learned
of Bohr’s view not from the great man himself, but from his son. After
Bohr died, his son told Wheeler that Bohr had felt that the search for
the ultimate theory of physics might never reach a satisfying conclu-
sion; as physicists sought to penetrate further into nature, they would
face questions of increasing complexity and difficulty that would
eventually overwhelm them. “I guess I’m more optimistic than that,”
Wheeler said. He paused a moment and added, with a rare note of som-
berness, “But maybe I’m kidding myself.”
The irony is that Wheeler’s own ideas suggest that a final theory
will always be a mirage, that the truth is in some sense imagined rather
than objectively apprehended. According to the it from bit, we create
not only truth, but even reality itself—the “it”—with the questions we
ask. Wheeler’s view comes dangerously close to relativism, or worse.
In the early 1980s, organizers of the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science placed Wheeler on a pro-
gram with three parapsychologists. Wheeler was furious. At the meet-
ing, he made it clear that he did not share the belief of his cospeakers in
psychic phenomena. He passed out a pamphlet that declared, in refer-
ence to parapsychology, “Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.”
Yet Wheeler himself has suggested that there is nothing but smoke.
“I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of
the imagination,” he once remarked to the science writer and physi-
cist Jeremy Bernstein.20 Wheeler is well aware that this view is, from
an empirical viewpoint, unsupportable: Where was mind when the

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universe was born? And what sustained the universe for the billions
of years before we came to be? He nonetheless bravely offers us a
lovely, chilling paradox: at the heart of everything is a question, not an
answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at
the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled faces
looking back at us.

David Bohm’s Implicate Order

N ot surprisingly, some other physicist-philosophers have bridled both

at Wheeler’s views and, more generally, at the Copenhagen inter-
pretation set forth by Bohr. One prominent dissident was David Bohm.
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Bohm left the United States in 1951, at
the height of the McCarthy era, after refusing to answer questions from
the Un-American Activities Committee about whether he or any of his
scientific colleagues (notably Robert Oppenheimer) were communists.
After stays in Brazil and Israel, he settled in England in the late 1950s.
By then, Bohm had already begun developing an alternative to the
Copenhagen interpretation. Sometimes called the pilot-wave interpre-
tation, it preserves all the predictive power of quantum mechanics but
eliminates many of the most bizarre aspects of the orthodox interpre-
tation, such as the schizophrenic character of quanta and their depen-
dence on observers for existence. Since the late 1980s, the pilot-wave
theory has attracted increasing attention from physicists and philoso-
phers uncomfortable with the subjectivism and antideterminism of the
Copenhagen interpretation.
Paradoxically, Bohm also seemed intent on making physics even
more philosophical, speculative, holistic. He went much further than
Wheeler did in drawing analogies between quantum mechanics and
Eastern religion. He developed a philosophy, called the implicate order,
that sought to embrace both mystical and scientific knowledge. Bohm’s
writings on these topics attracted an almost cultlike following; he
became a hero to those who hoped to achieve mystical insight through
physics. Few scientists combine these two contradictory impulses—the
need to clarify reality and to mystify it—in such a dramatic fashion.21

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In August 1992, I visited Bohm at his home in Edgeware, a suburb

north of London. His skin was alarmingly pale, especially in contrast
to his purplish lips and dark, wiry hair. His frame, sinking into a large
armchair, seemed limp and langorous, but at the same time suffused
with nervous energy. He cupped one hand over the top of his head;
the other rested on the armrest. His fingers, long and blue veined, with
tapered, yellow nails, were splayed. He was recovering, he told me,
from a recent heart attack.
Bohm’s wife brought us tea and biscuits and then retreated to
another part of the house. Bohm spoke haltingly at first, but gradu-
ally the words came faster, in a low, urgent monotone. His mouth was
apparently dry, because he kept smacking his lips. Occasionally, after
making some observation that amused him, he pulled his lips back
from his teeth in a semblance of a smile. He also had the disconcerting
habit of pausing every few sentences and saying, “Is that clear?” or sim-
ply, “Hmmm?” I was often so befuddled, and so hopeless of finding my
way to understanding, that I just nodded and smiled. But Bohm could
be absolutely, rivetingly clear, too. Later, I learned that he had this
same effect on others; like some strange quantum particle, he oscil-
lated in and out of focus.
Bohm said he had begun to question the Copenhagen interpretation
in the late 1940s, while writing a book on quantum mechanics. Bohr
had rejected the possibility that the probabilistic behavior of quantum
systems was actually the result of underlying, deterministic mecha-
nisms, sometimes called hidden variables. Reality was unknowable
because it was intrinsically indeterminate, Bohr insisted.
Bohm found this view unacceptable. “The whole idea of science so far
has been to say that underlying the phenomenon is some reality which
explains things,” he explained. “It was not that Bohr denied reality,
but he said quantum mechanics implied there was nothing more that
could be said about it.” Such a view, Bohm decided, reduced quantum
mechanics to “a system of formulas that we use to make predictions or
to control things technologically. I said, that’s not enough. I don’t think I
would be very interested in science if that were all there was.”
In a paper published in 1952, Bohm proposed that particles are
indeed particles—and at all times, not just when they are observed.

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Their behavior is determined by a new, heretofore undetected force,

which Bohm called the pilot wave. Any effort to measure these prop-
erties precisely would destroy information about them by physically
altering the pilot wave. Bohm thus gave the uncertainty principle a
purely physical rather than a metaphysical meaning. Bohr had inter-
preted the uncertainty principle as meaning “not that there is uncer-
tainty, but that there is an inherent ambiguity” in a quantum system,
Bohm told me.
Bohm’s interpretation did permit, and even highlight, one quantum
paradox: nonlocality, the ability of one particle to influence another
instantaneously across vast distances. Einstein had drawn attention to
non-locality in 1935 in an effort to show that quantum mechanics must
be flawed. Together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein
proposed a thought experiment—now called the EPR experiment—
involving two particles that spring from a common source and fly in
opposite directions.22
According to the standard model of quantum mechanics, neither
particle has a definite position or momentum before it is measured; but
by measuring the momentum of one particle, the physicist instanta-
neously forces the other particle to assume a fixed position—even if it
is on the other side of the galaxy. Deriding this effect as “spooky action
at a distance,” Einstein argued that it violated both common sense
and his own theory of special relativity, which prohibits the propaga-
tion of effects faster than the speed of light; quantum mechanics must
therefore be an incomplete theory. In 1980, however, a group of French
physicists carried out a version of the EPR experiment and showed that
it did indeed give rise to spooky action. (The reason that the experi-
ment does not violate special relativity is that one cannot exploit non-
locality to transmit information.) Bohm never had any doubts about
the outcome of the experiment. “It would have been a terrific surprise
to find out otherwise,” he said.
As Bohm was trying to bring the world into sharper focus through
his pilot-wave model, however, he was also arguing that complete clar-
ity was impossible. His ideas were inspired in part by an experiment he
saw on television, in which a drop of ink was squeezed onto a cylinder
of glycerin. When the cylinder was rotated, the ink diffused through

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the glycerin in an apparently irreversible fashion; its order seemed to

have disintegrated. But when the direction of rotation was reversed,
the ink gathered into a drop again.
Upon this simple experiment, Bohm built a worldview called the
implicate order. Underlying the apparently chaotic realm of physical
appearances—the explicate order—there is always a deeper, hidden,
implicate order. Applying this concept to the quantum realm, Bohm
proposed that the implicate order is the quantum potential, a field con-
sisting of an infinite number of fluctuating pilot waves. The overlap-
ping of these waves generates what appear to us as particles, which
constitute the explicate order. Even such seemingly fundamental
concepts as space and time may be merely explicate manifestations of
some deeper, implicate order, according to Bohm.
To plumb the implicate order, Bohm said, physicists might need
to jettison some basic assumptions about the organization of nature.
“Fundamental notions like order and structure condition our think-
ing unconsciously, and new kinds of theories depend on new kinds of
order,” he remarked. During the Enlightenment, thinkers such as New-
ton and Descartes replaced the ancients’ organic concept of order with
a mechanistic view. Although the advent of relativity and other theo-
ries brought about modifications in this order, “the basic idea is still the
same,” Bohm said, “a mechanical order described by coordinates.”
But Bohm, in spite of his own enormous ambitions as a truth seeker,
rejected the possibility that scientists could bring their enterprise to an
end by reducing all the phenomena of nature to a single phenomenon
(such as superstrings). “I think there are no limits to this. People are
going to talk about the theory of everything, but that’s an assumption,
you see, which has no basis. At each level we have something which is
taken as appearance and something else is taken as the essence which
explains the appearance. But then when we move to another level
essence and appearance interchange their rules, right? Is that clear?
There’s no end to this, you see? The very nature of our knowledge is of
that nature, you see. But what underlies it all is unknown and cannot
be grasped by thought.”
To Bohm, science was “an inexhaustible process.” Modern physi-
cists, he pointed out, assume that the forces of nature are the essence

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of reality. “But why are the forces of nature there? The forces of nature
are then taken as the essence. The atoms weren’t the essence. Why
should these forces be?”
The belief of modern physicists in a final theory could only be
self-fulfilling, Bohm said. “If you do that you’ll keep away from really
questioning deeply.” He noted that “if you have fish in a tank and you
put a glass barrier in there, the fish keep away from it. And then if you
take away the glass barrier they never cross the barrier and they think
the whole world is that.” He chuckled drily. “So your thought that this
is the end could be the barrier to looking further.”
Bohm reiterated that “we’re not ever going to get a final essence
which isn’t also the appearance of something.” But wasn’t that frus-
trating? I asked. “Well, it depends what you want. You’re frustrated if
you want to get it all. On the other hand, scientists are going to be frus-
trated if they get the final answer and then have nothing to do except
be technicians, you see.” He uttered his dry laugh. So, I said, damned
if you do and damned if you don’t. “Well, I think you have to look at it
differently, you see. One of the reasons for doing science is the exten-
sion of perception and not of current knowledge. We are constantly
coming into contact with reality better and better.”
Science, Bohm continued, is sure to evolve in totally unexpected
ways. He expressed the hope that future scientists would be less depen-
dent on mathematics for modeling reality and would draw on new
sources of metaphor and analogy. “We have an assumption now that’s
getting stronger and stronger that mathematics is the only way to deal
with reality,” Bohm said. “Because it’s worked so well for a while we’ve
assumed that it has to be that way.”
Like many other scientific visionaries, Bohm expected that science
and art would someday merge. “This division of art and science is tem-
porary,” he observed. “It didn’t exist in the past, and there’s no rea-
son why it should go on in the future.” Just as art consists not simply
of works of art but of an “attitude, the artistic spirit,” so does science
consist not in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of
fresh modes of perception. “The ability to perceive or think differ-
ently is more important than the knowledge gained,” Bohm explained.
There was something poignant about Bohm’s hope that science might

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become more artlike. Most physicists have objected to his pilot-wave

interpretation on aesthetic grounds: it is too ugly to be right.
Bohm, trying to convince me once and for all of the impossibility of
final knowledge, offered the following argument: “Anything known has
to be determined by its limits. And that’s not just quantitative but qual-
itative. The theory is this and not that. Now it’s consistent to propose
that there is the unlimited. You have to notice that if you say there is the
unlimited, it cannot be different, because then the unlimited will limit
the limited, by saying that the limited is not the unlimited, right? The
unlimited must include the limited. We have to say, from the unlimited
the limited arises, in a creative process; that’s consistent. Therefore we
say that no matter how far we go there is the unlimited. It seems that no
matter how far you go, somebody will come up with another point you
have to answer. And I don’t see how you could ever settle that.”
At this moment, to my relief, Bohm’s wife entered the room and
asked if we wanted more tea. As she refilled my cup, I pointed out a
book on Tibetan mysticism on a shelf behind Bohm. When I asked
Bohm if he had been influenced by such writings, he nodded. He had
been a friend and student of the Indian mystic Krishnamurti, who died
in 1986. Krishnamurti was one of the first modern Indian sages to try
to show westerners how to achieve enlightenment. Was Krishnamurti
himself enlightened? “In some ways, yes,” Bohm replied. “His basic
thing was to go into thought, to get to the end of it, completely, and
thought would become a different kind of consciousness.” Of course,
one could never truly plumb one’s own mind, Bohm said. Any attempt
to examine one’s own thought changes it—just as the measurement of
an electron alters its course. There could be no final mystical knowl-
edge, Bohm seemed to be implying, any more than there could be a
final theory of physics.
Was Krishnamurti a happy person? Bohm looked puzzled at my
question. “That’s hard to say,” he replied eventually. “He was unhappy
at times, but I think he was pretty happy overall. The thing is not about
happiness, really.” Bohm frowned, as if realizing the import of what he
had just said.
In Science, Order, and Creativity, cowritten with F. David Peat, Bohm
insisted on the importance of “playfulness” in science, and in life.23

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But Bohm himself, both in his writings and in person, was anything
but playful. For him, this was not a game, this truth seeking; it was a
dreadful, impossible, but necessary task. Bohm was desperate to know,
to discover the secret of everything, either through physics or through
meditation, through mystical knowledge. And yet he insisted that real-
ity was unknowable—because, I believe, he was repelled by the thought
of finality. He recognized that any truth, no matter how initially won-
drous, eventually ossifies into a dead, inanimate thing that does not
reveal the absolute but conceals it. Bohm craved not truth but revelation,
perpetual revelation. As a result, he was doomed to perpetual doubt.
I finally said good-bye to Bohm and his wife and departed. Outside,
a light rain was falling. I walked up the path to the street and glanced
back at the Bohms’ house, a modest, whitewashed cottage on a street
of modest, whitewashed cottages. Bohm died of a heart attack two
months later.24

Feynman’s Gloomy Prophecy

In The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel

Prize in 1965 for devising a quantum version of electromagnetism,
offered a rather dark prophecy about the future of physics:

We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making

discoveries. It is like the discovery of America—you only discover
it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are dis-
covering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never
come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excite-
ment will have to go. Of course in the future there will be other
interests. There will be the interest of the connection of one level
of phenomena to another—phenomena in biology and so on, or,
if you are talking about exploration, exploring other planets, but
there will not be the same things we are doing now.25

After the fundamental laws are discovered, physics will succumb to

second-rate thinkers, that is, philosophers. “The philosophers who are

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always on the outside making stupid remarks will be able to close in,
because we cannot push them away by saying, ‘If you were right we
would be able to guess all the laws,’ because when the laws are all there
they will have an explanation for them. . . . There will be a degener-
ation of ideas, just like the degeneration that great explorers feel is
occurring when tourists begin moving in on a new territory.”26
Feynman’s vision was uncannily on target. He erred only in thinking
that it would be millennia, not decades, before the philosophers closed
in. I saw the future of physics in 1992 when I attended a symposium at
Columbia University in which philosophers and physicists discussed
the meaning of quantum mechanics.27 The symposium demonstrated
that more than 60 years after quantum mechanics was invented, its
meaning remained, to put it politely, elusive. In the lectures, one could
hear echoes of Wheeler’s it from bit approach, and Bohm’s pilot-wave
hypothesis, and the many-worlds model favored by Steven Weinberg
and others. But for the most part each speaker seemed to have arrived
at a private understanding of quantum mechanics, couched in idiosyn-
cratic language; no one seemed to understand, let alone agree with,
anyone else. The bickering brought to mind what Bohr once said of
quantum mechanics: “If you think you understand it, that only shows
you don’t know the first thing about it.”28
Of course, the apparent disarray could have stemmed entirely from
my own ignorance. But when I revealed my impression of confusion
and dissonance to one of the attendees, he reassured me that my per-
ception was accurate. “It’s a mess,” he said of the conference (and, by
implication, the whole business of interpreting quantum mechanics).
The problem, he noted, arose because, for the most part, the differ-
ent interpretations of quantum mechanics cannot be empirically dis-
tinguished from one another; philosophers and physicists favor one
interpretation over another for aesthetic and philosophical—that is,
subjective—reasons.
This is the fate of physics. The vast majority of physicists, those
employed in industry and even academia, will continue to apply the
knowledge they already have in hand—inventing more versatile lasers
and superconductors and computing devices—without worrying about
any underlying philosophical issues.29 A few diehards dedicated to

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truth rather than practicality will 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 exper-
imentally resolved, will become more and more like those of that bas-
tion of literary criticism, the Modern Language Association.

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 CHAPTER FOUR
THE END OF COSMOLOGY

I
n 1990 I traveled to a remote resort in the mountains of northern
Sweden to attend a symposium entitled “The Birth and Early Evolu-
tion of Our Universe.” When I arrived, I found that about 30 particle
physicists and astronomers from around the world—the United States,
Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan—were there. I had come to the
meeting in part to meet Stephen Hawking. The compelling symbol-
ism of his plight—powerful brain in a paralyzed body—had helped to
make him one of the best-known scientists in the world.
Hawking’s condition, when I met him, was worse than I had
expected. He sat in a semifetal position, hunch shouldered, slack jawed,
and painfully frail, his head tipped to one side, in a wheelchair loaded
with batteries and computers. As far as I could tell, he could move only
his left forefinger. With it he laboriously selected letters, words, or
sentences from a menu on his computer screen. A voice synthesizer
uttered the words in an incongruously deep, authoritative voice—rem-
iniscent of the cyborg hero of Robocop. Hawking seemed, for the most
part, more amused than distressed by his plight. His purple-lipped,
Mick Jagger mouth often curled up at one corner in a kind of smirk.
Hawking was scheduled to give a talk on quantum cosmology, a
field he had helped to create. Quantum cosmology assumes that at
very small scales, quantum uncertainty causes not merely matter and
energy, but the very fabric of space and time, to flicker between dif-
ferent states. These space-time fluctuations might give rise to worm-
holes, which could link one region of space-time with another one very
far away, or to “baby universes.” Hawking had stored the hour-long
90

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speech, titled “The Alpha Parameters of Wormholes,” in his computer;

he had merely to tap a key to prompt his voice synthesizer to read it,
sentence by sentence.
In his eerie cyber-voice, Hawking discussed whether we might
someday be able to slip into a wormhole in our galaxy and a moment
later pop out the other end in a galaxy far, far away. Probably not, he
concluded, because quantum effects would scramble our constituent
particles beyond recognition. (Hawking’s argument implied that “warp
drive,” the faster-than-light transport depicted in Star Trek, was impos-
sible.) He wrapped up his lecture with a digression on superstring the-
ory. Although all we see around us is the “mini-superspace” that we
call space-time, “we are really living in the infinite dimensional super-
space of string theory.”1
My response to Hawking was ambivalent. He was, on the one hand,
a heroic figure. Trapped in a crippled, helpless body, he could still imag-
ine realities with infinite degrees of freedom. On the other hand, what
he was saying struck me as being utterly preposterous. Wormholes?
Baby universes? Infinite dimensional superspace of string theory? This
seemed more science fiction than science.
I had more or less the same reaction to the entire conference. A few
talks—those in which astronomers discussed what they had gleaned
from probing the cosmos with telescopes and other instruments—
were firmly grounded in reality. This was empirical science. But many
of the presentations addressed issues hopelessly divorced from reality,
from any possible empirical test. What was the universe like when
it was the size of a basketball, or a pea, or a proton, or a superstring?
What is the effect on our universe of all the other universes linked to it
by wormholes? There was something both grand and ludicrous about
grown men (no women were present) bickering over such issues.
Over the course of the meeting, I struggled to quell that instinctive
feeling of preposterousness, with some success. I reminded myself that
these were terribly smart people, “the greatest geniuses in the world,”
as a local Swedish newspaper had put it. They would not waste their
time on trivial pursuits. I therefore did my best, in writing later about
the ideas of Hawking and other cosmologists, to make them sound
plausible, to instill awe and comprehension instead of skepticism and

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confusion in readers. That is the job of the science writer, after all.
But sometimes the clearest science writing is the most dishonest.
My initial reaction to Hawking and others at the conference was, to
some extent, appropriate. Much of modern cosmology, particularly
those aspects inspired by unified theories of particle physics and other
esoteric ideas, is preposterous. Or, rather, it is ironic science, science
that is not experimentally testable or resolvable even in principle and
therefore is not science in the strict sense at all. Its primary function is
to keep us awestruck before the mystery of the cosmos.
The irony is that Hawking was the first prominent physicist of his
generation to predict that physics might soon achieve a complete, uni-
fied theory of nature and thus bring about its own demise. He offered
up this prophecy in 1980, just after he had been named the Lucasian Pro-
fessor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge; Newton had held
this chair some 300 years earlier. (Few observers noted that at the end
of his speech, titled “Is the End of Theoretical Physics in Sight?,” Hawk-
ing suggested that computers, given their accelerated evolution, might
soon surpass their human creators in intelligence and achieve the final
theory on their own.)2 Hawking spelled out his prophecy in more detail
in A Brief History of Time. The attainment of a final theory, he declared in
the book’s closing sentence, might help us to “know the mind of God.”3
The phrase suggested that a final theory would bequeath us a mystical
revelation in whose glow we could bask for the rest of time.
But earlier in the book, in discussing what he called the no-bound-
ary proposal, Hawking offered a very different view of what a final
theory might accomplish. The no-boundary proposal addressed the
age-old questions: What was there before the big bang? What exists
beyond the borders of our universe? According to the no-boundary
proposal, the entire history of the universe, all of space and all of time,
forms a kind of four-dimensional sphere: space-time. Talking about
the beginning or end of the universe is thus as meaningless as talking
about the beginning or end of a sphere. Physics, too, Hawking conjec-
tured, might form a perfect, seamless whole after it is unified; there
might be only one fully consistent unified theory capable of generating
space-time as we know it. God might not have had any choice in creat-
ing the universe.

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“What place, then, for a creator?” Hawking asked.4 There is no place,

was his reply; a final theory would exclude God from the universe, and
with him all mystery. Like Steven Weinberg, Hawking hoped to rout
mysticism, vitalism, creationism from one of their last refuges, the
origin of the universe. According to one biographer, Hawking and his
wife, Jane, separated in 1990 in part because she, as a devout Christian,
had become increasingly offended by his atheism.5
After the publication of Brief History, several other books took up
the question of whether physics could achieve a complete and final the-
ory, one that would answer all questions and thereby bring physics to
an end. Those who claimed that no such theory was possible tended
to fall back on Gödel’s theorem and other esoterica. But throughout
his career, Hawking has demonstrated that there is a much more basic
obstacle to a theory of everything. Physicists can never eradicate mys-
tery from the universe, they can never find The Answer, as long as there
are physicists with imaginations as florid as Hawking’s.
I suspect that Hawking—who may be less a truth seeker than an
artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker—knew all along that finding and
empirically validating a unified theory would be extremely difficult,
even impossible. His declaration that physics was on the verge of find-
ing The Answer may well have been an ironic statement, less an asser-
tion than a provocation. In 1994, he admitted as much when he told an
interviewer that physics might never achieve a final theory after all.6
Hawking is a master practitioner of ironic physics and cosmology.

Cosmology’s Great Surprises

T he most remarkable fact about modern cosmology is that it is not

all ironic. Cosmology has given us several genuine, irrefutable sur-
prises. Early in this century, the Milky Way, the island of stars within
which our own sun nestles, was thought to constitute the entire uni-
verse. Then astronomers realized that minute smudges of light called
nebulae, thought to be mere clouds of gas within the Milky Way, were
actually islands of stars. The Milky Way was only one of a vast num-
ber of galaxies in a universe that was much, much larger than anyone

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had imagined. That finding represented an enormous, empirical, irre-

vocable surprise, one that even the most hardcore relativist would be
hard-pressed to deny. To paraphrase Sheldon Glashow, galaxies are not
imagined and unimagined; they exist.
Another great surprise was to come. Astronomers discovered that
the glow of galaxies was invariably shifted toward the red end of the
visible spectrum. Apparently the galaxies were hurtling away from the
earth and from each other, and this recessional velocity caused the light
to undergo a Doppler shift (the same shift that makes an ambulance
siren deepen in pitch as it races away from a listener). The red-shift evi-
dence supported a theory, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, that
the universe had begun in an explosion that was ongoing.
In the 1950s, theorists predicted that the fiery birth of the universe
billions of years ago should have left an afterglow in the form of faint
microwaves. In 1964 two radio engineers at Bell Laboratories stumbled
upon the so-called cosmic background radiation. Physicists had also
proposed that the fireball of creation would have served as a nuclear
furnace in which hydrogen fused into helium and other light elements.
Careful observations over the past few decades have shown that the
abundances of light elements in the Milky Way and in other galaxies
precisely match theoretical predictions.
David Schramm of Fermilab and the University of Chicago likes to
call these three lines of evidence—the red shift of galaxies, the micro-
wave background, and the abundance of elements—the pillars on
which the big bang theory stands. Schramm is a big, barrel-chested,
ebullient man, a pilot, mountain climber, and former collegiate cham-
pion in Greco-Roman wrestling. He is an indefatigable booster of the
big bang—and of his own role in refining the calculations of light-el-
ement abundances. After I arrived at the symposium in Sweden,
Schramm sat me down and went over the evidence for the big bang in
great detail. “The big bang is in fantastic shape,” he said. “We have the
basic framework. We just need to fill in the gaps.”
Schramm acknowledged that some of those gaps were rather large.
Theorists cannot determine precisely how the hot plasma of the early
universe condensed into stars and galaxies. Observations have sug-
gested that the visible, starry stuff that astronomers can see through

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their telescopes is not massive enough to keep galaxies from flying

apart; some invisible, or dark, matter must be binding the galaxies
together. All the matter that we can see, in other words, may be just
foam on a deep, dark sea.
Another question concerns what cosmologists like to call “large-
scale structure.” In the early days of cosmology, galaxies seemed to be
scattered more or less evenly throughout the universe. But as obser-
vations improved, astronomers found that galaxies tend to huddle
together in clusters surrounded by gigantic voids. Finally, there is the
question of how the universe behaved in the so-called quantum gravity
era, when the cosmos was so small and hot that all the forces of the
universe were thought to be unified. These were the issues that dom-
inated discussion during the Nobel symposium in Sweden. But none
of these problems, Schramm insisted, threatened the basic framework
of the big bang. “Just because you can’t predict tornadoes,” he said,
“doesn’t mean the earth isn’t round.”7
Schramm delivered much the same message to his fellow cosmol-
ogists at the Nobel symposium. He kept proclaiming that cosmology
was in a “golden age.” His chamber of commerce enthusiasm seemed
to grate on some of his colleagues; after all, one does not become a
cosmologist to fill in the details left by the pioneers. After Schramm’s
umpteenth “golden age” proclamation, one physicist snapped that you
cannot know an age is golden when you are in that age but only in
retrospect. Schramm jokes proliferated. One colleague speculated that
the stocky physicist might represent the solution to the dark matter
problem. Another proposed that Schramm be employed as a plug to
prevent our universe from being sucked down a wormhole.
Toward the end of the meeting in Sweden, Hawking, Schramm, and
all the other cosmologists piled into a bus and drove to a nearby village
to hear a concert. When they entered the Lutheran church where the
concert was to be held, it was already filled. The orchestra, a motley
assortment of flaxen-haired youths and wizened elders clutching vio-
lins, clarinets, and other instruments, was already seated at the front
of the church. Their neighbors jammed the balconies and the seats at
the rear of the church. As the scientists filed down the center aisle to
the pews at the front reserved for them, Hawking leading the way in

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his motorized wheelchair, the townspeople started to clap, tentatively

at first, then passionately, for almost a full minute. The symbolism was
perfect: for this moment, at least, in this place and for these people,
science had usurped the role of religion as the source of truth about the
universe.
Doubts had infiltrated the scientific priesthood, however. In the
moments before the concert began, I overheard a conversation between
David Schramm and Neil Turok, a young British physicist. Turok con-
fided to Schramm that he was so concerned about the intractability of
questions related to dark matter and the distribution of galaxies that he
was thinking of quitting cosmology and entering another field. “Who
says we have any right to understand the universe, anyway?” Turok
asked plaintively. Schramm shook his big head. The basic framework
of cosmology, the big bang theory, was absolutely sound, he whis-
pered insistently, as the orchestra began warming up; cosmologists just
needed to tie up a few loose ends. “Things will sort themselves out,”
Schramm said.
Turok seemed to find Schramm’s words comforting, but he prob-
ably should have been alarmed. What if Schramm was right? What
if cosmologists already had, in the big bang theory, the major answer
to the puzzle of the universe? What if all that remained was tying up
loose ends, those that could be tied up? Given this possibility, it is no
wonder that “strong” scientists such as Hawking have vaulted past the
big bang theory into postempirical science. What else can someone so
creative and ambitious do?

The Russian Magician

O ne of Stephen Hawking’s few rivals as a practitioner of ironic cos-

mology is Andrei Linde, a Russian physicist who emigrated to Swit-
zerland in 1988 and to the United States two years later. Linde, too,
was at the Nobel symposium in Sweden, and his antics were among
the highlights of the meeting. After imbibing a drink or two at an out-
door cocktail party, Linde snapped a rock in half with a karate chop.
He stood on his hands and then flipped himself backward and landed

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on his feet. He pulled a box of wooden matches out of his pocket and
placed two of them, forming a cross, on his hand. While Linde kept his
hand—at least seemingly—perfectly still, the top match trembled and
hopped as if jerked by an invisible string. The trick maddened his col-
leagues. Before long, matches and curses were flying every which way
as a dozen or so of the world’s most prominent cosmologists sought
in vain to duplicate Linde’s feat. When they demanded to know how
Linde did it, he smiled and growled, “Ees kvantum fluctuation.”
Linde is even more renowned for his theoretical sleights of hand. In
the early 1980s he helped to win acceptance for one of the more extrav-
agant ideas to emerge from particle physics: inflation. The invention of
inflation (the term discovery is not appropriate here) is generally cred-
ited to Alan Guth of MIT, but Linde helped to refine the theory and
win its acceptance. Guth and Linde proposed that very early in the his-
tory of our universe—at T = 10 –43 seconds, to be precise, when the cos-
mos was allegedly much smaller than a proton—gravity might briefly
have become a repulsive rather than an attractive force. As a result,
the universe supposedly passed through a tremendous, exponential
growth spurt before settling down to its current, much more leisurely
rate of expansion.
Guth and Linde based their idea on untested—and almost certainly
untestable—unified theories of particle physics. Cosmologists nonethe-
less fell in love with inflation, because it could explain some nagging
problems raised by the standard big bang model. First, why does the
universe appear more or less the same in all directions? The answer is
that just as blowing up a balloon smooths out its wrinkles, so would
the exponential expansion of the universe render it relatively smooth.
Conversely, inflation also explains why the universe is not a completely
homogeneous consommé of radiation, but contains lumps of matter in
the form of stars and galaxies. Quantum mechanics suggests that even
empty space is brimming with energy; this energy constantly fluctu-
ates, like waves dancing on the surface of a windblown lake. Accord-
ing to inflation, the peaks generated by these quantum fluctuations in
the very early universe could have become large enough, after being
inflated, to serve as the gravitational seeds from which stars and galax-
ies would grow.

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Inflation has some startling implications, one of which is that every-

thing we can see through our telescopes represents an infinitesimal
fraction of the vastly larger realm created during inflation. But Linde
did not stop there. Even that prodigious universe, he contended, is
only one of an infinite number spawned by inflation. Inflation, once
it begins, can never end; it has created not only our universe—the gal-
axy-emblazoned realm we ponder through our telescopes—but also
countless others. This megaverse has what is known as a fractal struc-
ture: the big universes sprout little universes, which sprout still smaller
ones, and so on. Linde called his model the chaotic, fractal, eternally
self-reproducing, inflationary universe.8
For someone so publicly playful and inventive, Linde can be sur-
prisingly dour. I glimpsed this side of his character when I visited him
at Stanford University, where he and his wife, Renata Kallosh, who
is also a theoretical physicist, began working in 1990. When I arrived
at the gray, cubist home they were renting, Linde gave me a perfunc-
tory tour. In the backyard we encountered Kallosh, who was rooting
happily in a flower bed. “Look, Andrei!” she cried, pointing to a nest
filled with cheeping birds on a tree branch above her. Linde, his pallor
and squint betraying his unfamiliarity with sunlight, merely nodded.
When I asked if he found California relaxing, he muttered, “Maybe too
relaxing.”
As Linde recounted his life story, it became apparent that anxiety,
even depression, had played a significant role in motivating him. At
various stages of his career, he would despair of having any insight into
the nature of things—just before achieving a breakthrough. Linde had
stumbled on the basic concept of inflation in the late 1970s, while in
Moscow, but decided that the idea was too flawed to pursue. His inter-
est was revived by Alan Guth’s proposal that inflation could explain
several puzzling features of the universe, such as its smoothness, but
Guth’s version, too, was flawed. After pondering the problem so obses-
sively that he developed an ulcer, Linde showed how Guth’s model
could be adjusted to eliminate the technical problems.
But even this model of inflation depended on features of unified
theories that were, Linde felt, suspect. Eventually—after falling into a
gloom so deep that he had difficulty getting out of bed—he determined

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that inflation could result from much more generic quantum processes
first proposed by John Wheeler. According to Wheeler, if one had a
microscope trillions upon trillions of times more powerful than any
in existence, one would see space and time fluctuating wildly because
of quantum uncertainty. Linde contended that what Wheeler called
“space-time foam” would inevitably give rise to the conditions neces-
sary for inflation.
Inflation is a self-exhausting process; the expansion of space quickly
causes the energy driving inflation to dissipate. But Linde argued that
once inflation begins, it will always continue somewhere—again,
because of quantum uncertainty. (A handy feature, this quantum
uncertainty.) New universes are sprouting into existence at this very
moment. Some immediately collapse back into themselves. Others
inflate so fast that matter never has a chance to coalesce. And some,
like ours, settle down to an expansion leisurely enough for gravity to
mold matter into galaxies, stars, and planets.
Linde sometimes compared this supercosmos to an infinite sea.
Viewed up close, the sea conveys an impression of dynamism and
change, of waves heaving up and down. We humans, because we live
within one of these heaving waves, think that the entire universe is
expanding. But if we could rise above the sea’s surface, we would real-
ize that our expanding cosmos is just a tiny, insignificant, local feature
of an infinite, eternal ocean. In a way, Linde contended, the old steady-
state theory of Fred Hoyle (which I discuss later in this chapter) was
right; when seen from a God-like perspective, the supercosmos exhib-
its a kind of equilibrium.
Linde was hardly the first physicist to posit the existence of other uni-
verses. But whereas most theorists treat other universes as mathemati-
cal abstractions, and slightly embarrassing ones at that, Linde delighted
in speculating about their properties. Elaborating on his self-reproduc-
ing universe theory, for example, Linde borrowed from the language
of genetics. Each universe created by inflation gives birth to still other
“baby universes.” Some of these offspring retain the “genes” of their
predecessors and evolve into similar universes with similar laws of
nature—and perhaps similar inhabitants. Invoking the anthropic princi-
ple, Linde proposed that some cosmic version of natural selection might

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favor the perpetuation of universes that are likely to produce intelligent

life. “The fact that somewhere else there is life like ours is to me almost
certain,” he said. “But we can never know this.”
Like Alan Guth and several other cosmologists, Linde liked to spec-
ulate on the feasibility of creating an inflationary universe in a labo-
ratory. But only Linde asked: Why would one want to create another
universe? What purpose would it serve? Once some cosmic engineer
created a new universe, it would instantaneously dissociate itself from
its parent at faster-than-light speeds, according to Linde’s calculations.
No further communication would be possible.
On the other hand, Linde surmised, perhaps the engineer could
manipulate the seed of preinflationary stuff in such a way that it would
evolve into a universe with particular dimensions, physical laws, and
constants of nature. In that way, the engineer could impress a mes-
sage of some sort onto the very structure of the new universe. In fact,
Linde suggested, our own universe might have been created by beings
in another universe, and physicists such as Linde, in their fumbling
attempts to unravel the laws of nature, might actually be decoding a
message from our cosmic parents.
Linde presented these ideas warily, watching my reaction. Only at
the end, perhaps taking satisfaction in my gaping mouth, did he permit
himself a little smile. His smile faded, however, when I wondered what
the message imbedded in our universe might be. “It seems,” he said
wistfully, “that we are not quite grown up enough to know.” Linde
looked even more glum when I asked if he ever worried that all his
work might be—I struggled to find the right word—bullshit.
“In my moments of depression I feel myself a complete idiot,” he
replied. “What I am playing with are some very primitive toys.” He
added that he tried not to become too attached to his own ideas. “Some-
times the models are quite strange, and if you take them too seriously
then you are in danger to be trapped. I would say this is similar to run-
ning over very thin ice on the lake. If you just are running very fast,
you may not sink, and you may go a large distance. If you stay and
think if you are running in the right direction, you may go down.”
Linde seemed to be saying that his goal as a physicist was not to
achieve resolution, to arrive at The Answer or even simply at an answer,

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but to keep moving, to keep skating. Linde feared the thought of final-
ity. His self-reproducing universe theory makes sense in this light: if
the universe is infinite and eternal, then so is science, the quest for
knowledge. But even a physics confined to this universe, Linde sug-
gested, cannot be close to resolution. “For example, you do not include
consciousness. Physics studies matter, and consciousness is not matter.”
Linde agreed with John Wheeler that reality must be in some sense a
participatory phenomenon. “Before you make measurement, there is
no universe, nothing you can call objective reality,” Linde said.
Linde, like Wheeler and David Bohm, seemed to be tormented
by mystical yearnings that physics alone could never satisfy. “There
is some limit to rational knowledge,” he said. “One way to study the
irrational is to jump into it and just meditate. The other is to study the
boundaries of the irrational with the tools of rationality.” Linde chose
the latter route, because physics offered a way “not to say total non-
sense” about the workings of the world. But sometimes, he confessed,
“I’m depressed when I think I will die like a physicist.”

The Deflation of Inflation

T he fact that Linde has earned so much respect—he was courted by

several U.S. universities before choosing Stanford—bears witness
both to his rhetorical skills and to cosmologists’ hunger for new ideas.
Nonetheless, by the early 1990s, inflation and many of the other exotic
ideas that had emerged from particle physics in the previous decade
had begun losing support from mainstream cosmologists. Even David
Schramm, who had been quite bullish on inflation when I met him
in Sweden, had his doubts when I spoke to him several years later. “I
like inflation,” Schramm said, but it can never be thoroughly verified
because it does not generate any unique predictions, predictions that
cannot be explained in some other way. “You won’t see that for infla-
tion,” Schramm continued, “whereas for the big bang itself you do see
that. The beautiful, cosmic microwave background and the light-ele-
ment abundances tell you, ‘This is it.’ There’s no other way of getting
these observations.”

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Schramm acknowledged that as cosmologists venture further back

toward the beginning of time, their theories become more speculative.
Cosmology needs a unified theory of particle physics to describe pro-
cesses in the very early universe, but validating a unified theory may be
extremely difficult. “Even if somebody comes up with a really beauti-
ful theory, like superstring theory, there’s not any way it can be tested.
So you’re not really doing the scientific method, where you make pre-
dictions and then check it. There’s not that experimental check going
on. It’s more just mathematical consistency.”
Could the field end up being like the interpretation of quantum
mechanics, where the standards are primarily aesthetic? “That’s a real
problem I have with it,” Schramm replied, “that unless one comes up
with tests, we are into the more philosophical rather than physics area.
The tests have to give the universe as we observe it, but that’s more
of a post-diction rather than a pre-diction.” It is always possible that
theoretical explorations of black holes, superstrings, Wheeler’s it from
bit, and other exotica might yield some sort of breakthough. “But until
someone comes up with definitive tests,” Schramm said, “or we’re
lucky enough to find a black hole that we can probe in a careful way,
we’re not going to have that kind of ‘Eureka’ where you’re really confi-
dent you know the answer.”
Realizing the significance of what he was saying, Schramm sud-
denly switched back to his customary boosterish, public relations
mode. The fact that cosmologists are having so much difficulty advanc-
ing beyond the big bang model is a good sign, he insisted, falling back
on an all-too-familiar argument. “For example, at the turn of the cen-
tury, physicists were saying most of physics is solved. There are a few
nagging little problems, but it’s basically solved. And we found that
was certainly not the case. In fact, what we find is, that usually is the
clue that there’s another big step coming. Just when you think the end
is in sight, you find that’s a wormhole into a whole new perspective
into the universe. And I think that may be what’s going to happen, that
we’re zooming in and starting to see things. We’ll see certain nagging
problems that we haven’t been able to solve. And I expect the solution
to those problems will lead to a whole new rich and exciting area. The
enterprise is not going to die.”9

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But what if cosmology has passed its peak, in the sense that it is
unlikely to deliver any more empirical surprises as profound as the
big bang theory itself? Cosmologists are lucky to know anything with
certainty, according to Howard Georgi, a particle physicist at Harvard
University. “I think you have to regard cosmology as a historical sci-
ence, like evolutionary biology,” said Georgi, a cherub-faced man with
a cheerfully sardonic manner. “You’re trying to look at the present-day
universe and extrapolate back, which is an interesting but dangerous
thing to do, because there may have been accidents that had big effects.
And they try very hard to understand what kinds of things can be acci-
dental and what features are robust. But I find it difficult to understand
those arguments well enough to really be convinced.” Georgi sug-
gested that cosmologists might acquire some much-needed humility
by reading the books of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould,
who discusses the potential pitfalls of reconstructing the past based on
our knowledge of the present (see Chapter 5).
Georgi chuckled, perhaps recognizing the improbability of any
cosmologist’s taking his advice. Like Sheldon Glashow, whose office
was just down the hall, Georgi had once been a leader in the search
for a unified theory of physics. And like Glashow, Georgi eventually
denounced superstring theory and other candidates for a unified the-
ory as nontestable and thus nonscientific. The fate of particle physics
and cosmology, Georgi noted, are to some extent intertwined. Cos-
mologists hope that a unified theory will help them understand the
universe’s origins more clearly. Conversely, some particle physicists
hope that in lieu of terrestrial experiments, they can find confirma-
tion of their theories by peering through telescopes at the edge of the
universe. “That strikes me as a bit of a push,” Georgi remarked mildly,
“but what can I say?” When I asked him about quantum cosmology,
the field explored by Hawking, Linde, and others, Georgi smiled mis-
chievously. “A simple particle physicist like myself has trouble in those
uncharted waters,” he said. He found papers on quantum cosmology,
with all their talk of wormholes and time travel and baby universes,
“quite amusing. It’s like reading Genesis.” As for inflation, it is “a won-
derful sort of scientific myth, which is at least as good as any other cre-
ation myth I’ve ever heard.”10

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The Maverick of Mavericks

T here will always be those who reject not only inflation, baby uni-
verses, and other highly speculative hypotheses, but the big bang
theory itself. The dean of big bang bashers is Fred Hoyle, a British
astronomer and physicist. A selective reading of Hoyle’s résumé might
make him appear the quintessential insider. He studied at the Univer-
sity of Cambridge under the Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, who correctly
predicted the existence of antimatter. Hoyle became a lecturer at Cam-
bridge in 1945, and in the 1950s he helped to show how stars forge the
heavy elements of which planets and people are made. Hoyle founded
the prestigious Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge in the early 1960s
and served as its first director. For these and other achievements he was
knighted in 1972. Yes, Hoyle is Sir Fred. Yet Hoyle’s stubborn refusal to
accept the big bang theory—and his adherence to fringe ideas in other
fields—made him an outlaw in the field he had helped to create.11
Since 1988, Hoyle has lived in a high-rise apartment building in
Bournemouth, a town on England’s southern coast. When I visited
him there, his wife, Barbara, let me in and took me into the living
room, where I found Hoyle sitting in a chair watching a cricket match
on television. He rose and shook my hand without taking his eyes off
the match. His wife, gently admonishing him for his rudeness, went
over to the TV and turned it off. Only then did Hoyle, as if waking
from a spell, turn his full attention to me.
I expected Hoyle to be odd and embittered, but he was, for the most
part, all too amiable. With his pug nose, jutting jaw, and penchant for
slang—colleagues were “chaps” and a bogus theory a “bust flush”—he
exuded a kind of blue-collar integrity and geniality. He seemed to revel
in the role of outsider. “When I was young the old regarded me as an
outrageous young fellow, and now that I’m old the young regard me
as an outrageous old fellow.” He chuckled. “I should say that nothing
would embarrass me more than if I were to be viewed as someone who
is repeating what he has been saying year after year,” as many astron-
omers do. “What I would be worried about is somebody coming along
and saying, ‘What you’ve been saying is technically not sound.’ That

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would worry me.” (Actually, Hoyle has been accused of both repeti-
tiveness and technical errors.12)
Hoyle had a knack for sounding reasonable—for example, when
arguing that the seeds of life must have come to our planet from
outer space. The spontaneous generation of life on the earth, Hoyle
once remarked, would have been as likely as the assemblage of a 747
aircraft by a tornado passing through a junkyard. Elaborating on this
point during our interview, Hoyle pointed out that asteroid impacts
rendered the earth uninhabitable until at least 3.8 billion years ago
and that cellular life had almost certainly appeared by 3.7 billion years
ago. If one thought of the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet
as a 24-hour day, Hoyle elaborated, then life appeared in about half
an hour. “You’ve got to discover DNA; you’ve got to make thousands
of enzymes in that half an hour,” he explained. “And you’ve got to do
it in a very hostile situation. So I find when you put all this together it
doesn’t add up to a very attractive situation.” As Hoyle spoke, I found
myself nodding in agreement. Yes, of course life could not have origi-
nated here. What could be more obvious? Only later did I realize that
according to Hoyle’s timetable, apes were transmogrified into humans
some 20 seconds ago, and modern civilization sprang into existence in
less than 1/10 second. Improbable, perhaps, but it happened.
Hoyle had first started thinking seriously about the origin of the
universe shortly after World War II, during long discussions with two
other physicists, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi. “Bondi had a
relative somewhere—he seemed to have relatives everywhere—and
one sent him a case of rum,” Hoyle recalled. While imbibing Bondi’s
liquor, the three physicists turned to a perennial puzzle of the young
and intoxicated: How did we come to be?
The finding that all galaxies in the cosmos are receding from one
another had already convinced many astronomers that the universe
had exploded into being at a specific time in the past and was still
expanding. Hoyle’s fundamental objection to this model was philo-
sophical. It did not make sense to talk about the creation of the universe
unless one already had space and time for the universe to be created in.
“You lose the universality of the laws of physics,” Hoyle explained to

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me. “Physics is no longer.” The only alternative to this absurdity, Hoyle

decided, was that space and time must have always existed. He, Gold,
and Bondi thus invented the steady-state theory, which posits that the
universe is infinite both in space and time and constantly generates
new matter through some still-unknown mechanism.
Hoyle stopped promoting the steady-state theory after the discovery
of the microwave background radiation in the early 1960s seemed to pro-
vide conclusive evidence for the big bang. But his old doubts resurfaced
in the 1980s, as he watched cosmologists struggle to explain the forma-
tion of galaxies and other puzzles. “I began to get the sense that there
was something seriously wrong”—not only with new concepts such as
inflation and dark matter, he said, but with the big bang itself. “I’m a
great believer that if you have a correct theory, you show a lot of positive
results. It seems to me that they’d gone on for 20 years, by 1985, and there
wasn’t much to show for it. And that couldn’t be the case if it was right.”
Hoyle thus resurrected the steady-state theory in a new and
improved form. Rather than one big bang, he said, many little bangs
occurred in preexisting space and time. These little bangs were respon-
sible for light elements and the red shifts of galaxies. As for the cos-
mic microwave background, Hoyle’s best guess was that it is radiation
emitted by some sort of metallic interstellar dust. Hoyle acknowledged
that his “quasi–steady state theory,” which in effect replaced one big
miracle with many little ones, was far from perfect. But he insisted
that recent versions of the big bang theory, which posit the existence of
inflation, dark matter, and other exotica, are much more deeply flawed.
“It’s like medieval theology,” he exclaimed in a rare flash of anger.
The longer Hoyle spoke, however, the more I began to wonder just
how sincere his doubts about the big bang were. In some of his state-
ments, he revealed a proprietary fondness for the theory. One of the
great ironies of modern science is that Hoyle coined the term big bang in
1950 while he was doing a series of radio lectures on astronomy. Hoyle
told me that he meant not to disparage the theory, as many accounts
have suggested, but merely to describe it. At the time, he recalled,
astronomers often referred to the theory as “the Friedman cosmology,”
after a physicist who showed how Einstein’s theory of relativity gave
rise to an expanding universe.

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“That was poison,” Hoyle declared. “You had to have something

vivid. So I thought up the big bang. If I had patented it, copyrighted
it . . .” he mused. The August 1993 Sky and Telescope magazine initiated
a contest to rename the theory. After mulling over thousands of sugges-
tions, the judges announced they could find none worthy of supplanting
big bang.13 Hoyle said he was not surprised. “Words are like harpoons,”
he commented. “Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.”
Hoyle also seemed obsessed with how close he had come to discov-
ering the cosmic microwave background. It was 1963, and during an
astronomy conference Hoyle fell into a conversation with Robert Dicke,
a physicist from Princeton who was planning to search for the cosmic
microwaves predicted by the big bang model. Dicke told Hoyle that he
expected the microwaves to be about 20 degrees above absolute zero,
which is what most theorists were predicting. Hoyle informed Dicke
that in 1941, a Canadian radio astronomer named Andrew McKellar had
found interstellar gas radiating microwaves at 3 degrees, not 20.
To Hoyle’s everlasting regret, neither he nor Dicke, during their
conversation, spelled out the implication of McKellar’s finding: that the
microwave background might be 3 degrees. “We just sat there drink-
ing coffee,” Hoyle remembered, his voice rising. “If either of us had
said, ‘Maybe it is 3 degrees,’ we’d have gone straightaway and checked
it, and then we’d have had it in 1963.” A year later, just before Dicke
turned on his microwave experiment, Arno Penzias and Robert Wil-
son of Bell Laboratories discovered the 3-degree microwave radiation,
an achievement for which they later received the Nobel Prize. “I’ve
always felt that was one of the worst misses of my life,” Hoyle sighed,
shaking his head slowly.
Why should Hoyle care that he had nearly discovered a phenome-
non that he now derided as spurious? I think Hoyle, like many maver-
icks, once hoped to be a member of the inner circle of science, draped
in honor and glory. He went far toward realizing that goal. But in 1972,
officials at Cambridge forced Hoyle to resign from his post as director
of the Institute for Astronomy—for political rather than scientific rea-
sons. Hoyle and his wife left Cambridge for a cottage on an isolated
moor in northern England, where they lived for 15 years before moving
to Bournemouth. During this period, Hoyle’s anti-authoritarianism,

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which had always served him so well, became less creative than reac-
tionary. He degenerated into what Harold Bloom derided as a “mere
rebel,” although he still dreamed of what might have been.
Hoyle also seemed to suffer from another problem. The task of the
scientist is to find patterns in nature. There is always the danger that
one will see patterns where there are none. Hoyle, in the latter part
of his career, seemed to have succumbed to this pitfall. He saw pat-
terns—or, rather, conspiracies—both in the structure of the cosmos
and among those scientists who rejected his radical views. Hoyle’s
mind-set is most evident in his views on biology. Since the early 1970s
he has argued that the universe is pervaded by viruses, bacteria, and
other organisms. (Hoyle first broached this possibility in 1957 in The
Black Cloud, which remains the best known of his many science fiction
novels.) These space-faring microbes supposedly provided the seeds for
life on earth and spurred evolution thereafter; natural selection played
little or no role in creating the diversity of life.14 Hoyle has also asserted
that epidemics of influenza, whooping cough, and other diseases are
triggered when the earth passes through clouds of pathogens.
Discussing the biomedical establishment’s continued belief in the
more conventional, person-to-person mode of disease transmission,
Hoyle glowered. “They don’t look at those data and say, “Well, it’s
wrong,’ and stop teaching it. They just go on doping out the same rub-
bish. And that’s why if you go to the hospital and there’s something
wrong with you, you’ll be lucky if they cure it.” But if space is swarm-
ing with organisms, I asked, why haven’t they been detected? Oh, but
they probably were, Hoyle assured me. He suspected that U.S. exper-
iments on high-altitude balloons and other platforms had turned up
evidence of life in space in the 1960s, but that officials had hushed it up.
Why? Perhaps for reasons related to national security, Hoyle suggested,
or because the results contradicted received wisdom. “Science today is
locked into paradigms,” he intoned solemnly. “Every avenue is blocked
by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by
a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will
turn it down.”
Hoyle emphasized that, contrary to certain reports, he did not
believe the AIDS virus came from outer space. It “is such a strange

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virus I have to believe it’s a laboratory product,” he said. Was Hoyle

implying that the pathogen might have been produced by a biological
warfare program that went awry? “Yes, that’s my feeling,” he replied.
Hoyle also suspected that life and indeed the entire universe must be
unfolding according to some cosmic plan. The universe is an “obvious
fix,” Hoyle said. “There are too many things that look accidental which
are not.” When I asked if Hoyle thought some supernatural intelli-
gence was guiding things, he nodded gravely. “That’s the way I look on
God. It is a fix, but how it’s being fixed I don’t know.” Of course, many
of Hoyle’s colleagues—and probably a majority of the public at large—
share his view that the universe is, must be, a conspiracy. And perhaps
it is. Who knows? But his assertion that scientists would deliberately
suppress evidence of space-faring microbes or of legitimate flaws in the
big bang theory reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of his col-
leagues. Most scientists yearn for such revolutionary discoveries.

The Sun Principle

H oyle’s eccentricities aside, future observations may prove his skepti-

cism toward the big bang to be at least partially prescient. Astrono-
mers may find that the cosmic microwave background stems not from
the flash of the big bang, but from some more mundane source, such
as dust in our own Milky Way. The nucleosynthesis evidence, too,
may not hold up as well as Schramm and other big bang boosters have
claimed. But even if one knocks these two pillars out from under the
big bang, the theory can still stand on the red-shift evidence, which
even Hoyle agrees provides proof that the universe is expanding.
The big bang theory does for astronomy what Darwin s theory of
natural selection did for biology: it provides cohesion, sense, meaning,
a unifying narrative. That is not to say that the theory can—or will
ever—explain all phenomena. Cosmology, in spite of its close conjunc-
tion with particle physics, the most painstakingly precise of sciences,
is far from being precise itself. That fact has been demonstrated by the
persistent inability of astronomers to agree on a value for the Hubble
constant, which is a measure of the size, age, and rate of expansion of

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the universe. To derive the Hubble constant, one must measure the
breadth of the red shift of galaxies and their distance from the earth.
The former measurement is straightforward, but the latter is horren-
dously complicated. Astronomers cannot assume that the apparent
brightness of a galaxy is proportional to its distance; the galaxy might
be nearby, or it might simply be intrinsically bright. Some astronomers
insist that the universe is 10 billion years old or even younger; others
are equally sure that it cannot be less than 20 billion years old.15
The debate over the Hubble constant offers an obvious lesson: even
when performing a seemingly straightforward calculation, cosmologists
must make various assumptions that can influence their results; they
must interpret their data, just as evolutionary biologists and historians
do. One should thus take with a large grain of salt any claims based on
high precision (such as Schramm’s assertion that nucleosynthesis calcu-
lations agree with theoretical predictions to five decimal points).
More detailed observations of our cosmos will not necessarily resolve
questions about the Hubble constant or other issues. Consider: the most
mysterious of all stars is our own sun. No one really knows, for exam-
ple, what causes sunspots or why their numbers wax and wane over
periods of roughly a decade. Our ability to describe the universe with
simple, elegant models stems in large part from our lack of data, our
ignorance. The more clearly we can see the universe in all its glorious
detail, the more difficult it will be for us to explain with a simple theory
how it came to be that way. Students of human history are well aware of
this paradox, but cosmologists may have a hard time accepting it.
This sun principle suggests that many of the more exotic suppo-
sitions of cosmology are due for a fall. As recently as the early 1970s
black holes were still considered theoretical curiosities, not to be taken
seriously. (Einstein himself thought black holes were “a blemish to
be removed from his theory by a better mathematical formulation,”
according to Freeman Dyson.16) Gradually, as a result of the prosely-
tizing of John Wheeler and others, they have come to be accepted as
real objects. Many theorists are now convinced that almost all galax-
ies, including our own, harbor gigantic black holes at their cores. The
reason for this acceptance is that no one can imagine a better way to
explain the violent swirling of matter at the center of galaxies.

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These arguments depend on our ignorance. Astronomers should

ask themselves this: If they could somehow be whisked to the center
of the Andromeda galaxy or our own Milky Way, what would they
find there? Would they find something that resembles the black holes
described by current theory, or would they encounter something
entirely different, something that no one imagined or could have imag-
ined? The sun principle suggests that the latter outcome is more prob-
able. We humans may never see directly into the dust-obscured heart
of our own galaxy, let alone into any other galaxy, but we may learn
enough to raise doubts about the black hole hypothesis. We may learn
enough to learn, once again, how little we know.
The same is true of cosmology in general. We have learned one
astounding, basic fact about the universe. We know that the uni-
verse is expanding, and may have been for 10 to 20 billion years, just
as evolutionary biologists know that all life evolved from a common
ancestor through natural selection. But cosmologists are as unlikely
to transcend that basic understanding as evolutionary biologists are
to leap beyond Darwinism. David Schramm was right. In the future,
the late 1980s and early 1990s will be remembered as the golden age of
cosmology, when the field achieved a perfect balance between knowl-
edge and ignorance. As more data flood in in years to come, cosmology
may become more like botany, a vast collection of empirical facts only
loosely bound by theory.

The End of Discovery

F inally, scientists do not enjoy an infinite ability to discover interest-

ing new things about the universe. Martin Harwit, an astrophysicist
and historian of science who until 1995 directed the Smithsonian Insti-
tution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., made
this point in his 1981 book, Cosmic Discovery:

The history of most efforts at discovery follows a common pat-

tern, whether we consider the discovery of varieties of insects,
the exploration of the oceans for continents and islands, or the

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search for oil reserves in the ground. There is an initial accelerat-

ing rise in the discovery rate as increasing numbers of explorers
become attracted. New ideas and tools are brought to bear on the
search, and the pace of discovery quickens. Soon, however, the
number of discoveries remaining to be made dwindles, and the
rate of discovery declines despite the high efficiency of the meth-
ods developed. The search is approaching an end. An occasional,
previously overlooked feature can be found or a particular rare
species encountered; but the rate of discovery begins to decline
quickly and then diminishes to a trickle. Interest drops, research-
ers leave the field, and there is virtually no further activity.17

Unlike more experimental fields of science, Harwit pointed out,

astronomy is an essentially passive activity. We can only detect celes-
tial phenomena by means of information falling to us from the sky,
mostly in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Harwit made vari-
ous guesses about improvements in mature observational technolo-
gies, such as optical telescopes, as well as others that were still nascent,
such as gravitational-wave detectors. He presented a graph estimating
the rate at which new cosmic discoveries had been made in the past
and would be made in the future. The graph was a bell-shaped curve
peaking sharply at the year 2000. By that year, we will have discov-
ered roughly half of all the phenomena we can discover, according to
Harwit. We will have discovered roughly 90 percent of the accessible
phenomena by the year 2200, and the rest will trickle in at a decreasing
rate over the next few millennia.
Of course, Harwit conceded, various developments could acceler-
ate or arrest this schedule. “Political factors might dictate that astron-
omy receive less support in the future. A war might slow the search
to a virtual halt, though the postwar era, if there was one, could pro-
vide astronomers with discarded military equipment that would again
accelerate the discovery rate.”18 Every cloud has a silver lining.
Ironic cosmology will continue, of course, as long as we have poets
as imaginative and ambitious as Hawking, Linde, Wheeler, and, yes,
Hoyle. Their visions are both humbling, in that they show the limited
scope of our empirical knowledge, and exhilarating, since they also

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testify to the limitlessness of human imagination. At its best, ironic

cosmology can keep us awestruck. But it is not science.
John Donne could have been speaking for Hawking, and for all of
us, when he wrote: “My thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexpli-
cable mystery; I their Creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any-
where, and any one of my Creatures, my thoughts, is with the Sunne
and beyond the Sunne, overtakes the Sunne, and overgoes the Sunne
in one pace, one steppe, everywhere.”19 Let that serve as the epitaph of
cosmology.

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 CHAPTER FivE
THE END OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

N
o other field of science is as burdened by its past as is evolutionary
biology. It reeks of what the literary critic Harold Bloom called
the anxiety of influence. The discipline of evolutionary biology
can be defined to a large degree as the ongoing attempt of Darwin’s
intellectual descendants to come to terms with his overwhelming
influence. Darwin based his theory of natural selection, the central
component of his vision, on two observations. First, plants and ani-
mals usually produce more offspring than their environment can sus-
tain. (Darwin borrowed this idea from the British economist Thomas
Malthus.) Second, these offspring differ slightly from their parents and
from each other. Darwin concluded that each organism, in its struggle
to survive long enough to reproduce, competes either directly or indi-
rectly with others of its species. Chance plays a role in the survival of
any individual organism, but nature will favor, or select, those organ-
isms whose variations make them slightly more fit, that is, more likely
to survive long enough to reproduce and pass on those adaptive varia-
tions to their offspring.
Darwin could only guess what gives rise to the all-important vari-
ations between generations. On the Origin of Species, first published in
1859, mentioned a proposal set forth by the French biologist Jean-Bap-
tiste Lamarck, that organisms could pass on not only inherited but also
acquired characteristics to their heirs. For example, the constant cran-
ing of a giraffe to reach leaves high in a tree would alter its sperm or
egg so that its offspring would be born with longer necks. But Darwin
was clearly uncomfortable with the idea that adaptation is self-directed.
114

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He preferred to think that variations between generations are random,

and that only under the pressure of natural selection do they become
adaptive and lead to evolution.1
Unbeknownst to Darwin, during his lifetime an Austrian monk
named Gregor Mendel was conducting experiments that would help
refute Lamarck’s theory and vindicate Darwin’s intuition. Mendel was
the first scientist to recognize that natural forms can be subdivided
into discrete traits, which are transmitted from one generation to the
next by what Mendel termed hereditary particles and are now called
genes. Genes prevent the blending of traits and thereby preserve them.
The recombination of genes that takes place during sexual reproduc-
tion, together with occasional genetic mistakes, or mutations, provides
the variety needed for natural selection to work its magic.
Mendel’s 1868 paper on breeding pea plants went largely unno-
ticed by the scientific community until the turn of the century. Even
then, Mendelian genetics was not immediately reconciled with Dar-
win’s ideas. Some early geneticists felt that genetic mutation and
sexual recombination might guide evolution along certain paths
independently of natural selection. But in the 1930s and 1940s, Ernst
Mayr of Harvard University and other evolutionary biologists fused
Darwin’s ideas with genetics into a powerful restatement of his theory,
called the new synthesis, which affirmed that natural selection is the
primary architect of biological form and diversity.
The discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA—which serves as
the blueprint from which all organisms are constructed—confirmed
Darwin’s intuition that all life is related, descended from a common
source. Watson and Crick’s finding also revealed the source of both
continuity and variation that makes natural selection possible. In addi-
tion, molecular biology suggested that all biological phenomena could
be explained in mechanical, physical terms.
That conclusion was by no means foregone, according to Gunther
Stent. In The Coming of the Golden Age, he noted that prior to the unravel-
ing of DNA’s structure, some prominent scientists felt that the conven-
tional methods and assumptions of science would prove inadequate for
understanding heredity and other basic biological questions. The phys-
icist Niels Bohr was the major proponent of this view. He contended

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that just as physicists had to cope with an uncertainty principle in try-

ing to understand the behavior of an electron, so would biologists face
a fundamental limitation when they tried to probe living organisms
too deeply:

there must remain an uncertainty as regards the physical condi-

tion to which [the organism is] subjected, and the idea suggests
itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism
in this respect is just large enough to hide its ultimate secrets
from us. On this view, the existence of life must be considered
as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum
of action, which appears as an irrational element from the point
of view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with the
existence of the elementary particles, forms the foundation of
quantum mechanics.2

Stent accused Bohr of trying to revive the old, discredited concept of

vitalism, which holds that life stems from a mysterious essence or force
that cannot be reduced to a physical process. But Bohr’s vitalist vision
has not been borne out. In fact, molecular biology has proved one of
Bohr’s own dicta, that science, when it is most successful, reduces mys-
teries to trivialities (although not necessarily comprehensible ones).3
What can an ambitious young biologist do to make his or her mark
in the post-Darwin, post-DNA era? One alternative is to become more
Darwinian than Darwin, to accept Darwinian theory as a supreme
insight into nature, one that cannot be transcended. That is the route
taken by the arch-clarifier and reductionist Richard Dawkins of the
University of Oxford. He has honed Darwinism into a fearsome
weapon, one with which he obliterates any ideas that challenge his res-
olutely materialistic, nonmystical view of life. He seems to view the
persistence of creationism and other anti-Darwinian ideas as a per-
sonal affront.
I met Dawkins at a gathering convened by his literary agent in Man-
hattan.4 He is an icily handsome man, with predatory eyes, a knife-thin
nose, and incongruously rosy cheeks. He wore what appeared to be
an expensive, custom-made suit. When he held out his finely veined

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hands to make a point, they quivered slightly. It was the tremor not of
a nervous man, but of a finely tuned, high-performance competitor in
the war of ideas: Darwin’s greyhound.
As in his books, Dawkins in person exuded a supreme self-assur-
ance. His statements often seemed to have an implied preamble: “As
any fool can see  .  .  .” An unapologetic atheist, Dawkins announced
that he was not the sort of scientist who thought science and religion
addressed separate issues and thus could easily coexist. Most religions,
he contended, hold that God is responsible for the design and purpose
evident in life. Dawkins was determined to stamp out this point of
view. “All purpose comes ultimately from natural selection,” he said.
“This is the credo that I want to put forward.”
Dawkins then spent some 45 minutes setting forth his ultrareduc-
tionist version of evolution. He suggested that we think of genes as
little bits of software that have only one goal: to make more copies of
themselves. Carnations, cheetahs, and all living things are just elab-
orate vehicles that these “copy-me programs” have created to help
them reproduce. Culture, too, is based on copy-me programs, which
Dawkins called memes. Dawkins asked us to imagine a book with the
message: Believe this book and make your children believe it or when
you die you will all go to a very unpleasant place called hell. “That’s a
very effective piece of copy-me code. Nobody is foolish enough to just
accept the injunction, ‘Believe this and tell your children to believe it.’
You have to be a little more subtle and dress it up in some more elabo-
rate way. And of course we know what I’m talking about.” Of course.
Christianity, like all religions, is an extremely successful chain letter.
What could make more sense?
Dawkins then fielded questions from the audience, a motley assort-
ment of journalists, educators, book editors, and other quasi-intellectu-
als. One listener was John Perry Barlow, a former Whole Earth hippie
and occasional lyricist for the Grateful Dead who had mutated into a
New Age cyber-prophet. Barlow, a bearish man with a red bandanna
tied around his throat, asked Dawkins a long question having some-
thing to do with where information really exists.
Dawkins’s eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared ever so slightly as
they caught the scent of woolly-headedness. Sorry, he said, but he did

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not understand the question. Barlow spoke for another minute or so. “I
feel you are trying to get at something which interests you but doesn’t
interest me,” Dawkins said and scanned the room for another ques-
tioner. Suddenly, the room seemed several degrees chillier.
Later, during a discussion about extraterrestrial life, Dawkins set
forth his belief that natural selection is a cosmic principle; wherever
life is found, natural selection has been at work. He cautioned that life
cannot be too common in the universe, because thus far we have found
no evidence of life on other planets in the solar system or elsewhere
in the cosmos. Barlow bravely broke in to suggest that our inability
to detect alien life-forms may stem from our perceptual inadequacies.
“We don’t know who discovered water,” Barlow added meaningfully,
“but we can be pretty sure it wasn’t fish.” Dawkins turned his level
gaze on Barlow. “So you mean we’re looking at them all the time,”
Dawkins asked, “but we don’t see them?” Barlow nodded. “Yessss,”
Dawkins sighed, as if exhaling all hope of enlightening the unutterably
stupid world.
Dawkins can be equally harsh with his fellow biologists, those who
have dared to challenge the basic paradigm of Darwinism. He has
argued, with devastating persuasiveness, that all attempts to modify or
transcend Darwin in any significant way are flawed. He opened his 1986
book The Blind Watchmaker with the following proclamation: “Our exis-
tence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, 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.”5
“There’s always an element of rhetoric in those things,” Dawkins
replied when I asked him later about the footnotes remark. “On the
other hand, it’s a legitimate piece of rhetoric,” in that Darwin did
solve “the mystery of how life came into existence and how life has
the beauty, the adaptiveness, the complexity it has.” Dawkins agreed
with Gunther Stent that all the great advances in biology since Dar-
win—Mendel’s demonstration that genes come in discrete packages,
Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA—
buttressed rather than undermined Darwin’s basic idea.
Molecular biology has recently revealed that the process whereby
DNA interacts with RNA and proteins is more complicated than

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previously thought, but the basic paradigm of genetics—DNA-based

genetic transmission—is in no danger of collapsing. “What would be
a serious reversal,” Dawkins said, “would be if you could take a whole
organism, a zebra on the Serengeti Plain, and allow it to acquire some
characteristic, like learning a new route to the water hole, and have
that backward encoded into the genome. Now if anything like that
were to happen I really would eat my hat.”
There are still some rather large biological mysteries left, such as
the origin of life, of sex, and of human consciousness. Developmental
biology—which seeks to show how a single fertilized cell becomes a
salamander or an evangelist—also raises important issues. “We cer-
tainly need to know how that works, and it’s going to be very, very
complicated.” But Dawkins insisted that developmental biology, like
molecular genetics before it, would simply fill in more details within
the Darwinian paradigm.
Dawkins was “fed up” with those intellectuals who argued that sci-
ence alone could not answer ultimate questions about existence. “They
think science is too arrogant and that there are certain questions that
science has no business to ask, that traditionally have been of interest to
religious people. As though they had any answers. It’s one thing to say
it’s very difficult to know how the universe began, what initiated the
big bang, what consciousness is. But if science has difficulty explaining
something, there sure as hell is no one else who is going to explain it.”
Dawkins quoted, with great gusto, a remark by the great British biologist
Peter Medawar that some people “‘enjoy wallowing in a nonthreaten-
ing squalor of incomprehension.’ I want to understand,” Dawkins added
fiercely, “and understanding means to me scientific understanding.”
I asked Dawkins why he thought his message—that Darwin basi-
cally told us all we know and all we need to know about life—met with
resistance not only from creationists or New Agers or philosophical
sophists, but even from obviously competent biologists. “It may be I
don’t get the point across with sufficient clarity,” he replied. But the
opposite, of course, is more likely to be true. Dawkins gets his point
across with utter clarity, so much so that he leaves no room for mys-
tery, meaning, purpose—or for great scientific revelations beyond the
one that Darwin himself gave us.

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Gould’s Contingency Plan

N aturally, some modern biologists bridle at the notion that they are
merely adding footnotes to Darwin’s magnum opus. One of Dar-
win’s strongest (in Bloom’s sense) descendants is Stephen Jay Gould of
Harvard University. Gould has sought to resist the influence of Darwin
by denigrating his theory’s power, by arguing that it doesn’t explain
that much. Gould began staking out his philosophical position in the
1960s by attacking the venerable doctrine of uniformitarianism, which
holds that the geophysical forces that shaped the earth and life have
been more or less constant.6
In 1972, Gould and Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of
Natural History in New York extended this critique of uniformitari-
anism to biological evolution by introducing the theory of punctuated
equilibrium (also called punk eek or, by critics of Gould and Eldredge,
evolution by jerks).7 New species are only rarely created through the
gradual, linear evolution that Darwin described, Gould and Eldredge
argued. Rather, speciation is a relatively rapid event that occurs when
a group of organisms veers away from its stable parent population and
embarks on its own genetic course. Speciation must depend not on the
kind of adaptive processes described by Darwin (and Dawkins), but on
much more particular, complex, contingent factors.
In his subsequent writings, Gould has hammered away relentlessly
at ideas that he claims are implicit in many interpretations of Darwin-
ian theory: progress and inevitability. Evolution does not demonstrate
any coherent direction, according to Gould, nor are any of its prod-
ucts—such as Homo sapiens—in any sense inevitable; replay the “tape of
life” a million times, and this peculiar simian with the oversized brain
might never come to be. Gould has also attacked genetic determinism
wherever he has found it, whether in pseudo-scientific claims about
race and intelligence or in much more respectable theories related to
sociobiology. Gould packages his skepticism in a prose rich with refer-
ences to culture high and low and suffused with an acute awareness of
its own existence as a cultural artifact. He has been stunningly success-
ful; almost all his books have been bestsellers, and he is one of the most
widely quoted scientists in the world.8

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Before meeting Gould, I was curious about several, seemingly con-

tradictory aspects of his thought. I wondered, for example, just how
deep his skepticism, and his aversion to progress, ran. Did he believe,
with Thomas Kuhn, that science itself has not demonstrated any coher-
ent progress? Is the course of science as meandering, as aimless, as that
of life? Then how did Gould avoid the contradictions that Kuhn fell
prey to? Moreover, some critics—and Gould’s success ensured that
he had legions—accused him of being a crypto-Marxist. But Marx
espoused a highly deterministic, progressivist view of history that
seemed antithetical to Gould’s.
I also wondered whether Gould was backing down on the issue of
punctuated equilibrium. In the headline of their original 1972 paper,
Gould and Eldredge boldly called punk eek an “alternative” to Dar-
win’s gradualism that might someday supersede it. In the headline of
a retrospective essay published in Nature in 1993, called “Punctuated
Equilibrium Comes of Age,” Gould and Eldredge suggested that their
hypothesis might be “a useful extension” or “complement” to Darwin’s
basic model. Punk meek. Gould and Eldredge concluded the 1993 essay
with a spasm of disarming honesty. They noted that their theory was
only one of many modern scientific ideas emphasizing randomness
and discontinuity rather than order and progress. “Punctuated equi-
librium, seen in this light, is only paleontology’s contribution to a Zeit-
geist, and Zeitgeists, as (literally) transient ghosts of time, should never
be trusted. Thus, in developing punctuated equilibrium, we have
either been toadies and panderers to fashion, and therefore destined to
history’s ashheap, or we had a spark of insight about nature’s constitu-
tion. Only the punctuated and unpredictable future will tell.”9
I suspected that this uncharacteristic modesty could be traced to
events that had transpired in the late 1970s, when journalists were
touting punctuated equilibrium as a “revolutionary” advance beyond
Darwin. Inevitably, creationists seized on punk eek as proof that the
theory of evolution was not universally accepted. Some biologists
blamed Gould and Eldredge for having encouraged such claims with
their rhetoric. In 1981 Gould tried to set the record straight by testi-
fying at a trial held in Arkansas over whether creationism should be
taught alongside evolution in schools. Gould was forced to admit,

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in effect, that punctuated equilibrium was not a truly revolutionary

theory; it was a rather minor technical matter, a squabble among
experts.
Gould is disarmingly ordinary-looking. He is short and plump; his
face, too, is chubby, adorned with a button nose and graying Charlie
Chaplin mustache. When I met him, he was wearing wrinkled khaki
pants and an oxford shirt; he looked like the archetypal rumpled,
absent-minded professor. But the illusion of ordinariness vanished as
soon as Gould opened his mouth. When discussing scientific issues,
he talked in a rapid-fire murmur, laying out even the most complex,
technical argument with an ease that hinted at much vaster knowledge
held in reserve. He decorated his speech, like his writings, with quota-
tions, which he invariably prefaced by saying, “Of course you know the
famous remark of. . . .” As he spoke, he often appeared distracted, as if
he were not paying attention to his own words. I had the impression
that mere speech was not enough to engage him fully; the higher-level
programs of his mind roamed ahead, conducting reconnaissance, try-
ing to anticipate possible objections to his discourse, searching for new
lines of argument, analogies, quotations. I had the sense that, no mat-
ter where I was, Gould was way ahead of me.
Gould acknowledged that his approach to evolutionary biology
had been inspired in part by Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
which he read shortly after it was published in 1962. The book helped
Gould believe that he, a young man from “a lower-middle-class fam-
ily in Queens where nobody had gone to college,” might be able to
make an important contribution to science. It also led Gould to reject
the “inductivist, ameliorative, progressive, add-a-fact-at-a-time-don’t-
theorize-’til-you’re-old model of doing science.”
I asked Gould if he believed, as Kuhn did, that science did not
advance toward the truth. Shaking his head adamantly, Gould denied
that Kuhn held such a position. “I know him, obviously,” Gould said.
Although Kuhn was the “intellectual father” of the social constructiv-
ists and relativists, he nonetheless believed that “there’s an objective
world out there,” Gould asserted; Kuhn felt that this objective world is
in some sense very hard to define, but he certainly acknowledged that
“we have a better sense of what it is now than we did centuries ago.”

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So was Gould, who had strived so ceaselessly to banish the notion

of progress from evolutionary biology, a believer in scientific progress?
“Oh sure,” he said mildly. “I think all scientists are.” No real scientist
could possibly be a true cultural relativist, Gould elaborated, because
science is too boring. “The day-to-day work of science is intensely bor-
ing. You’ve got to clean the mouse cages and titrate your solutions.
And you gotta clean your petri dishes.” No scientist could endure
such tedium unless he or she thought it would lead to “greater empir-
ical adequacy.” Gould added, again in reference to Kuhn, that “some
people who have large-scale ideas will often express them in an almost
strangely exaggerated way just to accentuate the point.” (Musing over
this remark later, I had to wonder: Was Gould offering a backhanded
apology for his own rhetorical excesses?)
Gould glided just as easily past my queries on Marx. He acknowl-
edged that he found some of Marx’s proposals quite attractive. For
example, Marx’s view that ideas are socially embedded and change
through conflict, through the clash of theses and antitheses, “is actu-
ally a very sensible and interesting theory of change,” Gould remarked.
“You move by negating the previous one, and then you negate the first
negation, and you don’t go back to the first one. You’ve actually moved
on somewhere else. I think all of that is quite interesting.” Marx’s
view of social change and revolution, in which “you accumulate small
insults to the system until the system itself breaks,” is also quite com-
patible with punctuated equilibrium.
I hardly had to ask the next question: Was Gould, or had he ever
been, a Marxist? “You just remember what Marx said,” Gould replied
before my mouth closed. Marx himself, Gould “reminded” me, once
denied that he was a Marxist, because Marxism had become too many
things to too many people. No intellectual, Gould explained, wants
to identify himself too closely with any “ism,” especially one so capa-
cious. Gould also disliked Marx’s ideas about progress. “Marx really
got caught up in notions of predestiny and determinism, particularly
in theories of history, which I think ought to be completely contingent.
I really think he’s dead wrong on that.” Darwin, while “too eminent a
Victorian to dispense with progress totally,” was much more critical of
Victorian concepts of progress than Marx had been.

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On the other hand, Gould, the adamant antiprogressivist, did not

rule out the possibility that culture could display some sort of progress.
“Because social inheritance is Lamarckian, there is more of a theoreti-
cal basis for belief in progress in culture. It gets derailed all the time by
war, et cetera, and therefore it becomes contingent. But at least because
anything we invent is passed directly to an offspring, there is that pos-
sibility of directional accumulation.”
When, finally, I asked Gould about punctuated equilibrium, he
defended it in spirited fashion. The real significance of the idea, he said,
is that “you can’t explain [speciation] at the level of the adaptive strug-
gle of the individuals in Darwinian, conventional Darwinian, terms.”
The trends can only be accounted for by mechanisms operating at the
level of species. “You get trends because some species speciate more
often, because some species live longer than others,” he said. “Since
the causes of the birth and death of species are quite different from
the causes of the birth and death of organisms, it is a different kind of
theory. That’s what’s interesting. That’s where the new theory was in
punk eek.”
Gould refused to admit that he was in any sense backing down on
the issue of punctuated equilibrium or conceding Darwin’s suprem-
acy. When I asked him about the switch from “alternative” in his orig-
inal 1972 paper to “complement” in the 1993 Nature retrospective, he
exclaimed, “I didn’t write that!” Gould accused John Maddox, the edi-
tor of Nature, of inserting “complement” into the paper’s headline with-
out checking with him or with Eldredge. “I’m mad at him about that,”
Gould fumed. But then Gould proceeded to argue that alternative and
complement do not really have such different meanings.
“Look, by saying it’s an alternative, that doesn’t mean that the
old kind of gradualism doesn’t exist. See, that’s another thing I think
people miss. The world is full of alternatives, right? I mean we’ve
got men and women, which are alternative states of gender in Homo
sapiens. I mean if you claim something is an alternative, that doesn’t
mean it operates exclusively. Gradualism had pretty complete hege-
mony before we wrote. Here’s an alternative to test. I think punctuated
equilibrium has an overwhelmingly dominant frequency in the fossil

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record, which means gradualism exists but it’s not really important in
the overall pattern of things.”
As Gould continued speaking, I began to doubt whether he was
really interested in resolving debates over punctuated equilibrium
or other issues. When I asked him if he thought biology could ever
achieve a final theory, he grimaced. Biologists who hold such beliefs
are “naive inductivists,” he said. “They actually think that once we
sequence the human genome, well, we’ll have it!” Even some paleon-
tologists, he admitted, probably think “if we keep at it long enough
we really will know the basic features of the history of life and then
we’ll have it.” Gould disagreed. Darwin “had the answer right about
the basic interrelationships of organisms, but to me that’s only a begin-
ning. It’s not over; it’s started.”
So what did Gould consider the outstanding issues for evolutionary
biology? “Oh, there are so many I don’t know where to start.” He noted
that theorists still had to determine the “full panoply of causes” under-
lying evolution, from molecules on up to large populations of organ-
isms. Then there were “all these contingencies,” such as the asteroid
impacts that are thought to have caused mass extinctions. “So I would
say causes, strengths of causes, levels of causes, and contingency.” Gould
mused a moment. “That’s not a bad formulation,” he said, whereupon
he took a little notebook from his shirt pocket and scribbled in it.
Then Gould cheerfully rattled off all the reasons that science would
never answer all these questions. As a historical science, evolutionary
biology can offer only retrospective explanations and not predictions,
and sometimes it can offer nothing at all because it lacks sufficient data.
“If you’re missing the evidence of antecedent sequences, then you can’t
do it at all,” he said. “That’s why I think we’ll never know the origins
of language. Because it’s not a question of theory; it’s a question of con-
tingent history.”
Gould also agreed with Gunther Stent that the human brain, created
for survival in preindustrial society, is simply not capable of solving
certain questions. Research has shown that humans are inept at han-
dling problems that involve probabilities and the interactions of com-
plex variables—such as nature and nurture. “People do not understand

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that if both genes and culture interact—of course they do—you can’t
then say it’s 20 percent genes and 80 percent environment. You can’t
do that. It’s not meaningful. The emergent property is the emergent
property and that’s all you can ever say about it.” Gould was not one of
those who invested life or the mind with mystical properties, however.
“I’m an old-fashioned materialist,” he said. “I think the mind arises
from the complexities of neural organization, which we don’t really
understand very well.”
To my surprise, Gould then plunged into a rumination on infinity
and eternity. “These are two things that we can’t comprehend,” he
said. “And yet theory almost demands that we deal with it. It’s prob-
ably because we’re not thinking about them right. Infinity is a para-
dox within Cartesian space, right? When I was eight or nine I used to
say, ‘Well, there’s a brick wall out there.’ Well, what’s beyond the brick
wall? But that’s Cartesian space, and even if space is curved you still
can’t help thinking what’s beyond the curve, even if that’s not the right
way of thinking about it. Maybe all of that’s just wrong! Maybe it’s a
universe of fractal expansions! I don’t know what it is. Maybe there are
ways in which this universe is structured we just can’t think about.”
Gould doubted whether scientists in any discipline could achieve a
final theory, given their tendency to sort things according to precon-
ceived concepts. “I really wonder whether any claim for a final theory
isn’t just reflecting the way in which we conceptualize them.”
Was it possible, given all these limits, that biology, and even science
as a whole, might simply go as far as it could and then come to an end?
Gould shook his head. “People thought science was ending in 1900,
and since then we’ve got plate tectonics, the genetic basis for life. Why
should it stop?” And anyway, Gould added, our theories might reflect
our own limitations as truth seekers rather than the true nature of
reality. Before I could respond, Gould had already leaped ahead of me.
“Of course, if those limits are intrinsic, then science will be complete
within the limits. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that’s a fair argument. I don’t think
it’s right, but I can understand the structure of it.”
Moreover, there may still be great conceptual revolutions in biol-
ogy’s future, Gould argued. “The evolution of life on this planet
may turn out to be a very small part of the phenomenon of life.” Life

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elsewhere, he elaborated, may very well not conform to Darwinian

principles, as Richard Dawkins believed; in fact, the discovery of extra-
terrestrial life might falsify the claim of Dawkins that Darwin reigns
not only here on little earth but throughout the cosmos.
So Gould believes that life exists elsewhere in the universe? I asked.
“Don’t you?” he retorted. I replied that I thought the issue was entirely
a matter of opinion. Gould winced in annoyance; for once, perhaps, he
had been caught off guard. Yes, of course the existence of life elsewhere
is a matter of opinion, he said, but one can still engage in informed
speculation. Life seems to have emerged rather readily here on earth,
since the oldest rocks that could show evidence of life do show such
evidence. Moreover, “the immensity of the universe and the improb-
ability of absolute uniqueness of any part of it leads to the immense
probability that there is some kind of life all over. But we don’t know
that. Of course we don’t know that, and I know it’s not philosophically
incoherent to claim the other.”
The key to understanding Gould may be not his alleged Marxism,
or liberalism, or anti-authoritarianism, but his fear of his own field’s
potential for closure. By liberating evolutionary biology from Dar-
win—and from science as a whole, science defined as the search for
universal laws—he has sought to make the quest for knowledge open-
ended, even infinite. Gould is far too sophisticated to deny, as some
clumsy relativists do, that the fundamental laws uncovered by science
exist. Instead, he contends, very persuasively, that the laws do not have
much explanatory power; they leave many questions unanswered. He
is an extremely adept practitioner of ironic science in its negative capa-
bility mode. His view of life can nonetheless be summed up by the old
bumper-sticker slogan “Shit happens.”
Gould, of course, puts it more elegantly. He noted during our inter-
view that many scientists do not consider history, which deals with
particulars and contingency, a part of science. “I think that’s a false tax-
onomy. History is a different type of science.” Gould admitted that he
found the fuzziness of history, its resistance to straightforward anal-
ysis, exhilarating. “I love it! That’s because I’m a historian at heart.”
By transforming evolutionary biology into history—an intrinsically
interpretive, ironic discipline, like literary criticism—Gould makes

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it more amenable for someone with his considerable rhetorical skills.

If the history of life is a bottomless quarry of largely random events,
he can keep mining it, verbally cherishing one odd fact after another,
without ever fearing that his efforts have become trivial or redundant.
Whereas most scientists seek to discern the signal underlying nature,
Gould keeps drawing attention to the noise. Punctuated equilibrium is
not really a theory at all; it is a description of noise.
Gould’s great bugaboo is lack of originality. Darwin anticipated
the basic concept of punctuated equilibrium in On the Origin of Species:
“Many species once formed never undergo any further change . . . and
the periods during which species have undergone further modification,
though long as measured by years, have probably been short in com-
parison with the periods during which they retain the same form.”10
Ernst Mayr, Gould’s colleague at Harvard, proposed in the 1940s that
species could appear so rapidly—through the geographic isolation of
small populations, for example—that they would leave no trace of the
intermediate steps in the fossil record.
Richard Dawkins can find little of value in Gould’s oeuvre. To be
sure, Dawkins said, speciation may sometimes or even often occur in
rapid bursts. But so what? “The important thing is that you have gradu-
alistic selection going on even if that gradualistic selection is telescoped
into brief periods around about the time of speciation,” Dawkins com-
mented. “So I don’t see it as an important point. I see it as an interesting
wrinkle on the neo-Darwinian theory.”
Dawkins also belittled Gould’s insistence that there was no inevita-
bility to the appearance of humans or any other form of intelligent life
on earth. “I agree with him on that!” Dawkins said. “So, I think, does
everybody else! That’s my point! He’s tilting at windmills!” Life was
single celled for almost three billion years, Dawkins pointed out, and it
could well have continued for another three billion without giving rise
to multicellular organisms. “So, yes, of course there is no inevitability.”
Was it possible, I asked Dawkins, that in the long run Gould’s view
of evolutionary biology would prevail? After all, Dawkins had pro-
posed that the fundamental questions of biology might well be finite,
whereas the historical issues Gould addressed were virtually infinite.
“If you mean that once all the interesting questions have been solved

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all you’ve got to do is find the details,” Dawkins replied drily, “I sup-
pose that’s got to be true.” On the other hand, he added, biologists can
never be sure which biological principles have truly universal signifi-
cance “’til we’ve been to a few other planets that have life.” Dawkins
was acknowledging, implicitly, that the deepest questions of biology—
To what extent is life on earth inevitable? Is Darwinism a universal or
merely terrestrial law?—will never be truly, empirically answered as
long as we have only one form of life to study.

The Gaia Heresy

J ust as Darwin has absorbed Gould’s proposals with barely a burp, so

he has metabolized the ideas of another would-be strong scientist,
Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Margu-
lis has challenged what she calls the ultra-Darwinian orthodoxy with
several ideas. The first, and most successful, was the concept of sym-
biosis. Darwin and his heirs had emphasized the role of competition
between individuals and species in evolution. In the 1960s, Margulis
began arguing that symbiosis had been an equally important factor—
and perhaps more important—in the evolution of life. One of the
greatest mysteries in evolutionary biology concerns the evolution of
prokaryotes, cells that lack a nucleus and are the simplest of all organ-
isms, into eukaryotes, cells that have nuclei. All multicellular organ-
isms, including we humans, consist of eukaryotic cells.
Margulis proposed that eukaryotes may have emerged when one
prokaryote absorbed another, smaller one, which became the nucleus.
She suggested that such cells should be considered not as individual
organisms but as composites. After Margulis was able to provide exam-
ples of symbiotic relationships among living microorganisms, she
gradually won support for her views on the role of symbiosis in early
evolution. She did not stop there, however. Like Gould and Eldredge,
she argued that conventional Darwinian mechanisms could not
account for the stops and starts observed in the fossil record. Symbi-
osis, she suggested, could explain why species appear so suddenly and
why they persist so long without changing.11

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Margulis’s emphasis on symbiosis led naturally to a much more

radical idea: Gaia. The concept and term (Gaia was the Greek goddess
of the earth) were originally proposed in 1972 by James Lovelock, a
self-employed British chemist and inventor who is perhaps even more
iconoclastic than Margulis. Gaia comes in many guises, but the basic
idea is that the biota, the sum of all life on earth, is locked in a sym-
biotic relationship with the environment, which includes the atmo-
sphere, the seas, and other aspects of the earth’s surface. The biota
chemically regulates the environment in such a way as to promote its
own survival. Margulis was immediately taken with the idea, and she
and Lovelock have collaborated in promulgating it ever since.12
I met Margulis in May 1994 in the first-class lounge of New York’s
Pennsylvania Station, where she was waiting for a train. She resembled
an aging tomboy: she had short hair and ruddy skin, and she wore a
striped, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. She dutifully played the
radical, at first. She ridiculed the suggestion of Dawkins and other
ultra-Darwinians that evolutionary biology might be nearing comple-
tion. “They’re finished,” Margulis declared, “but that’s just a small blip
in the twentieth century history of biology rather than a full-fledged
and valid science.”
She emphasized that she had no problem with the basic premise of
Darwinism. “Evolution no doubt occurs, and it’s been seen to occur,
and it’s occurring now. Everyone who’s scientific minded agrees with
that. The question is, how does it occur? And that’s where everyone
parts company.” Ultra-Darwinians, by focusing on the gene as the unit
of selection, had failed to explain how speciation occurs; only a much
broader theory that incorporated symbiosis and higher-level selection
could account for the diversity of the fossil record and of life today,
according to Margulis.
Symbiosis, she added, also allows a kind of Lamarckianism, or
inheritance of acquired characteristics. Through symbiosis, one organ-
ism can genetically absorb or infiltrate another and thereby become
more fit. For example, if a translucent fungus absorbs an alga that
can perform photosynthesis, the fungus may acquire the capacity for
photosynthesis, too, and pass it on to its offspring. Margulis said that
Lamarck had been unfairly cast as the goat of evolutionary biology.

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“We have this British-French business. Darwin’s all right and Lamarck
is bad. It’s really terrible.” Margulis noted that symbiogenesis, the cre-
ation of new species through symbiosis, was not really an original idea.
The concept was first proposed late in the last century, and it has been
resurrected many times since then.
Before meeting Margulis, I had read a draft of a book she was writ-
ing with her son, Dorion Sagan, called What Is Life? The book was an
amalgam of philosophy, science, and lyric tributes to “life: the eternal
enigma.” It argued, in effect, for a new holistic approach to biology,
in which the animist beliefs of the ancients would be fused with the
mechanistic views of post-Newton, post-Darwin science.13 Margulis
conceded that the book was aimed less at advancing testable, scientific
assertions than at encouraging a new philosophical outlook among
biologists. But the only difference between her and biologists like
Dawkins, she insisted, was that she admitted her philosophical out-
look instead of pretending that she didn’t have one. “Scientists are no
cleaner with respect to being untouched by culture than anyone else.”
Did that mean she did not believe that science could achieve abso-
lute truth? Margulis pondered the question a moment. She noted that
science derives its power and persuasiveness from the fact that its asser-
tions can be checked against the real world—unlike the assertions of
religion, art, and other modes of knowledge. “But I don’t think that’s
the same as saying there’s absolute truth. I don’t think there’s absolute
truth, and if there is, I don’t think any person has it.”
But then, perhaps realizing how close she was edging toward relativ-
ism—toward being what Harold Bloom had called a mere rebel—Mar-
gulis took pains to steer herself back toward the scientific mainstream.
She said that, although she was often considered a feminist, she was
not and resented being typecast as one. She conceded that, in compari-
son to such concepts as “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth
and claw,” Gaia and symbiosis might seem feminine. “There is that cul-
tural overtone, but I consider that just a complete distortion.”
She rejected the notion—often associated with Gaia—that the earth
is in some sense a living organism. “The earth is obviously not a live
organism,” Margulis said, “because no single living organism cycles
its waste. That’s so anthropomorphic, so misleading.” James Lovelock

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encouraged this metaphor, she claimed, because he thought it would

aid the cause of environmentalism, and because it suited his own qua-
si-spiritual leanings. “He says it’s an okay metaphor because it’s better
than the old one. I think it’s bad because it’s just getting the scientists
mad at you, because you’re encouraging irrationality.” (Actually, Love-
lock, too, has reportedly voiced doubts about some of his earlier claims
concerning Gaia and has even thought of renouncing the term.14)
Both Gould and Dawkins have ridiculed Gaia as pseudo-science,
poetry posing as a theory. But Margulis is, in at least one sense, much
more hard-nosed, more of a positivist, than they are. Gould and Daw-
kins resorted to speculation about extraterrestrial life in order to
buttress their views of life on earth. Margulis scoffed at these tactics.
Any proposals concerning the existence of life elsewhere in the uni-
verse—or its Darwinian or non-Darwinian nature—are sheer specula-
tion, she said. “You have no constraints on the answer to that, whether
it’s a frequent or infrequent thing. So I don’t see how people can have
strong opinions on that. Let me put it this way: opinions aren’t science.
There’s no scientific basis! It’s just opinion!”
She remembered that in the early 1970s she had received a call from
the director Steven Spielberg, who was in the process of writing the
movie ET. Spielberg asked Margulis if she thought it was likely or even
possible that an extraterrestrial would have two hands, each with five
fingers. “I said, ‘You’re making a movie! Just make it fun! What the hell
do you care! Don’t try to confuse yourself that it’s science!’”
Toward the end of our interview, I asked Margulis if she minded
always being referred to as a provocateur or gadfly, or as someone who
was “fruitfully wrong,” as one scientist had put it.15 She pressed her lips
together, brooding over the question. “It’s kind of dismissive, not seri-
ous,” she replied. “I mean, you wouldn’t do this to a serious scientist,
would you?” She stared at me, and I finally realized her question was
not rhetorical; she really wanted an answer. I agreed that the descrip-
tions seemed somewhat condescending.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she mused. Such criticism did not bother her,
she insisted. “Anyone who makes this kind of ad hominem criticism
exposes himself, doesn’t he? I mean, if their argument is just based on
provocative adjectives about me rather than the substance of the issue,

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then . . .” Her voice trailed off. Like so many strong scientists, Margulis
cannot help but yearn, now and then, to be simply a respected member
of the status quo.

Kauffman’s Passion for Order

P erhaps the most ambitious and radical modern challenger of Dar-

win is Stuart Kauffman, a biochemist at the Santa Fe Institute, head-
quarters of the ultratrendy field of complexity (see Chapter 8). In the
1960s, when he was still a graduate student, Kauffman began to sus-
pect that Darwin’s theory of evolution was seriously flawed, in that it
could not account for the seemingly miraculous ability of life to appear
and then to perpetuate itself in such marvelous ways. After all, the sec-
ond law of thermodynamics decrees that everything in the universe is
drifting inexorably toward “heat death,” or universal blandness.
Kauffman tested his ideas by simulating the interaction of various
abstract agents—supposedly representative of chemical and biological
substances—on computers. He came to several conclusions. One was
that when a system of simple chemicals reaches a certain level of com-
plexity, it undergoes a dramatic transition, akin to the phase change
that occurs when liquid water freezes. The molecules begin sponta-
neously combining to create larger molecules of increasing complexity
and catalytic capability. Kauffman argued that this process of self-or-
ganization or autocatalysis, rather than the fortuitous formation of a
molecule with the ability to replicate and evolve, led to life.
Kauffman’s other hypothesis was even farther reaching, in that
it challenged perhaps the central tenet of biology: natural selection.
According to Kauffman, complex arrays of interacting genes subject
to random mutations do not evolve randomly. Instead, they tend to
converge toward a relatively small number of patterns, or attractors, to
use the term favored by chaos theorists. In his 709-page 1993 book, The
Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, Kauffman
contended that this ordering principle, which he sometimes called anti-
chaos, may have played a larger role than natural selection in guiding
the evolution of life, particularly as life grew in complexity.16

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Kauffman, when I first met him during a visit to Santa Fe in May

1994, had a broad, deeply tanned face and wavy gray hair thinning
at the crown. He wore standard-issue Santa Fe apparel: denim shirt,
khakis, hiking boots. He seemed at once tremulous and vulnerable
and supremely confident. His speech, like the improvisations of a jazz
musician, was short on melody, long on digression. Like a salesper-
son trying to establish bonhomie, he kept calling me John. He clearly
enjoyed talking about philosophy. Over the course of our conversation
he presented minilectures not only on his antichaos theories but also
on the limits of reductionism, the difficulty of falsifying theories, and
the social context of scientific facts.
Early in our conversation, Kauffman recalled an article I had written
for Scientific American on the origin of life.17 In the article I had quoted
Kauffman saying, of his own origin-of-life theory, “I’m sure I’m right.”
Kauffman told me he had been embarrassed to see this quotation in
print; he had vowed to avoid such hubris in the future. Somewhat to
my regret, Kauffman kept his word, for the most part. During our con-
versation, he took great pains to qualify his assertions: “Now I’m not
going to say that I’m sure I’m right, John, but . . .”
Kauffman had just finished a book, At Home in the Universe, that
spelled out the implications of his theories on biological evolution. “The
line that I take in my Oxford book, John, that I think is right—I mean,
I think it’s right in the sense that it’s all perfectly plausible; much to be
shown experimentally. But at least in terms of mathematical models,
here you have a body of models that says the emergence of life might
be a natural phenomenon, in the sense that, given a sufficiently compli-
cated set of reacting molecules, you’d expect to crystallize autocatalytic
subsets. So if that view is right, as I told you with abundant enthusiasm a
couple of years ago”—big smile—“then we’re not incredibly improbable
accidents.” In fact, life almost certainly exists elsewhere in the universe,
he added. “And therefore we are at home in the universe in a different
way than we would be if life were this incredibly improbable event that
happened on one planet and one planet only because it was so improba-
ble that you wouldn’t expect it to happen at all.”
Kauffman put the same spin on his theory about how networks of
genes tend to settle into certain recurring patterns. “Again, suppose

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that I’m right,” Kauffman said; then much of the order displayed by
biological systems results not from “the hard-won success of natural
selection” but from these pervasive order-generating effects. “The
whole point of it is that it’s spontaneous order. It’s order for free, okay?
Once again, if that view is right, then not only do we have to modify
Darwinism to account for it, but we understand something about the
emergence and order of life in a different way.”
His computer simulations offer another, more sobering message,
Kauffman said. Just as the addition of a single grain of sand to a large
sandpile can trigger avalanches down its sides, so can a change in the
fitness of one species cause a sudden change in the fitness of all the
other species in the ecosystem, which can culminate in an avalanche
of extinctions. “To say it metaphorically, the best adaptation each of us
achieves may unleash an avalanche that leads to our ultimate demise,
okay? Because we’re all playing the game together and sending out rip-
ples into the system we mutually create. Now that bespeaks humility.”
Kauffman credited the sandpile analogy to Per Bak, a physicist asso-
ciated with the Santa Fe Institute who had developed a theory called
self-organized criticality (which is discussed in Chapter 8).
When I brought up my concern that many scientists, and those at
the Santa Fe Institute in particular, seemed to confuse computer simu-
lations with reality, Kauffman nodded. “I agree with you. That person-
ally bothers me a lot,” he replied. Viewing some simulations, he said, “I
cannot tell where the boundary is between talking about the world—I
mean, everything out there—and really neat computer games and art
forms and toys.” When he did computer simulations, however, he was
always “trying to figure out how something in the world works, or
almost always. Sometimes I’m busy just trying to find things that just
seem interesting, and I wonder if they apply. But I don’t think you’re
doing science unless what you’re doing winds up fitting something out
there in the world, demonstrably. And that ultimately means being
testable.”
His model of genetic networks “makes all kinds of predictions” that
will probably be tested within the next 15 or 20 years, Kauffman said.
“It’s testable with some caveats. When you’ve got a system with 100,000
components, and you can’t take the system apart in detail—yet—what

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are the appropriate testable consequences? They’re going to have to be

statistical consequences, right?”
How could his origin-of-life theory be tested? “You could be asking
two different questions,” Kauffman replied. In one sense, the question
concerns the way in which life actually arose on earth some four bil-
lion years ago. Kauffman did not know whether his theory, or any the-
ory, could satisfactorily address this historical question. On the other
hand, one might test his theory by trying to create autocatalytic sets
in the laboratory. “Tell you what. We’ll make a deal. Whether I do it
or somebody else does it, if somebody makes collectively autocatalytic
sets of molecules with the phase transitions and reaction graphs, you
owe me a dinner, okay?”
There are parallels between Kauffman and other challengers of the
status quo in evolutionary biology. First, Kauffman’s ideas have histori-
cal precedents, just as punctuated equilibrium and symbiosis do. Kant,
Goethe, and other pre-Darwinian thinkers speculated that general
mathematical principles or rules might underlie the patterns of nature.
Even after Darwin, many biologists remained convinced of the exis-
tence of some order-generating force in addition to natural selection
that counteracts the universal drift toward thermodynamic sameness
and gives rise to biological order. Twentieth-century proponents of this
viewpoint, which is sometimes called rational morphology, include
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, William Bateson, and, most recently,
Brian Goodwin.18
Moreover, Kauffman seems to be motivated at least as much by phil-
osophical conviction about how things must be as by scientific curiosity
about how things really are. Gould stresses the importance of chance,
contingency, in shaping evolution. Margulis eschews the reductionism
of neo-Darwinism for a more holistic approach. Kauffman, similarly,
feels that accident alone cannot have created life; our cosmos must har-
bor some fundamental order-generating tendency.
Finally, Kauffman, like Gould and Margulis, has struggled to define
his relationship to Darwin. In his interview with me he said he viewed
anti-chaos as a complement to Darwinian natural selection. At other
times, he has proclaimed that antichaos is the primary factor in evo-
lution and that natural selection’s role has been minor or nonexistent.

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Kauffman’s continued ambivalence over this issue was starkly revealed

in a typeset draft of At Home in the Universe, which he gave me in the
spring of 1995. On the book’s first page, Kauffman proclaimed that
Darwinism was “wrong,” but he had crossed out “wrong” and replaced
it with “incomplete.” Kauffman went back to “wrong” in the galleys of
his book, released several months later. What did the final, published
version say? “Incomplete.”
Kauffman has one powerful ally in Gould, who proclaimed on the
cover of Kauffman’s Origins of Order that it would become “a landmark
and a classic as we grope towards a more comprehensive and satisfying
theory of evolution.” This is a strange alliance. Whereas Kauffman has
argued that the laws of complexity he discerns in his computer simu-
lations have lent the evolution of life a certain inevitability, Gould has
devoted his career to arguing that virtually nothing in the history of
life was inevitable. In his conversation with me, Gould also specifically
repudiated the proposal that the history of life unfolded according to
mathematical laws. “It’s a very deep position,” Gould said, “but I also
think it’s very deeply wrong.” What Gould and Kauffman do have in
common is that each has challenged the assertion of Richard Dawkins
and other hard-core Darwinians that evolutionary theory has already
more or less explained the history of life. In providing blurbs for Kauff-
man’s books, Gould shows that he adheres to the old maxim “The
enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
For the most part, Kauffman has had little success at winning a fol-
lowing for his ideas. Perhaps the major problem is that his theories are
statistical in nature, as he himself admits. But one cannot confirm a
statistical prediction about the probability of life’s origin and its subse-
quent evolution when one only has one data point—terrestrial life—to
consider. One of the harshest assessments of Kauffman’s work comes
from John Maynard Smith, a British evolutionary biologist who, like
Dawkins, is renowned for his sharp tongue and who pioneered the
use of mathematics in evolutionary biology. Kauffman once studied
under Maynard Smith, and he has spent countless hours trying to con-
vince his former mentor of the importance of his work—apparently in
vain. In a public debate in 1995, Maynard Smith said of self-organized
criticality, the sandpile model advanced by Per Bak and embraced by

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Kauffman, “I just find the whole enterprise contemptible.” Maynard

Smith told Kauffman later, over beers, that he did not find Kauffman’s
approach to biology interesting.19 To a practitioner of ironic science
such as Kauffman, there can be no crueler insult.
Kauffman is at his most eloquent and persuasive when he is in his
critical mode. He has implied that the evolutionary theory promul-
gated by biologists such as Dawkins is cold and mechanical; it does
not do justice to the majesty and mystery of life. Kauffman is right;
there is something unsatisfying, tautological, about Darwinian theory,
even when it is explicated by a rhetorician as skilled as Dawkins. But
Dawkins, at least, distinguishes between living and nonliving things.
Kauffman seems to see all phenomena, from bacteria to galaxies, as
manifestations of abstract mathematical forms that undergo endless
permutations. He is a mathematical aesthete. His vision is similar to
that of the particle physicists who call God a geometer. Kauffman has
suggested that his vision of life is more meaningful and comforting
than that of Dawkins. But most of us, I suspect, can identify more with
Dawkins’s pushy little replicators than we can with Kauffman’s Bool-
ean functions in N-space. Where is the meaning and comfort in these
abstractions?

The Conservatism of Science

O ne constant threat to the status quo in science—and in all human

endeavors—is the desire of new generations to make their mark on
the world. Society also has an insatiable appetite for the new. These
twin phenomena are largely responsible for the rapid turnover of
styles in the arts, where change for its own sake is embraced. Science
is hardly immune to these influences. Gould’s punctuated equilibrium,
Margulis’s Gaia, and Kauffman’s antichaos have all had their minute of
fame. But it is much more difficult to achieve lasting change in science
than in the arts, for obvious reasons. Science’s success stems in large
part from its conservatism, its insistence on high standards of effec-
tiveness. Quantum mechanics and general relativity were as new, as
surprising, as anyone could ask for. But they were believed ultimately

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not because they imparted an intellectual thrill but because they were
effective: they accurately predicted the outcome of experiments. Old
theories are old for good reason. They are robust, flexible. They have
an uncanny correspondence to reality. They may even be True.
Would-be revolutionaries face another problem. The scientific cul-
ture was once much smaller and therefore more susceptible to rapid
change. Now it has become a vast intellectual, social, and political
bureaucracy, with inertia to match. Stuart Kauffman, during one of
our conversations, compared the conservatism of science to that of
biological evolution, in which history severely constrains change. Not
only science, but many other systems of ideas—and particularly those
with important social consequences—tend to “stabilize and freeze in”
over time, Kauffman noted. “Think of the evolution of standard oper-
ating procedure on ships, or aircraft carriers,” he said. “It’s an incred-
ibly conservative process. If you wandered in and tried to design, ab
initio [from scratch], procedures on an aircraft carrier, I mean, you’d
just blow it to shit!”
Kauffman leaned toward me. “This is really interesting,” he said.
“Take the law, okay? British common law has evolved for what, 1,200
years? There is this enormous corpus with a whole bunch of concepts
about what constitutes reasonable behavior. It would be really hard to
change all that! I wonder if you could show that as a web of concepts
matures in any area—in all these cases we’re making maps to make
our way in the world—I wonder if you could show that somehow the
center of it got more and more resistant to change.” Oddly enough,
Kauffman was presenting an excellent argument why his own radical
theories about the origin of life and of biological order would probably
never be accepted. If any scientific idea has proved its ability to over-
come all challengers, it is Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The Mysterious Origin of Life

I f I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolu-

tion—which is so well supported by the fossil record—and focus
instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the

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chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer’s dream.

It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never
entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion.20
One of the most diligent and respected origin-of-life researchers is
Stanley Miller. He was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1953 when he
sought to recreate the origin of life in a laboratory. He filled a sealed
glass apparatus with a few liters of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen
(representing the atmosphere) and some water (the ocean). A spark-dis-
charge device zapped the gases with simulated lightning, while a heat-
ing coil kept the waters bubbling. Within a few days, the water and
gases were stained with a reddish goo. On analyzing the substance,
Miller found to his delight that it was rich in amino acids. These organic
compounds are the building blocks of proteins, the basic stuff of life.
Miller’s results seemed to provide stunning evidence that life could
arise from what the British chemist J. B. S. Haldane had called the “pri-
mordial soup.” Pundits speculated that scientists, like Mary Shelley’s
Dr. Frankenstein, would shortly conjure up living organisms in their
laboratories and thereby demonstrate in detail how genesis unfolded.
It hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, almost 40 years after his original
experiment, Miller told me that solving the riddle of the origin of life
had turned out to be more difficult than he or anyone else had envi-
sioned. He recalled one prediction, made shortly after his experiment,
that within 25 years scientists would “surely” know how life began.
“Well, 25 years have come and gone,” Miller said drily.
After his 1953 experiment, Miller dedicated himself to the search for
the secret of life. He developed a reputation as both a rigorous experi-
mentalist and a bit of a curmudgeon, someone who is quick to criticize
what he feels is shoddy work. When I met Miller in his office at the Uni-
versity of California at San Diego, where he is a professor of biochem-
istry, he fretted that his field still had a reputation as a fringe discipline,
not worthy of serious pursuit. “Some work is better than others. The
stuff that is awful does tend to drag it down. I tend to get very upset
about that. People do good work, and then you see this garbage attract
attention.” Miller seemed unimpressed with any of the current propos-
als on the origin of life, referring to them as “nonsense” or “paper chem-
istry.” He was so contemptuous of some hypotheses that, when I asked

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his opinion of them, he merely shook his head, sighed deeply, and snick-
ered—as if overcome by the folly of humanity. Stuart Kauffman’s the-
ory of autocatalysis fell into this category. “Running equations through
a computer does not constitute an experiment,” Miller sniffed.
Miller acknowledged that scientists may never know precisely
where and when life emerged. “We’re trying to discuss a historical
event, which is very different from the usual kind of science, and so
criteria and methods are very different,” he remarked. But when I sug-
gested that Miller sounded pessimistic about the prospects for discov-
ering life’s secret, he looked appalled. Pessimistic? Certainly not! He
was optimistic!
One day, he vowed, scientists would discover the self-replicating
molecule that had triggered the great saga of evolution. Just as the dis-
covery of the microwave afterglow of the big bang legitimized cos-
mology, so would the discovery of the first genetic material legitimize
Miller’s field. “It would take off like a rocket,” Miller muttered through
clenched teeth. Would such a discovery be immediately self-apparent?
Miller nodded. “It will be in the nature of something that will make
you say, ‘Jesus, there it is. How could you have overlooked this for so
long?’ And everybody will be totally convinced.”
When Miller performed his landmark experiment in 1953, most
scientists still shared Darwin’s belief that proteins were the likeliest
candidates for self-reproducing molecules, since proteins were thought
to be capable of reproducing and organizing themselves. After the dis-
covery that DNA is the basis for genetic transmission and for protein
synthesis, many researchers began to favor nucleic acids over proteins
as the ur-molecules. But there was a major hitch in this scenario. DNA
can make neither proteins nor copies of itself without the help of cat-
alytic proteins called enzymes. This fact turned the origin of life into
a classic chicken-or-egg problem: which came first, proteins or DNA?
In The Coming of the Golden Age, Gunther Stent, prescient as always,
suggested that this conundrum could be solved if researchers found a
self-replicating molecule that could act as its own catalyst.21 In the early
1980s, researchers identified just such a molecule: ribonucleic acid, or
RNA, a single-strand molecule that serves as DNA’s helpmate in man-
ufacturing proteins. Experiments revealed that certain types of RNA

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could act as their own enzymes, snipping themselves in two and splic-
ing themselves back together again. If RNA could act as an enzyme
then it might also be able to replicate itself without help from proteins.
RNA could serve as both gene and catalyst, egg and chicken.
But the so-called RNA-world hypothesis suffers from several prob-
lems. RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize under the
best of circumstances, in a laboratory, let alone under plausible pre-
biotic conditions. Once RNA is synthesized, it can make new copies
of itself only with a great deal of chemical coaxing from the scientist.
The origin of life “has to happen under easy conditions, not ones that
are very special,” Miller said. He is convinced that some simpler—and
possibly quite dissimilar—molecule must have paved the way for RNA.
Lynn Margulis, for one, doubts whether investigations of the ori-
gin of life will yield the kind of simple, self-validating answer of
which Miller dreams. “I think that may be true of the cause of can-
cer but not of the origin of life,” Margulis said. Life, she pointed out,
emerged under complex environmental conditions. “You have day and
night, winter and summer, changes in temperature, changes in dry-
ness. These things are historical accumulations. Biochemical systems
are effectively historical accumulations. So I don’t think there is ever
going to be a packaged recipe for life: add water and mix and get life.
It’s not a single-step process. It’s a cumulative process that involves a lot
of changes.” The smallest bacterium, she noted, “is so much more like
people than Stanley Miller’s mixtures of chemicals, because it already
has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less
of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium.”
Francis Crick wrote in his book Life Itself that “the origin of life
appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which
would have to be satisfied to get it going.”22 (Crick, it should be noted,
is an agnostic leaning toward atheism.) Crick proposed that aliens visit-
ing the earth in a spacecraft billions of years ago may have deliberately
seeded it with microbes.
Perhaps Stanley Miller’s hope will be fulfilled: scientists will find
some clever chemical or combination of chemicals that can reproduce,
mutate, and evolve under plausible prebiotic conditions. The discov-
ery would be sure to launch a new era of applied chemistry. (The vast

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majority of researchers focus on this goal, rather than on the elucida-

tion of life’s origin.) But given our lack of knowledge about the condi-
tions under which life began, any theory of life’s origin based on such
a finding would always be subject to doubts. Miller has faith that biolo-
gists will know the answer to the riddle of life’s origin when they see it.
But his belief rests on the premise that the answer will be plausible, if
only retrospectively. Who said the origin of life on earth was plausible?
Life might have emerged from a freakish convergence of improbable
and even unimaginable events.
Moreover, the discovery of a plausible ur-molecule, when or if it
happens, is unlikely to tell us what we really want to know: Was life
on earth inevitable or a freak occurrence? Has it happened elsewhere
or only in this lonely, lonely spot? These questions can only be resolved
if we discover life beyond the earth. Society seems increasingly reluc-
tant to underwrite such investigations. In 1993, Congress shut down
NASA’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, which
scanned the heavens for radio signals generated by other civilizations.
The dream of a manned mission to Mars, the most likely site for extra-
terrestrial life in the solar system, has been indefinitely deferred.
Even so, scientists may find evidence of life beyond the earth tomor-
row. Such a discovery would transform all of science and philosophy
and human thought. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins might
be able to settle their argument over whether natural selection is a cos-
mic or merely terrestrial phenomenon (although each would doubtless
find ample evidence for his point of view). Stuart Kauffman might be
able to determine whether the laws he discerns in his computer simu-
lations prevail in the real world. If the extraterrestrials are intelligent
enough to have developed their own science, Edward Witten may
learn whether superstring theory really is the inevitable culmination
of any search for the fundamental rules governing reality. Science fic-
tion will become fact. The New York Times will resemble the Weekly
World News, one of the supermarket tabloids that prints “photographs”
of presidents hobnobbing with aliens. One can always hope.

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 CHAPTER Six
THE END OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

E
verything would have been easy for Edward O. Wilson if he had
just stuck to ants. Ants lured him into biology when he was a boy
growing up in Alabama, and they remain his greatest source of
inspiration. He has written stacks of papers and several books on the
tiny creatures. Ant colonies line Wilson’s office at Harvard University’s
Museum of Comparative Zoology. Showing them off to me, he was
as proud and excited as a 10-year-old child. When I asked Wilson if he
had exhausted the topic of ants yet, he exulted, “We’re only just begin-
ning!” He had recently embarked on a survey of Pheidole, one of the
most abundant genera in the animal kingdom. Pheidole is thought to
include more than 2,000 species of ants, most of which have never been
described or even named. “I guess with that same urge that makes
men in their middle age decide that at last they are going to row across
the Atlantic in a rowboat or join a group to climb K2, I decided that I
would take on Pheidole,” Wilson said.1
Wilson was a leader in the effort to conserve the earth’s biologi-
cal diversity, and his grand goal was to make Pheidole a benchmark
of sorts for biologists seeking to monitor the biodiversity of different
regions. Drawing on Harvard’s collection of ants, the largest in the
world, Wilson was generating a set of painstaking pencil drawings of
each species of Pheidole along with descriptions of its behavior and ecol-
ogy. “It probably looks crushingly dull to you,” Wilson apologized as
he flipped through his drawings of Pheidole species (which were actu-
ally compellingly monstrous). “To me it’s one of the most satisfying
activities imaginable.” He confessed that, when he peered through his
144

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microscope at a previously unknown species, he had “the sensation of

maybe looking upon—I don’t want to get too poetic—of looking upon
the face of creation.” A single ant was enough to render Wilson awe-
struck before the universe.
I first detected a martial spirit glinting through Wilson’s boyish
exuberance when we walked over to the ant farm sprawling across a
counter in his office. These are leaf-cutter ants, Wilson explained, which
range from South America as far north as Louisiana. The scrawny little
specimens scurrying across the surface of the spongelike nest are the
workers; the soldiers lurk within. Wilson pulled a plug from the top of
the nest and blew into the hole. An instant later several bulked-up behe-
moths boiled to the surface, BB-sized heads tossing, mandibles agape.
“They can cut through shoe leather,” Wilson remarked, a bit too admir-
ingly. “If you tried to dig into a leaf-cutter nest, they would gradually
dispatch you, like a Chinese torture, by a thousand cuts.” He chuckled.
Wilson’s pugnacity—innate or inculcated?—emerged more clearly
later on, when he discussed the continued reluctance of American soci-
ety to confront the role played by genes in shaping human behavior.
“This country is so seized by our civic religion, egalitarianism, that it
just averts its gaze from anything that would seem to detract from that
central ethic we have that everybody is equal, that perfect societies can
be built with the good will of people.” As he delivered this sermon,
Wilson’s long-boned, Yankee-farmer face, usually so genial, became as
stony as a Puritan preacher’s.
There are two—at least two—Edward Wilsons. One is the poet
of social insects and the passionate defender of all the earth’s biodi-
versity. The other is a fiercely ambitious, competitive man struggling
with his sense that he is a latecomer, that his field is more or less com-
plete. Wilson’s response to the anxiety of influence was quite different
from that of Gould, Margulis, Kauffman, and others who have wres-
tled with Darwin. For all their differences, they responded to Darwin’s
dominance by arguing that Darwinian theory has limited explanatory
power, that evolution is much more complicated than Darwin and his
modern heirs have suggested. Wilson took the opposite course. He
sought to extend Darwinism, to show that it could explain more than
anyone—even Richard Dawkins—had thought.

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Wilson’s role as the prophet of sociobiology can be traced back to a

crisis of faith he suffered in the late 1950s, just after his arrival at Har-
vard. Although he was already one of the world’s authorities on social
insects, he began to brood over the apparent insignificance—at least in
the eyes of other scientists—of his field of research. Molecular biolo-
gists, exhilarated by their discovery of the structure of DNA, the basis
of genetic transmission, had begun questioning the value of studying
whole organisms, such as ants. Wilson once recalled that James Wat-
son, who was then at Harvard and still flushed with the excitement
of having discovered the double helix, “radiated contempt” for evolu-
tionary biology, which he saw as a glorified version of stamp collecting
rendered obsolete by molecular biology.2
Wilson responded to this challenge by broadening his outlook, by
seeking the rules of behavior governing not only ants but all social
animals. That effort culminated in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Published in 1975, the book was for the most part a magisterial sur-
vey of nonhuman social animals, from ants and termites to antelope
and baboons. Drawing on ethology, population genetics, and other dis-
ciplines, Wilson showed how mating behavior and division of labor
could be understood as adaptive responses to evolutionary pressure.
Only in the last chapter did Wilson turn to humans. He drew atten-
tion to the obvious fact that sociology, the study of human social
behavior, was badly in need of a unifying theory. “There have been
attempts at system building but . . . they came to little. Much of what
passes for theory in sociology today is really labeling of phenomena
and concepts, in the expected manner of natural history. Process is dif-
ficult to analyze because the fundamental units are elusive, perhaps
nonexistent. Syntheses commonly consist of the tedious cross-referenc-
ing of differing sets of definitions and metaphors erected by the more
imaginative thinkers.”3
Sociology would only become a truly scientific discipline, Wil-
son argued, if it submitted to the Darwinian paradigm. He noted,
for example, that warfare, xenophobia, the dominance of males, and
even our occasional spurts of altruism could all be understood as adap-
tive behaviors stemming from our primordial compulsion to propa-
gate our genes. In the future, Wilson predicted, further advances in

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evolutionary theory as well as in genetics and neuroscience would

enable sociobiology to account for a wide variety of human behavior;
sociobiology would eventually subsume not only sociology, but also
psychology, anthropology, and all the “soft” social sciences.
The book received generally favorable reviews. Yet some scientists,
including Wilson’s colleague Stephen Jay Gould, rebuked Wilson for
suggesting that the human condition was somehow inevitable. Wilson’s
views, critics argued, represented an updated version of social Darwin-
ism; that notorious Victorian-era doctrine, by conflating what is with
what should be, had provided a scientific justification for racism, sex-
ism, and imperialism. The attacks on Wilson peaked in 1978 at a meet-
ing of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A
member of a radical group called the International Committee Against
Racism dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head while shouting,
“You’re all wet.”4
Undeterred, Wilson went on to write two books on human sociobi-
ology with Charles Lumsden, a physicist at the University of Toronto:
Genes, Mind, and Culture (1981) and Promethean Fire (1983). Wilson and
Lumsden conceded in the latter book “the sheer difficulty of cre-
ating an accurate portrayal of genetic and cultural interaction.” But
they declared that the way to cope with this difficulty was not to con-
tinue “the honored tradition of social theory written as literary criti-
cism,” but to create a rigorous mathematical theory of the interaction
between genes and culture. “The theory we wished to build,” Wilson
and Lumsden wrote, “would contain a system of linked abstract pro-
cesses expressed as far as possible in the form of explicit mathematical
structures that translate the processes back to the real world of sensory
experience.”5
The books that Wilson wrote with Lumsden were not as well
received as Sociobiology had been. One critic recently called their view
of human nature “grimly mechanistic” and “simplistic.”6 During our
interview, Wilson was nonetheless more bullish than ever about the
prospects for sociobiology. While granting that support for his propos-
als was very slim in the 1970s, he insisted that “a lot more evidence
exists today” that many human traits—ranging from homosexuality to
shyness—have a genetic basis; advances in medical genetics have also

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made genetic explanations of human behavior more acceptable to sci-

entists and to the public. Human sociobiology has flourished not only
in Europe, which has a Sociobiological Society, but also in the United
States, Wilson said; although many scientists in the United States shun
the term sociobiology because of its political connotations, disciplines
with names such as biocultural studies, evolutionary psychology, and
Darwinian studies of human behavior are all “sprigs” growing from
the trunk of sociobiology.7
Wilson was still convinced that sociobiology would eventually sub-
sume not only the social sciences but also philosophy. He was writ-
ing a book, tentatively titled Natural Philosophy, about how findings
from sociobiology would help to resolve political and moral issues.
He intended to argue that religious tenets can and should be “empiri-
cally tested” and rejected if they are incompatible with scientific truths.
He suggested, for example, that the Catholic church might examine
whether its prohibition against abortion—a dogma that contributes
to overpopulation—conflicts with the larger moral goal of preserving
all the earth’s biodiversity. As Wilson spoke, I recalled one colleague’s
comment that Wilson combined great intelligence and learnedness
with, paradoxically, a kind of naïveté, almost an innocence.
Even those evolutionary biologists who admire Wilson’s efforts
to lay the foundations for a detailed theory of human nature doubt
whether such an endeavor can succeed. Dawkins, for example, loathed
the “knee-jerk hostility” toward sociobiology displayed by Stephen Jay
Gould and other left-leaning scientists. “I think Wilson was shabbily
treated, not least by his colleagues at Harvard,” Dawkins said. “And
so if there’s an opportunity to be counted, I would stand up and be
counted with Wilson.” Yet Dawkins was not as confident as Wilson
seemed to be that “the messiness of human life” could be completely
understood in scientific terms. Science is not intended to explain
“highly complex systems arising out of lots and lots of details,” Daw-
kins elaborated. “Explaining sociology would be rather like using sci-
ence to explain or to predict the exact course of a molecule of water
as it goes over Niagara Falls. You couldn’t do it, but that doesn’t mean
that there’s anything fundamentally difficult about it. It’s just very, very
complicated.”

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I suspect that Wilson himself may doubt whether sociobiology will

ever become as all-powerful as he once believed. At the end of Sociobiol-
ogy, he implied that the field would eventually culminate in a complete,
final theory of human nature. “To maintain the species indefinitely,”
Wilson wrote, “we are compelled to drive toward total knowledge,
right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have
progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms,
and the social sciences come to full flower, the result might be hard to
accept.” He closed with a quote from Camus: “in a universe divested of
illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without
remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope
of a promised land.”8
When I recalled this gloomy coda, Wilson admitted that he had fin-
ished Sociobiology in a slight depression. “I thought after a period of
time, as we knew more and more about where we came from and why
we do what we do, in precise terms, that it would reduce—what’s the
word I’m looking for—our exalted self-image, and our hope for indef-
inite growth in the future.” Wilson also believed that such a theory
would bring about the end of biology, the discipline that had given
meaning to his own life. “But then I talked myself out of that,” he said.
Wilson decided that the human mind, which has been and is still being
shaped by the complex interaction between culture and genes, repre-
sented an endless frontier for science. “I saw that here was an immense
unmapped area of science and human history which we would take
forever to explore,” he recalled. “That made me feel much more cheer-
ful.” Wilson resolved his depression by acknowledging, in effect, that
his critics were right: science cannot explain all the vagaries of human
thought and culture. There can be no complete theory of human nature,
one that resolves all the questions we have about ourselves.
Just how revolutionary is sociobiology? Not very, according to Wil-
son himself. For all his creativity and ambition, Wilson is a rather
conventional Darwinian. That became clear when I asked him about
a concept called biophilia, which holds that the human affinity for
nature, or at least certain aspects of it, is innate, a product of natural
selection. Biophilia represents Wilson’s effort to find common ground
between his two great passions, sociobiology and biodiversity. Wilson

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wrote a monograph on biophilia, published in 1984, and later edited

a collection of essays on the topic by himself and others. During my
conversation with Wilson, I made the mistake of remarking that bio-
philia reminded me of Gaia, because each idea evokes an altruism that
embraces all of life rather than just one’s kin or even one’s species.
“Actually, not,” Wilson replied, so sharply that I was taken aback.
Biophilia does not posit the existence of “some phosphorescent altru-
ism in the air,” Wilson scoffed. “I take a very strong mechanistic view
of where human nature came from,” he said. “Our concern for other
organisms is very much a product of Darwinian natural selection.”
Biophilia evolved, Wilson continued, not for the benefit of all life, but
for the benefit of individual humans. “My view is pretty strictly anthro-
pocentric, because what I see and understand, from all that I know of
evolution, supports that view and not the other.”
I asked Wilson whether he agreed with his Harvard colleague Ernst
Mayr that modern biology had been reduced to addressing puzzles
whose solution would merely reinforce the prevailing paradigm of
neo-Darwinism.9 Wilson smirked. “Fix the constants to the next dec-
imal point,” he said, alluding to the quote that helped to create the
legend of the complacent nineteenth-century physicists. “Yeah, we’ve
heard that.” But having gently mocked Mayr’s view of completion, Wil-
son went on to agree with it. “We are not about to dethrone evolution
by natural selection, or our basic understanding of speciation,” Wilson
said. “So I, too, am skeptical that we are going to go through any revo-
lutionary changes of how evolution works or how diversification works
or how biodiversity is created, at the species level.” There is much to
learn about embryonic development, about the interaction between
human biology and culture, about ecologies and other complex sys-
tems. But the basic rules of biology, Wilson asserted, are “beginning to
fall pretty much, in my judgment, permanently into place. How evolu-
tion works, the algorithm, the machine, what drives it.”
What Wilson might have added is that the chilling moral and phil-
osophical implications of Darwinian theory were spelled out long ago.
In his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that if humans had
evolved as bees had, “there can be hardly a doubt that our unmarried
females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their

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brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and
no one would think of interfering.”10 In other words, we humans are
animals, and natural selection has shaped not only our bodies but our
very beliefs, our fundamental sense of right and wrong. One dismayed
Victorian reviewer of Descent fretted in the Edinburgh Review, “If these
views be true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake
society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of the con-
science and the religious sense.”11 That revolution happened long ago.
Before the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche had proclaimed
that there were no divine underpinnings to human morality: God is
dead. We did not need sociobiology to tell us that.

A Few Words from Noam Chomsky

O ne of the more intriguing critics of sociobiology and other Darwin-

ian approaches to social science is Noam Chomsky, who is both a
linguist and one of America’s most uncompromising social critics. The
first time I saw Chomsky in the flesh he was giving a talk on the prac-
tices of modern labor unions. He was wiry, with the slight hunch of a
chronic reader. He wore steel-rimmed glasses, sneakers, chinos, and
an open-necked shirt. But for the lines in his face and the gray in his
longish hair, he could have passed for a college student, albeit one who
would rather discuss Hegel than guzzle beer at fraternity parties.
Chomsky’s main message was that union leaders were more con-
cerned with maintaining their own power than with representing
workers. His audience? Union leaders. During the question-and-an-
swer period they reacted, as one might expect, with defensiveness and
even hostility. But Chomsky met their arguments with such serene,
unshakable conviction—and such a relentless barrage of facts—that
before long the targets of his criticism were nodding in agreement: yes,
perhaps they were selling out to their capitalist overlords.
When I later expressed surprise to Chomsky at the harshness of his
lecture, he informed me that he was not interested in “giving people A’s
for being right.” He opposed all authoritarian systems. Of course, he
usually focused his wrath not on labor unions, which have lost much

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of their power, but on the U.S. government, industry, and the media.
He called the United States a “terrorist superpower” and the media its
“propaganda agent.” He told me that if the New York Times, one of his
favorite targets, started reviewing his books on politics, it would be a
sign to him that he was doing something wrong. He summed up his
world view as “whatever the establishment is, I’m against it.”
I said I found it ironic that his political views were so antiestablish-
ment, given that in linguistics he is the establishment. “No I’m not,” he
snapped. His voice, which ordinarily is hypnotically calm—even when
he is eviscerating someone—suddenly had an edge. “My position in
linguistics is a minority position, and it always has been.” He insisted
that he was “almost totally incapable of learning languages” and that,
in fact, he was not even a professional linguist. MIT had only hired him
and given him tenure, he suggested, because it really did not know or
care much about the humanities; it simply needed to fill a slot.12
I provide this background for its cautionary value. Chomsky is one
of the most contrarian intellectuals I have met (rivaled only by the
anarchic philosopher Paul Feyerabend). He is compelled to put all
authority figures in their places, even himself. He exemplifies the anxi-
ety of self-influence. One should thus take all of Chomsky’s pronounce-
ments with a grain of salt. In spite of his denials, Chomsky is the most
important linguist who has ever lived. “It is hardly an exaggeration to
say that there is no major theoretical issue in linguistics today that is
debated in terms other than those in which he has chosen to define it,”
declares the Encyclopaedia Britannica.13 Chomsky’s position in the his-
tory of ideas has been likened to that of Descartes and Darwin.14 When
Chomsky was in graduate school in the 1950s, linguistics—and all the
social sciences—was dominated by behaviorism, which hewed to John
Locke’s notion that the mind begins as a tabula rasa, a blank slate that
is inscribed upon by experience. Chomsky challenged this approach.
He contended that children could not possibly learn language solely
through induction, or trial and error, as behaviorists believed. Some
fundamental principles of language—a kind of universal grammar—
must be embedded in our brains. Chomsky’s theories, which he first set
forth in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, helped to rout behaviorism

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once and for all and paved the way for a more Kantian, genetically ori-
ented view of human language and cognition.15
Edward Wilson and other scientists who attempt to explain human
nature in genetic terms are all, in a sense, indebted to Chomsky. But
Chomsky has never been comfortable with Darwinian accounts of
human behavior. He accepts that natural selection may have played
some role in the evolution of language and other human attributes. But
given the enormous gap between human language and the relatively
simple communication systems of other animals, and given our frag-
mentary knowledge of the past, science can tell us little about how
language evolved. Just because language is adaptive now, Chomsky
elaborates, does not mean that it arose in response to selection pres-
sures. Language may have been an incidental by-product of a spurt in
intelligence that only later was coopted for various uses. The same may
be true of other properties of the human mind. Darwinian social sci-
ence, Chomsky has complained, is not a real science at all but “a phi-
losophy of mind with a little bit of science thrown in.” The problem,
according to Chomsky, is that “Darwinian theory is so loose it can
incorporate anything they discover.”16
Chomsky’s evolutionary perspective has, if anything, convinced
him that we may have only a limited ability to understand nature,
human or inhuman. He rejects the notion—popular among many sci-
entists—that evolution shaped the brain into a general-purpose learn-
ing and problem-solving machine. Chomsky believes, as Gunther Stent
and Colin McGinn do, that the innate structure of our minds imposes
limits on our understanding. (Stent and McGinn arrived at this conclu-
sion in part because of Chomsky’s research.)
Chomsky divides scientific questions into problems, which are at
least potentially answerable, and mysteries, which are not. Before the
seventeenth century, Chomsky explained to me, when science did not
really exist in the modern sense, almost all questions appeared to be
mysteries. Then Newton, Descartes, and others began posing ques-
tions and solving them with the methods that spawned modern sci-
ence. Some of those investigations have led to “spectacular progress,”
but many others have proved fruitless. Scientists have made absolutely

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no progress, for example, investigating such issues as consciousness

and free will. “We don’t even have bad ideas,” Chomsky said.
All animals, he argued, have cognitive abilities shaped by their evolu-
tionary histories. A rat, for example, may learn to navigate a maze that
requires it to turn left at every second fork but not one that requires it to
turn left at every fork corresponding to a prime number. If one believes
that humans are animals—and not “angels,” Chomsky added sarcasti-
cally—then we, too, are subject to these biological constraints. Our lan-
guage capacity allows us to formulate questions and resolve them in ways
that rats cannot, but ultimately we, too, face mysteries as absolute as that
faced by the rat in a prime-number maze. We are limited in our ability to
ask questions as well. Chomsky thus rejected the possibility that physi-
cists or other scientists could attain a theory of everything; at best, physi-
cists can only create a “theory of what they know how to formulate.”
In his own field of linguistics “there’s a lot of understanding now
about how human languages are more or less cast in the same mold,
what the principles are that unify them and so on.” But many of the
most profound issues raised by language remain impenetrable. Des-
cartes, for instance, struggled to comprehend the human ability to use
language in endlessly creative ways. “We’re facing the same blank wall
Descartes did” on that issue, Chomsky said.
In his 1988 book, Language and Problems of Knowledge, Chomsky sug-
gested that our verbal creativity may prove more fruitful than our sci-
entific skills for addressing many questions about human nature. “It is
quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we
will always learn more about human life and human personality from
novels than from scientific psychology,” he wrote. “The science-form-
ing capacity is only one facet of our mental endowment. We use it
where we can but are not restricted to it, fortunately.”17
The success of science, Chomsky proposed to me, stems from “a
kind of chance convergence of the truth about the world and the struc-
ture of our cognitive space. And it is a chance convergence because
evolution didn’t design us to do this; there’s no pressure on differential
reproduction that led to the capacity to solve problems in quantum
theory. We had it. It’s just there for the same reason that most other
things are there: for some reason that nobody understands.”

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Modern science has stretched the cognitive capacity of humans to

the breaking point, according to Chomsky. In the nineteenth century,
any well-educated person could grasp contemporary physics, but in the
twentieth century “you’ve got to be some kind of freak.” That was my
opening. Does the increasing difficulty of science, I asked, imply that
science might be approaching its limits? Might science, defined as the
search for comprehensible regularities or patterns in nature, be ending?
Abruptly, Chomsky took back everything he had just said. “Science is
hard, I would agree with that. But when you talk to young children,
they want to understand nature. It’s driven out of them. It’s driven out
of them by boring teaching and by an educational system that tells
them they’re too stupid to do it.” Suddenly it was the establishment, not
our innate limitations, that had brought science to its current impasse.
Chomsky insisted that “there are major questions for the natural
sciences which we can formulate and that are within our grasp, and
that’s an exciting prospect.” For example, scientists still must show—
and almost certainly will show—how fertilized cells grow into com-
plex organisms and how the human brain generates language. There
is still plenty of science left to do, “plenty of physics, plenty of biology,
plenty of chemistry.”
In denying the implication of his own ideas, Chomsky may have
been exhibiting just another odd spasm of self-defiance. But I suspect
he was really succumbing to wishful thinking. Like so many other
scientists, he cannot imagine a world without science. I once asked
Chomsky which work he found more satisfying, his political activism
or his linguistic research. He seemed surprised that I needed to ask.
Obviously, he replied, he spoke out against injustice merely out of a
sense of duty; he took no intellectual pleasure from it. If the world’s
problems were suddenly to disappear, he would happily, joyfully,
devote himself to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

The Antiprogress of Clifford Geertz

P ractitioners of ironic science can be divided into two types: naïfs,

who believe or at least hope they are discovering objective truths

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about nature (the superstring theorist Edward Witten is the arche-

typal example), and sophisticates, who realize that they are, in fact,
practicing something more akin to art or literary criticism than to con-
ventional science. There is no better example of a sophisticated ironic
scientist than the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He is simultaneously
a scientist and a philosopher of science; his work is one long comment
on itself. If Stephen Jay Gould serves as the negative capability of evo-
lutionary biology, Geertz does the same for social science. Geertz has
helped to fulfill Gunther Stent’s prophecy in The Coming of the Golden
Age that the social sciences “may long remain the ambiguous, impres-
sionistic disciplines that they are at present.”18
I first encountered Geertz’s writings in college, when I took a class
on literary criticism and the instructor assigned Geertz’s 1973 essay
“Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”19 The
essay’s basic message was that an anthropologist cannot portray a cul-
ture by merely “recording the facts.” He or she must interpret phenom-
ena, must try to guess what they mean. Consider the blink of an eye,
Geertz wrote (crediting the example to the British philosopher Gilbert
Ryle). The blink may represent an involuntary twitch stemming from a
neurological disorder, or from fatigue, or from nervousness. Or it may
be a wink, an intentional signal, with many possible meanings. A cul-
ture consists of a virtually infinite number of such messages, or signs,
and the anthropologist’s task is to interpret them. Ideally, the anthro-
pologist’s interpretation of a culture should be as complex and richly
imagined as the culture itself. But just as literary critics never can hope
to establish, once and for all, what Hamlet means, so anthropologists
must eschew all hope of discovering absolute truths. “Anthropol-
ogy, or at least interpretive anthropology, is a science whose progress
is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of
debate,” Geertz wrote. “What gets better is the precision with which
we vex each other.”20 The point of his brand of science, Geertz realized,
is not to bring discourse to a close, but to perpetuate it in ever-more-in-
teresting ways.
In later writings, Geertz likened anthropology not only to liter-
ary criticism but also to literature. Ethnography involves “telling sto-
ries, making pictures, concocting symbolisms and deploying tropes,”

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Geertz wrote, just as literature does. He called anthropology “faction,”

or “imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times.”21
(Of course, substituting art for literary criticism hardly represents a
radical step for one such as Geertz, since to most postmodernists a text
is a text is a text.)
Geertz displayed his own talents as a faction writer in “Deep Play:
Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” The first sentence of the 1972 essay
established his anything-but-straightforward style: “Early in April of
1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village
we intended, as anthropologists, to study.”22 (Geertz’s prose has been
likened to that of both Marcel Proust and Henry James. Geertz told me
he was flattered by the former comparison, but thought the latter was
probably closer to the mark.)
The opening section of the essay described how the young couple
gained the confidence of the normally aloof Balinese. Geertz, his wife,
and a group of villagers had been watching a cockfight when police
raided the scene. The American couple fled along with their Balinese
neighbors. Impressed that the scientists had not sought privileged
treatment from the police, the villagers accepted them.
Having thus established his credentials as an insider, Geertz pro-
ceeded to depict and then to analyze the Balinese obsession with cock-
fighting. He eventually concluded that the bloody sport—in which
roosters armed with razor-sharp spurs fight to the death—mirrored
and thus exorcized the Balinese people’s fear of the dark forces underly-
ing their superficially calm society. Like King Lear or Crime and Punish-
ment, cockfighting “catches up these themes—death, masculinity, rage,
pride, loss, beneficence, chance—and [orders] them into an encompass-
ing structure.”23
Geertz is a shambling bear of a man, with shaggy, whitening hair
and beard. When I first interviewed him one drizzly spring day at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he fidgeted incessantly,
pulling on his ear, pawing his cheek, slouching down in his chair and
abruptly drawing himself up.24 Now and then, as he listened to me pose
a question, he pulled the top of his sweater up over the tip of his nose,
like a bandit trying to conceal his identity. His discourse, too, was elu-
sive. It mimicked his writing: all stops and starts, headlong assertions

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punctuated by countless qualifications, and suffused with hypertrophic

self-awareness.
Geertz was determined to correct what he felt was a common mis-
impression, that he was a universal skeptic who did not believe that
science could achieve any durable truths. Some fields, Geertz said,
notably physics, obviously do have the capability to arrive at the truth.
He also stressed that, contrary to what I might have heard, he did not
consider anthropology to be merely an art form, devoid of any empir-
ical content, and thus not a legitimate field of science. Anthropology is
“empirical, responsive to evidence, it theorizes,” Geertz said, and prac-
titioners can sometimes achieve a nonabsolute falsification of ideas.
Hence it is a science, one that can achieve progress of a kind.
On the other hand, “nothing in anthropology has anything like the
status of the harder parts of the hard sciences, and I don’t think it ever
will,” Geertz said. “Some of the assumptions that [anthropologists]
made about how easy it is to understand all this and what you need
to do in order to do that are no longer really—well, nobody believes
them anymore.” He laughed. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to know
anybody, either, or to do anthropological work. I don’t think that at all.
But it’s not easy.”
In modern anthropology, disagreement rather than consensus is the
norm. “Things get more and more complicated, but they don’t con-
verge to a single point. They spread out and disperse in a very complex
way. So I don’t see everything heading toward some grand integration.
I see it as much more pluralistic and differentiated.”
As Geertz continued speaking, it seemed that the progress he envi-
sioned was a kind of antiprogress, in which anthropologists would
eliminate, one by one, all the assumptions that could make consensus
possible; firm beliefs would dwindle, and doubts multiply. He noted
that few anthropologists still believed that they could extract universal
truths about humanity from the study of so-called “primitive” tribes,
those supposedly existing in a pristine state, uncorrupted by modern
culture; neither could anthropologists pretend to be purely objective
data gatherers, free of biases and preconceptions.
Geertz found laughable the predictions of Edward Wilson that the
social sciences could eventually be rendered as rigorous as physics by

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grounding them in evolutionary theory, genetics, and neuroscience.

Would-be revolutionaries have always come forward with some grand
idea that would unify the social sciences, Geertz recalled. Before
sociobiology there was general systems theory, and cybernetics, and
Marxism. “The notion that someone is going to come along and rev-
olutionize everything overnight is a kind of academicians’ disease,”
Geertz said.
At the Institute for Advanced Study, Geertz was occasionally
approached by physicists or mathematicians who had developed highly
mathematical models of racial relations and other sociological prob-
lems. “But they don’t know anything about what goes on in the inner
cities!” Geertz exclaimed. “They just have a mathematical model!”
Physicists, he grumbled, would never stand for a theory of physics that
lacked an empirical foundation. “But somehow or other social science
doesn’t count. And if you want to have a general theory of war and
peace, all you have to do is to sit down and write an equation without
having any knowledge of history or people.”
Geertz was painfully aware that the introspective, literary style of
science he had promulgated also had its pitfalls. It could lead to exces-
sive self-consciousness, or “epistemological hypochondria” on the part
of the practitioner. This trend, which Geertz dubbed “I-witnessing,”
had produced some interesting works but also some abysmal ones.
Some anthropologists, Geertz noted, had become so determined to
expose all their potential biases, ideological or otherwise, that their
writings resembled confessionals, revealing far more about the author
than about the putative subject.
Geertz had recently revisited two regions he had studied early in
his career, one in Morocco and the other in Indonesia. Both places
had changed, drastically; he had also changed. As a result, he became
even more aware of just how hard it is for the anthropologist to dis-
cern truths that transcend their time, place, context. “I always felt it
could end in total failure,” he said. “I’m still reasonably optimistic, in
the sense that I think it’s doable, doable as long as you don’t claim too
much for it. Am I pessimistic? No, but I am chastened.” Anthropology
is not the only field grappling with questions about its own limita-
tions, Geertz pointed out. “I do sense the same mood in all kinds of

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fields”—even in particle physics, he said, which seems to be reaching

the limits of empirical verification. “The kind of simple self-confidence
in science that there once was doesn’t seem to me to be so pervasive.
Which doesn’t mean everybody is giving up hope and wringing their
hands in anguish and so on. But it is extraordinarily difficult.”
At the time of our meeting in Princeton, Geertz was writing a book
about his excursions into his past. When the book was published in
1995, its title neatly summarized Geertz’s anxious attitude: After the
Fact. Geertz peeled apart the title’s multiple meanings in the book’s
final paragraph: Scientists like him are, of course, chasing after facts,
but they can only capture facts, if at all, retrospectively; by the time
they reach some understanding of what has taken place, the world has
moved on, inscrutable as ever.
The phrase also referred, Geertz concluded, to the “post-positivist
critique of empirical realism, the move away from simple correspon-
dence theories of truth and knowledge which makes of the very term
‘fact’ a delicate matter. There is not much assurance or sense of closure,
not even much of a sense of knowing what it is one precisely is after,
in so indefinite a quest, amid such various people, over such a diver-
sity of times. But it is an excellent way, interesting, dismaying, useful,
and amusing, to spend a life.”25 Ironic social science may not get us any-
where, but at least it can give us something to do, forever if we like.

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 CHAPTER SEvEN
THE END OF NEUROSCIENCE

M
ind, not space, is science’s final frontier. Even the most avid
believers in the power of science to solve its problems consider
the mind a potentially endless source of questions. The prob-
lem of mind can be approached in many ways. There is the historical
dimension: How, why, did Homo sapiens become so smart? Darwin pro-
vided a general answer long ago: natural selection favored hominids
who could use tools, anticipate the actions of potential competitors,
organize into hunting parties, share information through language,
and adapt to changing circumstances. Together with modern genetics,
Darwinian theory has much to say about the structure of our minds
and thus about our sexual and social behavior (although not as much as
Edward Wilson and other sociobiologists might like).
But modern neuroscientists are interested less in how and why our
minds evolved, in a historical sense, than in how they are structured
and work right now. The distinction is similar to the one that can be
made between cosmology, which seeks to explain the origins and sub-
sequent evolution of matter, and particle physics, which addresses the
structure of matter as we find it here in the present. One discipline
is historical and thus necessarily tentative, speculative, and open-
ended. The other is, by comparison, much more empirical, precise, and
amenable to resolution and finality.
Even if neuroscientists restricted their studies to the mature rather
than embryonic brain, the questions would be legion. How do we
learn, remember, see, smell, taste, and hear? Most researchers would
say these problems, although profoundly difficult, are tractable;
161

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scientists will solve them by reverse engineering our neural circuitry.

Consciousness, our subjective sense of awareness, has always seemed
to be a different sort of puzzle, not physical but metaphysical. Through
most of this century, consciousness was not considered a proper subject
for scientific investigation. Although behaviorism had died, its legacy
lived on in the reluctance of scientists to consider subjective phenom-
ena, and consciousness in particular.
That attitude changed when Francis Crick turned his attention to
the problem. Crick is one of the most ruthless reductionists in the his-
tory of science. After he and James Watson unraveled the twin-cork-
screw structure of DNA in 1953, Crick went on to show how genetic
information is encoded into DNA. These achievements gave Darwin’s
theory of evolution and Mendel’s theory of heredity the hard empirical
base they had lacked. In the mid-1970s, Crick moved from Cambridge,
England, where he had spent most of his career, to the Salk Institute
for Biological Research, a cubist fortress overlooking the Pacific Ocean
just north of San Diego, California. He worked on developmental biol-
ogy and the origin of life before finally turning his attention to the
most elusive and inescapable of all phenomena: consciousness. Only
Nixon could go to China. And only Francis Crick could make con-
sciousness a legitimate subject for science.1
In 1990, Crick and a young collaborator, Christof Koch, a Ger-
man-born neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology,
proclaimed in Seminars in the Neurosciences that it was time to make
consciousness a subject of empirical investigation. They asserted that
one could not hope to achieve true understanding of consciousness or
any other mental phenomena by treating the brain as a black box, that
is, an object whose internal structure is unknown and even irrelevant.
Only by examining neurons and the interactions between them could
scientists accumulate the kind of unambiguous knowledge needed to
create truly scientific models of consciousness, models analogous to
those that explain heredity in terms of DNA.2
Crick and Koch rejected the belief of many of their colleagues that
consciousness could not be defined, let alone studied. Consciousness,
they argued, was synonymous with awareness, and all forms of aware-
ness—whether directed toward objects in the world or highly abstract,

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internal concepts—seem to involve the same underlying mechanism,

one that combines attention with short-term memory. (Crick and Koch
credited William James with inventing this definition.) Crick and Koch
urged investigators to focus on visual awareness as a synecdoche for
consciousness, since the visual system had been so well mapped. If
researchers could find the neural mechanisms underlying this func-
tion, they might be able to unravel more complex and subtle phenom-
ena, such as self-consciousness, that might be unique to humans (and
thus much more difficult to study at the neural level). Crick and Koch
had done the seemingly impossible: they had transformed conscious-
ness from a philosophical mystery to an empirical problem. A theory
of consciousness would represent the apogee—the culmination—of
neuroscience.
Legend has it that some students of the arch-behaviorist B. F. Skin-
ner, on being exposed firsthand to his relentlessly mechanistic view of
human nature, fell into an existential despair. I recalled this factoid on
meeting Crick in his huge, airy office at the Salk Institute. He was not a
gloomy or dour man. Quite the contrary. Clad in sandals, corn-colored
slacks, and a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, he was almost preternaturally jolly.
His eyes and mouth curled up at the corners in a perpetual wicked
grin. His bushy white eyebrows flared out and up like horns. His ruddy
face flushed even darker when he laughed, which he did often and with
gusto. Crick seemed particularly cheery when he was skewering some
product of wishful and fuzzy thinking, such as my vain hope that we
humans have free will.3
Even an act as apparently simple as seeing, Crick informed me in
his crisp, Henry Higgins accent, actually involves vast amounts of neu-
ral activity. “The same could be said as to how you make a move, say,
picking up a pen,” he continued, plucking a ballpoint from his desk
and waving it before me. “A lot of computation goes on preparing you
for that movement. What you’re aware of is a decision, but you’re not
aware of what makes you do the decision. It seems free to you, but it’s
the result of things you’re not aware of.” I frowned, and Crick chuckled.
Trying to help me understand what he and Koch meant by atten-
tion—which was the crucial component of their definition of con-
sciousness—Crick emphasized that it involved more than the simple

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processing of information. To demonstrate this point, he handed me

a sheet of paper imprinted with a familiar black-and-white pattern:
I saw a white vase on a black background one moment and two sil-
houetted human profiles the next. Although the visual input to my
brain remained constant, Crick pointed out, what I was aware of—or
paying attention to—kept changing. What change in the brain corre-
sponded to this change in attention? If neuroscientists could answer
that question, Crick said, they might go far toward solving the mystery
of consciousness.
Crick and Koch had actually offered a tentative answer to this ques-
tion in their 1990 paper on consciousness. Their hypothesis was based
on evidence that when the visual cortex is responding to stimulation,
certain groups of neurons fire extremely rapidly and in synchrony.
These oscillating neurons, Crick explained to me, might correspond
to aspects of the scene to which attention is being directed. If one envi-
sions the brain as a vast, muttering crowd of neurons, the oscillating
neurons are like a group of people who suddenly start singing the same
song. Going back to the vase-profiles figure, one set of neurons sings
“vase” and then another sings “faces.”
The oscillation theory (which has been advanced independently by
other neuroscientists) has its weaknesses, as Crick was quick to admit.
“I think it’s a good, brave, first attempt,” he said, “but I have my doubts
that it will turn out to be right.” He observed that he and Watson had
only succeeded in discovering the double helix after numerous false
starts. “Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t
know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about
it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.” Crick was none-
theless confident the issue would be resolved not by arguing over psy-
chological concepts and definitions, but by doing “lots of experiments.
That’s what science is about.”
Neurons must be the basis for any model of the mind, Crick told
me. Psychologists have treated the brain as a black box, which can
be understood in terms merely of inputs and outputs rather than of
internal mechanisms. “Well, you can do that if the black box is simple
enough, but if the black box is complicated the chances of you getting
the right answer are rather small,” Crick said. “It’s just the same as in

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genetics. We had to know about genes, and what genes did. But to pin
it down, we had to get down to the nitty-gritty and find the molecules
and things involved.”
Crick gloated that he was in a perfect position to promote conscious-
ness as a scientific problem. “I don’t have to get grants,” he said, because
he had an endowed chair at the Salk Institute. “The main reason I do it
is because I find the problem fascinating, and I feel I’ve earned the right
to do what I like.” Crick did not expect researchers to solve these prob-
lems overnight. “What I want to stress is that the problem is important
and has been too long neglected.”
While talking to Crick, I could not help but think of the famous
first line of The Double Helix, James Watson’s memoir about how he and
Crick had deciphered DNA’s structure: “I have never seen Francis Crick
in a modest mood.”4 Some historical revisionism is in order here. Crick
is often modest. During our conversation, he expressed doubts about
his oscillation theory of consciousness; he said parts of a book he was
writing on the brain were “dreadful” and needed rewriting. When I
asked Crick how he interpreted Watson’s quip, he laughed. What Wat-
son meant, Crick suggested, was not that he was immodest, but that
he was “full of confidence and enthusiasm and things like that.” If he
was also a tad bumptious at times, and critical of others, well, that was
because he wanted so badly to get to the bottom of things. “I can be
patient for about 20 minutes,” he said, “but that’s it.”
Crick’s analysis of himself, like his analysis of most things, seemed
on target. He has the perfect personality for a scientist, an empirical
scientist, the kind who answers questions, who gets us somewhere. He
is, or appears to be, singularly free of self-doubt, wishful thinking, and
attachments to his own theories. His immodesty, such as it is, comes
simply from wanting to know how things work, regardless of the
consequences. He cannot tolerate obfuscation or wishful thinking or
untestable speculation, the hallmarks of ironic science. He is also eager
to share his knowledge, to make things as clear as possible. This trait is
not as common among prominent scientists as one might expect.
In his autobiography, Crick revealed that as a youth and would-be
scientist he had worried that by the time he grew up everything
would already be discovered. “I confided my fears to my mother, who

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reassured me. ‘Don’t worry, Ducky,’ she said. ‘There will be plenty left
for you to find out.’”5 Recalling this passage, I asked Crick if he thought
there would always be plenty left for scientists to find out. It all depends
on how one defines science, he replied. Physicists might soon deter-
mine the fundamental rules of nature, but they could then apply that
knowledge by inventing new things forever. Biology seems to have an
even longer future. Some biological structures—such as the brain—
are so complex that they may resist elucidation for some time. Other
puzzles, especially historical ones, such as the origin of life, may never
be fully answered simply because the available data are insufficient.
“There are enormous numbers of interesting problems” in biology,
Crick said. “There’s enough to keep us busy at least through our grand-
children’s time.” On the other hand, Crick agreed with Richard Daw-
kins that biologists already had a good general understanding of the
processes underlying evolution.
As Crick escorted me out of his office, we passed a table bearing a
thick stack of paper. It was a draft of Crick’s book on the brain, entitled
The Astonishing Hypothesis. Would I like to read his opening paragraph?
Sure, I said. “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” the book began, “is that
‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,
your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than
the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated mole-
cules. As Lewis Caroll’s Alice might have phrased it, ‘You’re nothing but
a pack of neurons.’”6 I looked at Crick. He was grinning from ear to ear.
I was talking to Crick on the telephone several weeks later, check-
ing the facts of an article I had written about him, when he asked me
for some advice. He confessed that his editor wasn’t thrilled with the
title The Astonishing Hypothesis; she didn’t think the view that “we are
nothing but a pack of neurons” was all that astonishing. What did I
think? I told Crick I had to agree; his view of the mind was, after all,
just old-fashioned reductionism and materialism. I suggested that The
Depressing Hypothesis might be a more fitting title, but it might repel
would-be readers. The title didn’t matter that much anyway, I added,
since the book would sell on the strength of Crick’s name.
Crick absorbed all this with his usual good humor. When his book
appeared in 1994, it was still called The Astonishing Hypothesis. However,

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Crick, or, more likely, his editor, had added a subtitle: The Scientific
Search for the Soul. I had to smile when I saw it; Crick was obviously
trying not to find the soul—that is, some spiritual essence that exists
independently of our fleshy selves—but to eliminate the possibility
that there was one. His DNA discovery had gone far toward eradicat-
ing vitalism, and now he hoped to stamp out any last vestiges of that
romantic worldview through his work on consciousness.

Gerald Edelman Postures around the Riddle

O ne of the premises of Crick’s approach to consciousness is that no

theory of mind advanced to date has much value. Yet at least one
prominent scientist, a Nobel laureate no less, claims to have gone far
toward solving the problem of consciousness: Gerald Edelman. His
career, like Crick’s, has been eclectic, and highly successful. While
still a graduate student, Edelman helped to determine the structure
of immunoglobulins, proteins that are crucial to the body’s immune
response. In 1972 he shared a Nobel Prize for that work. Edelman
moved on to developmental biology, the study of how a single fertil-
ized cell becomes a full-fledged organism. He found a class of proteins,
called cell-adhesion molecules, thought to play an important role in
embryonic development.
All this was merely prelude, however, to Edelman’s grand project
of creating a theory of mind. Edelman has set forth his theory in four
books: Neural Darwinism, Topobiology, The Remembered Present, and
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.7 The gist of the theory is that just as environ-
mental stresses select the fittest members of a species, so inputs to the
brain select groups of neurons—corresponding to useful memories, for
example—by strengthening the connections between them.
Edelman’s tumescent ambition and personality have made him an
alluring subject for journalists. A New Yorker profile called him “a der-
vish of motion, energy and raw intellect” who was “as much Henny
Youngman as Einstein”; it mentioned that detractors consider him “an
empire-building egomaniac.”8 In a New York Times Magazine cover story
in 1988, Edelman conferred divine powers upon himself. Discussing

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his work in immunology, he said that “before I came to it, there was
darkness—afterwards there was light.” He called a robot based on his
neural model his “creature” and said: “I can only observe it, like God. I
look down on its world.”9
I experienced Edelman’s self-regard firsthand when I visited him
at Rockefeller University in June 1992. (Sometime later, Edelman left
Rockefeller to head his own laboratory at the Scripps Institute in La
Jolla, California, just down the road from Crick.) Edelman is a large
man. Clad in a dark, broad-shouldered suit, he exuded a kind of men-
acing elegance and geniality. As in his books, he kept interrupting his
scientific discourse to dispense stories, jokes, or aphorisms whose rele-
vance was often obscure. The digressions seemed intended to demon-
strate that Edelman represented the ideal intellectual, both cerebral
and earthy, learned and worldly; no mere experimentalist, he.
Explaining how he became interested in the mind, Edelman said:
“I’m very excited by dark and romantic and open issues of science. I’m
not averse to working on details, but pretty much only in the service
of trying to address this issue of closure.” Edelman wanted to find
the answer to great questions. His Nobel Prize–winning research
on antibody structure had transformed immunology into “more or
less a closed science”; the central question, which concerned how the
immune system responds to invaders, was resolved. He and others
helped to show that self-recognition happens through a process known
as selection: the immune system has innumerable different antibodies,
and the presence of foreign antigens spurs the body to accelerate the
production of, or select, antibodies specific to that antigen and to sup-
press the production of other antibodies.
Edelman’s search for open questions led him inexorably to the devel-
opment and operation of the brain. He realized that a theory of the
human mind would represent the ultimate closure for science, for then
science could account for its own origin. Consider superstring theory,
Edelman said. Could it explain the existence of Edward Witten? Obvi-
ously not. Most theories of physics relegate issues involving the mind
to “philosophy or sheer speculation,” Edelman noted. “You read that
section of my book where Max Planck says we’ll never get this mystery

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of the universe because we are the mystery? And Woody Allen said if I
had my life to live over again I’d live in a delicatessen?”
Describing his approach to the mind, Edelman sounded, at first, as
resolutely empirical as Crick. The mind, Edelman emphasized, can
only be understood from a biological standpoint, not through physics
or computer science or other approaches that ignore the structure of the
brain. “We will not have a deeply satisfactory brain theory unless we
have a deeply satisfactory theory of neural anatomy, okay? It’s as simple
as that.” To be sure, “functionalists,” such as the artificial-intelligence
maven Marvin Minsky, say they can build an intelligent being without
paying attention to anatomy. “My answer is, ‘When you show me, fine.’”
But as Edelman continued speaking, it became clear that, unlike
Crick, he viewed the brain through the filter of his idiosyncratic obses-
sions and ambitions. He seemed to think that all his insights were
totally original; no one had truly seen the brain before he had turned
his attention to it. He recalled that when he had started studying the
brain, or, rather, brains, he was immediately struck by their variability.
“It seemed to me very curious that the people who worked in neuro-
science always talked about brains as if they were identical,” he said.
“When you look at papers everybody talked about it as if it were a rep-
licable machine. But when you actually look in depth, at every level—
and there are amazing numbers of levels—the thing that really hits
you is the diversity.” Even identical twins, he remarked, show great
differences in the organization of their neurons. These differences, far
from being insignificant noise, are profoundly important. “It’s quite
scary,” Edelman said. “That’s something you just can’t get around.”
The vast variability and complexity of the brain may be related to a
problem with which philosophers from Kant to Wittgenstein had wres-
tled: how do we categorize things? Wittgenstein, Edelman elaborated,
highlighted the troublesome nature of categories by pointing out that
different games often had nothing in common except the fact that they
were games. “Typical Wittgenstein,” Edelman mused. “There is a kind
of ostentation in his modesty. I don’t know what that is. He provokes
you and it’s very powerful. It’s ambiguous, sometimes, and it’s not cute.
It’s riddle, it’s posturing around the riddle.”

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A little girl playing hopscotch, chess players, and Swedish sailors

doing naval exercises are all playing games, Edelman continued. To
most observers, these phenomena seem to have little or nothing to do
with each other, and yet they are all members of the set of possible
games. “This defines what is known in the business as a polymorphous
set. It’s a very hard thing. It means a set defined by neither necessary
nor sufficient conditions. I can show you pictures of it in Neural Dar-
winism.” Edelman grabbed the book off his table and flipped through
it until he found an illustration of two sets of geometrical forms that
represented polymorphous sets. He then pushed the book away and
transfixed me once again. “I’m astonished that people don’t sit and put
these things together,” Edelman said.
Edelman, of course, did put these things together: the polymor-
phous diversity of the brain allows it to respond to the polymorphous
diversity of nature. The brain’s diversity is not irrelevant noise, but is
“the very basis on which selection is going to be made, when encoun-
tering an unknown set of physical correspondences in the world. All
right? Well that’s very promising. Let’s go one step further. Could the
unit of selection be the neuron?” No, because the neuron is too binary,
inflexible; it is either on, firing, or off, dormant. But groups of linked,
interacting neurons could do the job. These groups compete with each
other in an effort to create effective representations, or maps, of the
infinite variety of stimuli entering from the world. Groups that form
successful maps grow still stronger, while other groups wither.
Edelman continued asking and answering his own questions. He
spoke slowly, portentously, as if trying to physically impress his words
on my brain. How do these groups of linked neurons solve the problem
of polymorphous sets that troubled Wittgenstein? Through reentry.
What is reentry? “Reentry is the ongoing recursive signaling between
mapped areas,” Edelman said, “so that you map maps by massively par-
allel reciprocal connections. It’s not feedback, which is between two
wires, in which I have a definite function, instruction—sine wave in,
amplified sine wave out.” He was grim, almost angry, as if I had sud-
denly become the symbol of all his puny-minded, envious critics, who
said that reentry was merely feedback.

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He paused a moment, as if to collect himself, and began again,

speaking loudly, slowly, pausing between words, like a tourist trying
to make a presumably dim native understand him. Contrary to what
his critics said, his model was unique; it had nothing in common with
neural networks, he said, lacing the term neural networks with scorn.
To gain his trust—and because it was true—I confessed that I had
always found neural networks difficult to grasp. (Neural networks con-
sist of artificial neurons, or switches, linked by connections of vary-
ing strengths.) Edelman smiled triumphantly. “Neural nets involve the
stretching of a metaphor,” he said. “There is this yawning gap, and you
say, ‘Is it me, or am I missing something?’” His model, he assured me,
did not suffer from that problem.
I began asking another question about reentry, but Edelman held
up his hand. It was time, he said, to tell me about his latest creature,
Darwin 4. The best way to validate his theory would be to observe the
behavior of neurons in a living animal, which was of course impos-
sible. The only solution, Edelman said, was to construct an automa-
ton that embodied the principles of neural Darwinism. Edelman and
his coworkers had built four robots, each named Darwin, each more
sophisticated than the last. Indeed, Darwin 4, Edelman assured me, was
not a robot at all but a “real creature.” It was “the first nonliving thing
that truly learns, okay?”
Again he paused, and I felt his evangelical fervor washing over me.
He seemed to be trying to build a sense of drama, as if he were pulling
back a succession of veils, each of which concealed a deeper mystery.
“Let’s go take a look,” he said. We headed out of his office and down the
hall. He opened the door to a room containing a huge, humming main-
frame computer. This, Edelman assured me, was Darwin 4’s “brain.”
Then we walked to another room, where the creature itself awaited us.
A pile of machinery on wheels, it sat on a plywood stage littered with
blue and red blocks. Perhaps sensing my disappointment—real robots
will always disappoint anyone who has seen Star Wars—Edelman reit-
erated that Darwin 4 “looks like a robot but it’s not.”
Edelman pointed out the “snout,” a bar tipped with a light-sensitive
sensor and a magnetic gripper. A television monitor mounted on one

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wall flashed some patterns that represented, Edelman informed me,

the state of Darwin’s brain. “When it does find an object it will poke up
to it, it’ll grab it, and then it will get good or bad values. . . . That will
alter the diffuse relationships and synaptology of these things, which
are brain maps”—he pointed at the television monitor—“that weaken
or strengthen synapses that alter how muscles move.”
Edelman stared at Darwin 4, which remained stubbornly immobile.
“Uh, it takes a fair amount of time,” he said, adding that “the amount
of computation involved is hair-raising.” Finally the robot stirred, to
Edelman’s evident relief, and began rolling slowly around the plat-
form, nudging blocks, leaving blue ones, picking up red ones with its
magnetic snout and taking them over to a big box that Edelman called
“home.”
Edelman gave me a running commentary. “Uh oh, it just moved
its eye. It just found an object. It picked up an object. Now it’s going to
search for home.”
What is its end goal? I asked. “It has no end goals,” Edelman reminded
me with a frown. “We have given it values. Blue is bad, red is good.” Val-
ues are general and thus better suited to helping us cope with the poly-
morphous world than are goals, which are much more specific. When
he was a teenager, Edelman elaborated, he desired Marilyn Monroe, but
Marilyn Monroe was not his goal. He possessed values that led him to
desire certain feminine properties, which Marilyn Monroe happened to
exemplify.
Brutally repressing an upwelling image of Edelman and Marilyn
Monroe, I asked how this robot differed from all the others built by sci-
entists over the past few decades, many of which were capable of feats
at least as impressive as those achieved by Darwin 4. The difference,
Edelman replied, his jaw setting, was that Darwin 4 possessed values or
instincts, whereas other robots needed specific instructions to accom-
plish any task. But don’t all neural networks, I asked, eschew specific
instructions for general learning programs? Edelman frowned. “But
all of those, you have to exclusively define the input and the output.
That’s the big distinction. Isn’t this correct, Julio?” He turned to a dour,
young postdoc who had joined us and was listening to our conversa-
tion silently.

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After a moment’s hesitation, Julio nodded. Edelman, with a broad

smile, noted that most artificial-intelligence designers tried to program
knowledge in from the top down with explicit instructions for every
situation, instead of having knowledge arise naturally from values.
Take a dog, he said. Hunting dogs acquire their knowledge from a few
basic instincts. “That is more efficacious than any bunch of Harvard
boys writing a program for swamps!” Edelman guffawed and glanced
at Julio, who joined in uneasily.
But Darwin 4 is still a computer, a robot, with a limited repertoire of
responses to the world, I persisted; Edelman was using language met-
aphorically when he called it a “creature” with a “brain.” As I spoke,
Edelman muttered, “Yup, all right, all right,” while nodding rapidly. If
a computer, he said, is defined as something driven by algorithms, or
effective procedures, then Darwin 4 is not a computer. True, computer
scientists might program robots to do what Darwin 4 does. But they
would just be faking biological behavior, whereas Darwin 4’s behavior
is authentically biological. If some random electronic glitch scrambles
a line of code in his creature, Edelman informed me, “it’ll just correct
like a wounded organism and it’ll go around again. I do that for the
other one and it’ll drop dead in its tracks.”
Rather than pointing out that all neural networks and many conven-
tional computer programs have this capability, I asked Edelman about
the complaints of some scientists that they simply did not understand
his theories. Most genuinely new scientific concepts, he replied, must
overcome such resistance. He had invited those who had accused him
of obscurity—notably Gunther Stent, whose complaints about Edel-
man’s incomprehensibility were quoted in the New York Times Maga-
zine—to visit him so he could explain his work in person. (Stent had
reached his decision about Edelman’s work after sitting next to him
during a trans-Atlantic flight.) No one had accepted Edelman’s offer.
“The opacity, I believe, is in the reception, not the transmission,” Edel-
man said.
By this time, Edelman was no longer making an attempt to hide
his irritation. When I asked about his relationship with Francis Crick,
Edelman abruptly announced that he had to attend an important meet-
ing. He would leave me in the capable hands of Julio. “I have a very

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long-term relationship with Francis, and that’s not something one can
answer—Boom! Boom!—on the way out the door. Or, as Groucho
Marx said, ‘Leave, and never darken my towels again!’” With that, he
departed on a wave of hollow laughter.
Edelman has admirers, but most dwell on the fringes of neurosci-
ence. His most prominent fan is the neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose
beautifully written accounts of his dealings with brain-damaged
patients have set the standard for literary—that is, ironic—neurosci-
ence. Francis Crick spoke for many of his fellow neuroscientists when
he accused Edelman of hiding “presentable” but not terribly original
ideas behind a “smoke screen of jargon.” Edelman’s Darwinian termi-
nology, Crick added, has less to do with any real analogies to Darwin-
ian evolution than with rhetorical grandiosity. Crick suggested that
Edelman’s theory be renamed “neural Edelmanism.” “The trouble
with Jerry,” Crick said, is that “he tends to produce slogans and sort
of waves them about without really paying attention to what other
people are saying. So it’s really too much hype, is what one is complain-
ing about.”10
The philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University remained
unimpressed after visting Edelman’s laboratory. In a review of Edel-
man’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Dennett argued that Edelman had
merely presented rather crude versions of old ideas. Edelman’s deni-
als nothwithstanding, his model was a neural network, and reentry
was feedback, according to Dennett. Edelman also “misunderstands
the philosophical issues he addresses at an elementary level,” Dennett
asserted. Edelman may profess scorn for those who think the brain is
a computer, but his use of a robot to “prove” his theory shows that he
holds the same belief, Dennett explained.11
Some critics accuse Edelman of deliberately trying to take credit for
others’ ideas by wrapping them in his own idiosyncratic terminology.
My own, somewhat more charitable, interpretation is that Edelman
has the brain of an empiricist and the heart of a romantic. He seemed
to acknowledge as much, in his typically oblique way, when I asked
him if he thought science was in principle finite or infinite. “I don’t
know what that means,” he replied. “I know what it means when I
say that a series in mathematics is finite or infinite. But I don’t know

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what it means to say that science is infinite. Example, okay? I’ll quote
Wallace Stevens: Opus Posthumus. ‘In the very long run even the truth
doesn’t matter. The risk is taken.’” The search for truth is what counts,
Edelman seemed to be implying, not the truth itself.
Edelman added that Einstein, when asked whether science was
exhausted, reportedly answered, “Possibly, but what’s the use of
describing a Beethoven symphony in terms of air-pressure waves?”
Einstein, Edelman explained, was referring to the fact that physics
alone could not address questions related to value, meaning, and other
subjective phenomena. One might respond by asking: What is the
use of describing a Beethoven symphony in terms of reentrant neural
loops? How does the substitution of neurons for air-pressure waves or
atoms or any physical phenomenon do justice to the magic and mys-
tery of the mind? Edelman cannot accept, as Francis Crick does, that
we are “nothing but a pack of neurons.” Edelman therefore obfuscates
his basic neural theory—infusing it with terms and concepts borrowed
from evolutionary biology, immunology, and philosophy—to lend it
added grandeur, resonance, mystique. He is like a novelist who risks
obscurity—even seeks it—in the hope of achieving a deeper truth. He
is a practitioner of ironic neuroscience, one who, unfortunately, lacks
the requisite rhetorical skills.

Quantum Dualism

T here is one issue on which Crick, Edelman, and indeed almost all
neuroscientists agree: the properties of the mind do not depend
in any crucial way on quantum mechanics. Physicists, philosophers,
and others have speculated about links between quantum mechanics
and consciousness since at least the 1930s, when some philosophically
inclined physicists began to argue that the act of measurement—and
hence consciousness itself—played a vital role in determining the out-
come of experiments involving quantum effects. Such theories have
involved little more than hand waving, and proponents invariably have
ulterior philosophical or even religious motives. Crick’s partner Chris-
tof Koch summed up the quantum-consciousness thesis in a syllogism:

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Quantum mechanics is mysterious, and consciousness is mysterious.

Q.E.D.: quantum mechanics and consciousness must be related.12
One vigorous advocate of a quantum theory of consciousness is John
Eccles, a British neuroscientist who won a Nobel Prize in 1963 for his
studies of neural transmission. Eccles is perhaps the most prominent
modern scientist to espouse dualism, which holds that the mind exists
independently of its physical substrate. He and Karl Popper authored
a book defending dualism, called The Self and Its Brain, published in
1977. They rejected physical determinism in favor of free will: the mind
could choose between different thoughts and courses of action under-
taken by the brain and body.13
The most common objection to dualism is that it violates the con-
servation of energy: how can the mind, if it has no physical existence,
initiate physical changes in the brain? Together with the German phys-
icist Friedrich Beck, Eccles has provided the following answer: The
brain’s nerve cells fire when charged molecules, or ions, accumulate at
a synapse, causing it to release neurotransmitters. But the presence of a
given number of ions at a synapse does not always trigger the firing of
a neuron. The reason, according to Eccles, is that for at least an instant,
the ions exist in a quantum superposition of states; in some states the
neuron discharges and in others it does not.
The mind exerts its influence over the brain by “deciding” which
neurons will fire and which will not. As long as probability is con-
served throughout the brain, this exercise of free will does not vio-
late conservation of energy. “We have no proof of any of this,” Eccles
cheerfully acknowledged after explaining his theory to me in a tele-
phone interview. He nonetheless called the hypothesis “a tremendous
advance” that would inspire a resurgence of dualism. Materialism and
all its vile progeny—logical positivism, behaviorism, identity theory
(which equates states of mind with physical states of the brain)—“are
finished,” Eccles declared.
Eccles was frank—too frank for his own good—about his motive
for turning to quantum mechanics in explaining the mind’s properties.
He was a “religious person,” he told me, who rejected “cheap materi-
alism.” He believed that “the very nature of the mind is the same as
the nature of life. It’s a divine creation.” Eccles also insisted that “we’re

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only at the beginning of discovering the mystery of existence.” Could

we ever plumb that mystery, I asked, and thereby bring science to an
end? “I don’t think so,” he replied. He paused and added, heatedly, “I
don’t want it to end. The only important thing is to go on.” He agreed
with his fellow dualist and falsificationist Karl Popper that we must and
will keep “discovering and discovering and discovering. And thinking.
And we must not claim to have the last word on anything.”

What Roger Penrose Really Wants

R oger Penrose is somewhat better at obscuring his ulterior motives—

perhaps because he perceives them only dimly himself. Penrose first
made his reputation as an authority on black holes and other exotica of
physics. He also invented Penrose tiles, simple geometric forms that
when fit together generate infinitely varied, quasi-periodic patterns.
Since 1989 he has been renowned for the arguments set forth in The
Emperor’s New Mind. The book’s main purpose was to refute the claim
of artificial-intelligence proponents that computers could replicate all
the attributes of humans, including consciousness.
The key to Penrose’s argument is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
The theorem states that any consistent system of axioms beyond a
certain basic level of complexity yields statements that can be neither
proved nor disproved with those axioms; hence the system is always
incomplete. According to Penrose, the theorem implies that no “com-
putable” model—that is, neither classical physics, computer science,
nor neuroscience as presently construed—can replicate the mind’s
creative, or, rather, intuitive powers. The mind must derive its power
from some more subtle phenomenon, probably one related to quan-
tum mechanics.
Three years after my first meeting with Penrose in Syracuse—which
had triggered my interest in the limits of science—I visited him at his
home base, the University of Oxford. Penrose said he was working on
a sequel to Emperor’s New Mind, which would spell out his theory in
greater detail. He was more convinced than ever, he said, that he was
on the right track with his theory of quasi-quantum consciousness.

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“One is going out on a limb here, but I feel quite strongly about those
things. I can’t see any way out.”14
I noted that some physicists had begun thinking about how exotic
quantum effects, such as superposition, might be harnessed for per-
forming computations that classical computers could not achieve. If
these quantum computers proved feasible, would Penrose grant that
they might be capable of thinking? Penrose shook his head. A computer
capable of thought, he said, would have to rely on mechanisms related
not to quantum mechanics in its present form but to a deeper theory
not yet discovered. What he was really arguing against in The Emperor’s
New Mind, Penrose confided, was the assumption that the mystery of
consciousness, or of reality in general, could be explained by the cur-
rent laws of physics. “I’m saying this is wrong,” he announced. “The
laws that govern the behavior of the world are, I believe, much more
subtle than that.”
Contemporary physics simply does not make sense, he elaborated.
Quantum mechanics, in particular, has to be flawed, because it is so
glaringly inconsistent with ordinary, macroscopic reality. How can
electrons act like particles in one experiment and waves in another?
How can they be in two places at the same time? There must be some
deeper theory that eliminates the paradoxes of quantum mechanics
and its disconcertingly subjective elements. “Ultimately our theory
has to accommodate subjectivism, but I wouldn’t like to see the the-
ory itself being a subjective theory.” In other words, the theory should
allow for the existence of minds but should not require it.
Neither superstring theory—which is after all a quantum theory—
nor any other current candidate for a unified theory has the qualities
that Penrose feels are necessary. “If there is going to be such a kind
of total theory of physics, in some sense it couldn’t conceivably be the
character of any theory I’ve seen,” he said. Such a theory would need
a “kind of compelling naturalism.” In other words, the theory would
have to make sense.
Yet Penrose was just as conflicted as he had been in Syracuse over
whether physics would achieve a truly complete theory. Gödel’s the-
orem, he said, suggests that there will always be open questions in
physics, as in mathematics. “Even if you could find the end of how

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the physical world actually was as a mathematical structure,” Penrose

remarked, “there would still be no end to the subject, if you like, just
because there’s no end to mathematics.” He spoke very deliberately,
much more so than when we first discussed the topic in 1989. He had
clearly given the issue more thought.
I recalled Richard Feynman’s comparison of physics to chess: once
we learn the basic rules, we can still explore their consequences for-
ever. “Yes, it’s not dissimilar to that viewpoint,” Penrose said. Did that
mean he thought it would be possible to know the fundamental rules,
if not all the consequences of those rules? “I suppose in my more opti-
mistic moods I believe that.” He added heatedly, “I’m certainly not one
of these people who thinks there’s no end to our physical understand-
ing of the world.” In Syracuse, Penrose had said it was pessimistic to
believe in The Answer; now he felt this view was optimistic.
Penrose said he was pleased, for the most part, with the reception
that had been given his ideas; most of his critics had been polite, at
least. One exception was Marvin Minsky. Penrose had had an unpleas-
ant encounter with Minsky at a meeting in Canada where they both
lectured. At Minsky’s insistence, Penrose spoke first. Minsky then rose
to offer a rebuttal. After announcing that wearing a jacket “implies
you’re a gentleman,” he took his jacket off, exclaiming, “Well, I don’t
feel like a gentleman!” He proceeded to attack The Emperor’s New Mind
with arguments that were, according to Penrose, silly. Recalling this
scene, Penrose seemed still mystified, and pained. I marveled again, as
I had when I first met him, at the contrast between Penrose’s mildness
of manner and the audacity of his intellectual views.
In 1994, two years after my meeting with Penrose in Oxford, his
book Shadows of the Mind was published. In The Emperor’s New Mind,
Penrose had been rather vague about where quasi-quantum effects
might work their magic. In Shadows he hazarded a guess: microtubules,
minute tunnels of protein that serve as a kind of skeleton for most cells,
including neurons. Penrose’s hypothesis was based on a claim by Stuart
Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona, that anes-
thesia inhibits the movement of electrons in microtubules. Erecting a
mighty theoretical edifice on this frail claim, Penrose conjectured that
microtubules perform nondeterministic, quasi-quantum computations

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that somehow give rise to consciousness. Each neuron is thus not a

simple switch, but a complex computer in its own right.
Penrose’s microtubule theory could not help but be anticlimactic.
In his first book, he built up an air of suspense, anticipation, and mys-
tery, as does a director of a horror movie who offers only tantalizing
glimpses of the monster. When Penrose finally unveiled his monster, it
looked like an overweight actor wearing a cheap rubber suit, complete
with flapping fins. Some skeptics have responded, not unexpectedly,
with ridicule rather than with awe. They have noted that microtubules
are found in almost all cells, not just in neurons. Does that mean that
our livers are conscious? What about our big toes? What about para-
mecia? (Penrose’s partner, Stuart Hameroff, when I put this question
to him in April 1994, replied, “I’m not going to contend that a parame-
cium is conscious, but it does show pretty intelligent behavior.”)
Penrose can also be countered with Crick’s argument against free
will. Because Penrose, through mere introspection, cannot retrace
the computational logic of his perception of a mathematical truth, he
insists that the perceptions must stem from some mysterious, non-
computational phenomenon. But as Crick pointed out, just because we
are not aware of the neural processes leading up to a decision does not
mean that those processes did not occur. Proponents of artificial intel-
ligence rebut Penrose’s Gödel argument by contending that one can
always design a computer to broaden its own base of axioms to solve
a new problem; in fact, such learning algorithms are rather common
(although they are still extremely crude in comparison to the human
mind).15
Some critics of Penrose have accused him of being a vitalist, some-
one who secretly hopes that the mystery of the mind will not yield
to science. But if Penrose was a vitalist, he would have kept his ideas
vague and untestable. He would never have unveiled the microtubule
monster. Penrose is a true scientist; he wants to know. He sincerely
believes that our present understanding of reality is incomplete, logi-
cally flawed, and, well, mysterious. He is looking for a key, an insight,
some clever quasi-quantum trick that will make everything suddenly
clear. He is looking for The Answer. He has made the great mistake of
thinking that physics should render the world completely intelligible

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and meaningful. Steven Weinberg could have told him that physics
lacks that capacity.

Attack of the Mysterians

P enrose, although he pushed a theory of consciousness far beyond

the horizon of current science, at least held out the hope that the
theory could one day be reached. But some philosophers have ques-
tioned whether any purely materialistic model—involving conven-
tional neural processes or the exotic, nondeterministic mechanisms
envisioned by Penrose—can really account for consciousness. The phi-
losopher Owen Flanagan named these doubters “the new mysterians,”
after the sixties rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians, which
performed the hit song “96 Tears.” (Flanagan himself is not a myste-
rian, but a down-to-earth materialist.)16
The philosopher Thomas Nagel offered one of the clearest expres-
sions of the mysterian viewpoint (an oxymoronic undertaking?) in
his famous 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel assumed
that subjective experience is a fundamental attribute of humans and
many higher-level animals, such as bats. “No doubt it occurs in count-
less forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar
systems throughout the universe,” Nagel wrote. “But no matter how
the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experi-
ence at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that
organism.”17 Nagel argued that no matter how much we learn about
the physiology of bats, we cannot really know what it is like to be one,
because science cannot penetrate the realm of subjective experience.
Nagel is what one might call a weak mysterian: he holds out the pos-
sibility that philosophy and/or science might one day reveal a natural
way to bridge the gap between our materialistic theories and subjective
experience. Colin McGinn is a strong mysterian. McGinn is the same
philosopher who believes that most major philosophical questions are
unsolvable because they are beyond our cognitive abilities (see Chapter
2). Just as rats have cognitive limitations, so do humans, and one of our
limitations is that we cannot solve the mind-body problem. McGinn

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considers his position on the mind-body problem—that it is unsolv-

able—the logical conclusion of Nagel’s analysis in “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?” McGinn defends his viewpoint as superior to what he calls
the “eliminativist” position, which attempts to show that the mind-
body problem is not really a problem at all.
It is quite possible, McGinn said, for scientists to invent a theory of
the mind that can predict the outcome of experiments with great pre-
cision and yield a wealth of medical benefits. But an effective theory
is not necessarily a comprehensible one. “There’s no real reason why
part of our mind can’t develop a formalism with these remarkable pre-
dictive properties, but we can’t make sense of the formalism in terms
of the part of our mind which understands things. So it could be in the
case of consciousness that we come up with a theory which is analo-
gous to quantum theory in this respect, a theory which is actually a
good theory of consciousness, but we wouldn’t be able to interpret it,
or to understand it.”18
This kind of talk infuriates Daniel Dennett. A philosopher at Tufts
University, Dennett is a big, hoary-bearded man with a look of per-
petual, twinkly amusement—Santa Claus on a diet. Dennett exem-
plifies what McGinn calls the eliminativist position. In his 1992 book,
Consciousness Explained, Dennett contended that consciousness—and
our sense that we possess a unified self—was an illusion arising out
of the interaction of many different “subprograms” run on the brain’s
hardware.19 Dennett, when I asked him about McGinn’s mysterian
argument, called it ridiculous. He denigrated McGinn’s comparison
of humans to rats. Unlike humans, Dennett asserted, rats cannot
conceive of scientific questions, so of course they cannot solve them.
Dennett suspected that McGinn and other mysterians “don’t want con-
sciousness to fall to science. They like the idea that this is off-limits to
science. Nothing else could explain why they welcome such slipshod
arguments.”
Dennett tried another strategy, one that struck me as oddly Platonic
for such an avowed materialist—and also dangerous for a writer. He
recalled that Borges, in his story “The Library of Babel,” imagined an
infinite library of all possible statements, those that have been, will be,
and could be, from the most nonsensical to the most sublime. Surely

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somewhere in the Library of Babel is a perfectly stated resolution of the

mind-body problem, Dennett said. Dennett served up this argument
with such confidence that I suspected he believed that the Library of
Babel really exists.
Dennett granted that neuroscience might never produce a theory
of consciousness that satisfied everyone. “We can’t explain anything
to everyone’s satisfaction,” he said. After all, many people are dissat-
isfied with science’s explanations of, say, photosynthesis or biological
reproduction. But “the sense of mystery is gone from photosynthesis
or reproduction,” Dennett said, “and I think in the end we will have a
similar account of consciousness.”
Abruptly, Dennett tacked in a completely different direction.
“There’s a curious paradox looming” in modern science, he said. “One
of the very trends that makes science proceed so rapidly these days is a
trend that leads science away from human understanding. When you
switch from trying to model things with elegant equations to doing
massive computer simulations, you may end up with a model that
exquisitely models nature, the phenomena you’re interested in, but you
don’t understand the model. That is, you don’t understand it the way
you understood models in the old days.”
A computer program that accurately modeled the human brain,
Dennett noted, might be as inscrutable to us as the brain itself. “Soft-
ware systems are already at the very edge of human comprehensibil-
ity,” he observed. “Even a system like the Internet is absolutely trivial
compared to a brain, and yet it’s been patched and built on so much
that nobody really understands how it works or whether it will go on
working. And thus, as you start using software-writing programs and
software-debugging programs and code that heals itself, you create new
artifacts that have a life of their own. And they become objects that are
no longer within the epistemological hegemony of their makers. And so
that’s going to be sort of like the speed of light. It’s going to be a barrier
against which science is going to keep butting its head forever.”
Astonishingly, Dennett was implying that he, too, had mysterian
inclinations. He thought a theory of the mind, although it might
be highly effective and have great predictive power, was unlikely
to be intelligible to mere humans. The only hope humans have of

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comprehending their own complexity may be to cease being human.

“Anybody who has the motivation or talent,” he said, “will be able in
effect to merge with these big software systems.” Dennett was refer-
ring to the possibility, advanced by some artificial-intelligence enthu-
siasts, that one day we humans will be able to abandon our mortal,
fleshy selves and become machines. “I think that’s logically possi-
ble,” Dennett added. “I’m not sure how plausible it is. It’s a coherent
future. I think it’s not self-contradictory.” But Dennett seemed to doubt
whether even superintelligent machines would ever fully comprehend
themselves. Trying to know themselves, the machines would have to
become still more complicated; they would thus be caught in a spiral
of ever-increasing complexity, chasing their own tails for all eternity.

How Do I Know You’re Conscious?

I n the spring of 1994, I witnessed a remarkable collision of the phil-

osophical and scientific worldviews at a meeting called “Toward a
Scientific Basis for Consciousness,” held at the University of Arizona.20
On the first day David Chalmers, a long-haired Australian philosopher
who bears an uncanny resemblance to the subject of Thomas Gains-
borough’s famous painting Blue Boy, set forth the mysterian viewpoint
in forceful terms. Studying neurons, he declared, cannot reveal why
the impingement of sound waves on our ears gives rise to our subjec-
tive experience of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. All physical theories,
Chalmers said, describe only functions—such as memory, attention,
intention, introspection—correlating to specific physical processes in
the brain. But none of these theories can explain why the performance
of these functions is accompanied by subjective experience. After all,
one can certainly imagine a world of androids that resemble humans in
every respect—except that they do not have a conscious experience of
the world. However much they learn about the brain, neuroscientists
cannot bridge that “explanatory gap” between the physical and subjec-
tive realms with a strictly physical theory, according to Chalmers.
Up to this point, Chalmers had expressed the basic mysterian view-
point, the same one associated with Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn.

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But then Chalmers proclaimed that although science could not solve
the mind-body problem, philosophy still might. Chalmers thought he
had found a possible solution: scientists should assume that informa-
tion is as essential a property of reality as matter and energy. Chalm-
ers’s theory was similar to the it from bit concept of John Wheeler—in
fact, Chalmers acknowledged his debt to Wheeler—and it suffered
from the same fatal flaw. The concept of information does not make
sense unless there is an information processor—whether an amoeba
or a particle physicist—that gathers information and acts on it. Matter
and energy were present at the dawn of creation, but life was not, as far
as we know. How, then, can information be as fundamental as matter
and energy? Nevertheless, Chalmers’s ideas struck a chord among his
audience. They thronged around him after his speech, telling him how
much they had enjoyed his message.21
At least one listener was displeased: Christof Koch, Francis Crick’s
collaborator. That night Koch, a tall, rangy man wearing red cowboy
boots, tracked Chalmers down at a cocktail party for the conferees
and chastized him for his speech. It is precisely because philosophical
approaches to consciousness have all failed that scientists must focus
on the brain, Koch declared in his rapid-fire, German-accented voice as
rubberneckers gathered. Chalmers’s information-based theory of con-
sciousness, Koch continued, like all philosophical ideas, was untestable
and therefore useless. “Why don’t you just say that when you have a
brain the Holy Ghost comes down and makes you conscious!” Koch
exclaimed. Such a theory was unnecessarily complicated, Chalmers
responded drily, and it would not accord with his own subjective expe-
rience. “But how do I know your subjective experience is the same as
mine?” Koch sputtered. “How do I even know you’re conscious?”
Koch had brought up the embarrassing problem of solipsism, which
lies at the heart of the mysterian position. No person really knows that
any other being, human or inhuman, has a subjective experience of
the world. By raising this ancient philosophical conundrum, Koch, like
Dennett, was revealing himself to be a mysterian. Koch admitted as
much to me later. All science can do, he asserted, is provide a detailed
map of the physical processes that correlate with different subjective
states. But science cannot truly “solve” the mind-body problem. No

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empirical, neurological theory can explain why mental functions are

accompanied by specific subjective states. “I don’t see how any sci-
ence can explain that,” Koch said. For the same reason, Koch doubted
that science would ever provide a definitive answer to the question of
whether machines can become conscious and have subjective experi-
ences. “The debate might not be resolved ever,” he told me, adding
gratuitously, “How do I even know you are conscious?”
Even Francis Crick, although he was more optimistic than Koch,
had to acknowledge that the solution to consciousness might not be
intuitively comprehensible. “I don’t think it will be a commonsense
answer that we get when we understand the brain,” Crick said. After
all, natural selection cobbles organisms together not according to any
logical plan, but with various gimmicks and tricks, with whatever
works. Crick went on to suggest that the mysteries of the mind might
not yield as readily as those of heredity. The mind “is a much more
complicated system” than the genome, he remarked, and theories of
the mind would probably have more limited explanatory power.
Holding up his pen, Crick explained that scientists should be able to
determine which neural activity correlated with my perception of the
pen. “But if you were to ask, ‘Do you see red and blue the same way I see
red and blue?’ well, that’s something you can’t communicate to me. So I
don’t think we’ll be able to explain everything that we’re conscious of.”
Just because the mind stems from deterministic processes, Crick
continued, does not mean that scientists will be able to predict all its
meanderings; they may be chaotic and thus unpredictable. “There may
be other limitations in the brain. Who knows? I don’t think you can
look too far ahead.” Crick doubted that quantum phenomena played
a crucial role in consciousness, as Roger Penrose had suggested. On
the other hand, Crick added, some neural equivalent of Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle might restrict our ability to trace the brain’s
activity in minute detail, and the processes underlying conscious-
ness might be as paradoxical and difficult for us to grasp as quantum
mechanics is. “Remember,” Crick elaborated, “our brains have evolved
to deal with everyday matters when we were hunter-gatherers, and
before that when we were monkeys.” Yes, that was the point of Colin
McGinn, and Chomsky, and Stent.

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The Many Minds of Marvin Minsky

T he most unlikely mysterian of all is Marvin Minsky. Minsky was

one of the founders of artificial intelligence (AI), which holds that
the brain is nothing more than a very complicated machine whose
properties can be duplicated with computers. Before I visited him at
MIT, colleagues warned me that he might be cranky, even hostile. If I
did not want the interview cut short, I should not ask him too directly
about the falling fortunes of artificial intelligence or of his own partic-
ular theories of the mind. One former associate pleaded with me not to
take advantage of Minsky’s penchant for outrageous utterances. “Ask
him if he means it, and if he doesn’t say it three times you shouldn’t use
it,” the ex-colleague urged.
When I met Minsky, he was rather edgy, but the condition seemed
congenital rather than acquired. He fidgeted ceaselessly, blinking, wag-
gling his foot, pushing things about his desk. Unlike most scientific celeb-
rities, he gave the impression of conceiving ideas and tropes from scratch
rather than retrieving them whole from memory. He was often, but not
always, incisive. “I’m rambling here,” he muttered after a riff on how to
verify models of the mind collapsed in a heap of sentence fragments.22
Even his physical appearance had an improvisational air. His large,
round head seemed entirely bald, but was actually fringed by hairs as
transparent as optical fibers. He wore a braided belt that supported, in
addition to his pants, a belly pack and a tiny holster containing pliers
with retractable jaws. With his paunch and vaguely Asian features, he
resembled Buddha—Buddha reincarnated as a hyperactive hacker.
Minsky seemed unable, or unwilling, to inhabit any emotion for
long. Early on, as predicted, he lived up to his reputation as a curmud-
geon, and arch-reductionist. He expressed contempt for those who
doubted whether computers could be conscious. Consciousness is a
trivial issue, he said. “I’ve solved it, and I don’t understand why people
don’t listen.” Consciousness is merely a type of short-term memory,
a “low-grade system for keeping records.” Computer programs such
as LISP, which have features that allow their processing steps to be
retraced, are “extremely conscious,” more so than humans, with their
pitifully shallow memory banks.

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Minsky called Roger Penrose a “coward” who could not accept his
own physicality, and he derided Gerald Edelman’s reentrant-loops
hypothesis as warmed-over feedback theory. Minsky even snubbed
MIT’s own Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which he had founded
and where we happened to be meeting. “I don’t consider this to be a
serious research institution at the moment,” he announced.
When we wandered through the lab looking for a lecture on a
chess-playing computer, however, a metamorphosis occurred. “Isn’t
the chess meeting supposed to be here?” Minsky queried a group of
researchers chatting in a lounge. “That was yesterday,” someone
replied. After asking a few questions about the talk, Minsky spun
tales about the history of chess-playing programs. This minilecture
evolved into a reminiscence of Minsky’s friend Isaac Asimov, who had
just died. Minsky recounted how Asimov—who had popularized the
term robot and explored its metaphysical implications in his science fic-
tion—always refused Minsky’s invitations to see the robots being built
at MIT out of fear that his imagination “would be weighed down by
this boring realism.”
One lounger, noticing that he and Minsky wore the same pliers,
yanked his instrument from its holster and with a flick of his wrist
snapped the retractable jaws into place. “En garde,” he said. Minsky,
grinning, drew his weapon, and he and his challenger whipped their
pliers repeatedly at each other, like punks practicing their switchblade
technique. Minsky expounded on both the versatility and—an import-
ant point for him—the limitations of the pliers; his pair pinched him
during certain maneuvers. “Can you take it apart with itself?” someone
asked. Minsky and his colleagues shared an insiders’ laugh at this refer-
ence to a fundamental problem in robotics.
Later, returning to Minsky’s office, we encountered a young,
extremely pregnant Korean woman. She was a doctoral candidate and
was scheduled for an oral exam the next day. “Are you nervous?” asked
Minsky. “A little,” she replied. “You shouldn’t be,” he said, and gently
pressed his forehead against hers, as if seeking to infuse her with his
strength. I realized, watching this scene, that there were many Minskys.
But of course there would be. Multiplicity is central to Minsky’s view
of the mind. In his book The Society of Mind he contended that brains

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contain many different, highly specialized structures that evolved in

order to solve different problems.23 “We have many layers of networks
of learning machines,” he explained to me, “each of which has evolved
to correct bugs or to adapt the other agencies to the problems of think-
ing.” It is thus unlikely that the brain can be reduced to a particular
set of principles or axioms, “because we’re dealing with a real world
instead of a mathematical one that is defined by axioms.”
If AI had not lived up to its early promise, Minsky said, that was
because modern researchers had succumbed to “physics envy”—the
desire to reduce the intricacies of the brain to simple formulas. Such
researchers, to Minsky’s annoyance, had failed to heed his message
that the mind has many different methods for coping with even a sin-
gle, relatively simple problem. For example, someone whose television
set fails to work will probably first consider the problem to be purely
physical. He or she will check to see whether the television is properly
programmed or whether the cord is plugged in. If that fails, the person
may try to have the machine repaired, thus turning the problem from
a physical one to a social one—how to find someone who can repair
the television quickly and cheaply.
“That’s one lesson I can’t get across to these people,” Minsky said of
his fellow AI workers. “It seems to me that the problem the brain has
more or less solved is how to organize different methods into working
when the individual methods fail pretty often.” The only theorist other
than he who truly grasped the mind’s complexity, Minsky asserted,
was dead. “Freud has the best theories so far, next to mine, of what it
takes to make a mind.”
As Minsky continued speaking, his emphasis on multiplicity took
on a metaphysical and even moral cast. He blamed the problems of his
field—and of science in general—on what he called “the investment
principle,” which he defined as the tendency of humans to keep doing
something that they have learned to do well rather than to move on
to new problems. Repetition, or, rather, single-mindedness, seemed to
hold a kind of horror for Minsky. “If there’s something you like very
much,” he asserted, “then you should regard this not as you feeling
good but as a kind of brain cancer, because it means that some small
part of your mind has figured out how to turn off all the other things.”

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The reason Minsky had mastered so many skills during his career—he
is an adept in mathematics, philosophy, physics, neuroscience, robotics,
and computer science and has written several science fiction novels—
was that he had learned to enjoy the “feeling of awkwardness” triggered
by having to learn something new. “It’s so thrilling not to be able to do
something. It’s such a rare experience to treasure. It won’t last.”
Minsky was a child prodigy in music, too, but eventually he decided
that music was a soporific. “I think the reason people like music is
to suppress thought—the wrong kinds of thought—not to produce
it.” Minsky still occasionally found himself composing “Bach-like
things”—an electric piano crowded his office—but he tried to resist the
impulse. “I had to kill the musician at some point,” he said. “It comes
back every now and then, and I hit it.”
Minsky had no patience for those who claim the mind is too subtle
to understand. “Look, before Pasteur people said, ‘Life is different. You
can’t explain it mechanically.’ It’s just the same thing.” But a final the-
ory of the mind, Minsky emphasized, would be much more complex
than a final theory of physics—which Minsky also believed was attain-
able. All of particle physics might be condensed to a page of equations,
Minsky said, but to describe all the components of the mind would
require much more space. After all, consider how long it would take
precisely to describe an automobile, or even a single spark plug. “It
would take a fair-sized book to explain how they welded and sintered
the spline to the ceramic without it leaking when it starts.”
Minsky said the truth of a model of mind could be demonstrated in
several ways. First, a machine based on the model’s principles should be
able to mimic human development. “The machine ought to be able to
start as a baby and grow up by seeing movies and playing with things.”
Moreover, as imaging technology improves, scientists should be able
to determine whether the neural processes in living humans corrobo-
rate the model. “It seems to me that it’s perfectly reasonable that once
you get a [brain] scanner that had one angstrom [one ten-billionth of a
meter] resolution, then you could see every neuron in someone’s brain.
You watch this for 1,000 years and you say, ‘Well, we know exactly
what happens whenever this person says blue. And people check this

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out for generations and the theory is sound. Nothing goes wrong, and
that’s the end of it.”
If humans achieve a final theory of the mind, I asked, what fron-
tiers will be left for science to explore? “Why are you asking me this
question?” Minsky retorted. The concern that scientists will run out of
things to do is pitiful, he said. “There’s plenty to do.” We humans may
well be approaching our limits as scientists, but we will someday cre-
ate machines much smarter than we that can continue doing science.
But that would be machine science, not human science, I said. “You’re
a racist, in other words,” Minsky said, his great domed forehead pur-
pling. I scanned his face for signs of irony, but found none. “I think the
important thing for us is to grow,” Minsky continued, “not to remain in
our own present stupid state.” We humans, he added, are just “dressed
up chimpanzees.” Our task is not to preserve present conditions but to
evolve, to create beings better, more intelligent than we.
But Minsky, surprisingly, was hard-pressed to say precisely what
kinds of questions these brilliant machines might be interested in.
Echoing Daniel Dennett, Minsky suggested, rather halfheartedly, that
machines might try to comprehend themselves as they evolved into
ever-more-complex entities. He seemed more enthusiastic discuss-
ing the possibilities of converting human personalities into computer
programs that could then be downloaded into machines. Minsky saw
downloading as a way to indulge in pursuits that he would ordinarily
consider too dangerous, such as taking LSD or indulging in religious
faith. “I regard religious experience as a very risky thing to do because
it can destroy the brain in a rapid way, but if I had a backup copy—.”
Minsky confessed that he would love to know what Yo-Yo Ma, the
great cellist, felt like when playing a concerto, but Minsky doubted
whether such an experience would be possible. To share Yo-Yo Ma’s
experience, Minsky explained, he would have to possess all Yo-Yo Ma’s
memories, he would have to become Yo-Yo Ma. But in becoming Yo-Yo
Ma, Minsky suspected, he would cease to be Minsky.
This was an extraordinary admission for Minsky to make. Like lit-
erary critics who claim that the only true interpretation of a text is
the text itself, Minsky was implying that our humanness is irreducible;

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any attempt to convert an individual into an abstract mathematical

program—a string of ones and zeros that could be downloaded onto
a disk and transferred from one machine to another or combined with
another program representing another person—might well destroy
that individual’s essence. In his own oblique way, Minsky was sug-
gesting that the how-do-I-know-you’re-conscious problem is insur-
mountable. If no two personalities could ever be fully fused, then
downloading, too, might be impossible. In fact, the whole premise of
artificial intelligence, if intelligence is defined in human terms, might
be flawed.
Minsky, for all his reputation as a rabid reductionist, is actually
an antireductionist. He is even more of a romantic, in his way, than
is Roger Penrose. Penrose holds out the hope that the mind can be
reduced to a single quasi-quantum trick. Minsky insists that no such
reduction is possible, because multiplicity is the essence of the mind,
of all minds, those of humans and machines alike. Minsky’s revulsion
toward single-mindedness, simplicity, reflects not just a scientific judg-
ment, I think, but something deeper. Minsky, like Paul Feyerabend and
David Bohm and other great romantics, seems to fear The Answer, the
revelation to end all revelations. Fortunately for Minsky, no such reve-
lation is likely to emerge from neuroscience, since any useful theory of
the mind will probably be hideously complex, as he recognizes. Unfor-
tunately for Minsky, it also seems unlikely, given this complexity, that
he or even his grandchildren will witness the birth of machines with
human attributes. If and when we do construct intelligent, auton-
omous machines, they will surely be aliens, as unlike us as a 747 is
unlike a sparrow. And we could never be sure that they were conscious,
any more than any of us knows that anyone else is conscious.

Did Bacon Solve the Consciousness Problem?

T he conquest of consciousness will take time. The brain is marvel-

ously complicated. But is it infinitely complicated? Given the rate
at which neuroscientists are learning about it, within a few decades
they may have a highly effective map of the brain, one that correlates

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specific neural processes to specific mental functions—including con-

sciousness as defined by Crick and Koch. This knowledge may yield
many practical benefits, such as treatments for mental illness and infor-
mation-processing tricks that can be transferred to computers. In The
Coming of the Golden Age, Gunther Stent proposed that advances in neu-
roscience might one day give us great power over our own selves. We
might be able to “direct specific electrical inputs into the brain. These
inputs can then be made to generate synthetically sensations, feelings,
and emotions. . . . Mortal men will soon live like gods without sorrow
of heart and remote from grief, as long as their pleasure centers are
properly wired.”24
But Stent, anticipating the mysterian arguments of Nagel, McGinn,
and others, also wrote, “the brain may not be capable, in the last analysis,
of providing an explanation of itself.”25 Scientists and philosophers will
still strive to accomplish the impossible. They will ensure that neuro-
science continues in a postempirical, ironic mode in which practitioners
argue about the meaning of their physical models, much as physicists
argue about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Every now and then a
particularly evocative interpretation, set forth by some latter-day Freud
steeped in neural and cybernetic knowledge, may attract a vast follow-
ing and threaten to become the final theory of mind. Neomysterians
will then sally forth and point out the theory’s inevitable shortcomings.
Can it provide a truly satisfying explanation of dreams, or mystical expe-
rience? Can it tell us whether amoebas are conscious, or computers?
One could argue that consciousness was “solved” as soon as some-
one decided that it was an epiphenomenon of the material world.
Crick’s blunt materialism echoes that of the British philosopher Gil-
bert Ryle, who coined the phrase “ghost in the machine” in the 1930s
to ridicule dualism.26 Ryle pointed out that dualism—which held that
the mind was a separate phenomenon, independent of its physical sub-
strate and capable of exerting influence over it—violated conservation
of energy and thus all of physics. Mind is a property of matter, accord-
ing to Ryle, and only by tracing the intricate meanderings of matter in
the brain can one “explain” consciousness.
Ryle was not the first to propose this materialistic paradigm, which
is at once so empowering and deflating. Four centuries ago, Francis

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Bacon urged the philosophers of his day to cease trying to show how
the universe evolved from thought and to begin considering how
thought evolved from the universe.27 Here, arguably, Bacon anticipated
modern explanations of consciousness within the context of the theory
of evolution and, more generally, of the materialist paradigm. The sci-
entific conquest of consciousness will be the ultimate anticlimax, yet
another demonstration of Niels Bohr’s dictum that science’s job is to
reduce all mysteries to trivialities. But human science will not, cannot,
solve the how-do-I-know-you’re-conscious problem. There may be only
one way to solve it: to make all minds one mind.

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 CHAPTER EiGHT
THE END OF CHAOPLEXITY

I
miss the Reagan era. Ronald Reagan made moral and political
choices so easy. What he liked, I disliked. Star Wars, for example.
Formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, it was Reagan’s
plan to build a shield in space that would protect the United States from
the nuclear missiles of the Soviet Union. Of the many stories I wrote
about Star Wars, the one I am most embarrassed by now involved
Gottfried Mayer-Kress, a physicist at, of all places, the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, the cradle of the atomic bomb. Mayer-Kress had
constructed a simulation of the arms race between the Soviet Union
and the United States that employed “chaotic” mathematics. His sim-
ulation suggested that Star Wars would destabilize relations between
the superpowers and possibly lead to a catastrophe, that is, nuclear
war. Because I approved of Mayer-Kress’s conclusions—and because
his place of employment added a nice touch of irony—I wrote up an
admiring report of his work. Of course, if Mayer-Kress’s simulation
had suggested that Star Wars was a good idea, I would have dismissed
his work as the nonsense that it obviously was. Star Wars could well
have destabilized relations between the superpowers, but did we need
some computer model to tell us that?
I don’t mean to beat up on Mayer-Kress. He meant well. (In 1993,
several years after I wrote about Mayer-Kress’s Star Wars research, I
saw a press release from the University of Illinois, where he was then
employed, announcing that his computer simulations had suggested
solutions to the conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia.1) His work is just one
of the more blatant examples of over-reaching by someone in the field
195

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of chaoplexity (pronounced kay-oh-plex-ity). By chaoplexity I mean both

chaos and its close relative complexity. Each term, and chaos in partic-
ular, has been defined in specific, distinct ways by specific individu-
als. But each has also been defined in so many overlapping ways by so
many different scientists and journalists that the terms have become
virtually synonymous, if not meaningless.
The field of chaoplexity emerged as a full-blown pop-culture phe-
nomenon with the publication in 1987 of Chaos: Making a New Science,
by former New York Times reporter James Gleick. After Gleick’s mas-
terful book became a best-seller, scores of journalists and scientists
sought to duplicate his success by writing similar books on similar top-
ics.2 There are two, somewhat contradictory aspects to the chaoplexity
message. One is that many phenomena are nonlinear and hence inher-
ently unpredictable, because arbitrarily tiny influences can have enor-
mous, unforeseeable consequences. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist
at MIT and a pioneer of chaoplexity, called this phenomenon the but-
terfly effect, because it meant that a butterfly fluttering in Iowa could,
in principle, trigger an avalanche of effects culminating in a monsoon
in Indonesia. Because we can never possess more than approximate
knowledge of a weather system, our ability to predict its behavior is
severely limited.
This insight is hardly new. Henri Poincaré warned at the turn of the
century that “small differences in the initial conditions produce very
great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will
produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossi-
ble.”3 Investigators of chaoplexity—whom I will call chaoplexologists—
also like to emphasize that many phenomena in nature are “emergent”;
they exhibit properties that cannot be predicted or understood sim-
ply by examining the system’s parts. Emergence, too, is a hoary idea,
related to holism, vitalism, and other antireductionist creeds that date
back to the last century at least. Certainly Darwin did not think that
natural selection could be derived from Newtonian mechanics.
So much for the negative side of the chaoplexity message. The pos-
itive side goes as follows: The advent of computers and of sophisti-
cated nonlinear mathematical techniques will help modern scientists
understand chaotic, complex, emergent phenomena that have resisted

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analysis by the reductionist methods of the past. The blurb on the back
of Heinz Pagels’s The Dreams of Reason, one of the best books on the
“new sciences of complexity,” put it this way: “Just as the telescope
opened up the universe and the microscope revealed the secrets of the
microcosm, the computer is now opening an exciting new window on
the nature of reality. Through its capacity to process what is too com-
plex for the unaided mind, the computer enables us for the first time to
simulate reality, to create models of complex systems like large mol-
ecules, chaotic systems, neural nets, the human body and brain, and
patterns of evolution and population growth.”4
This hope stems in large part from the observation that simple sets of
mathematical instructions, when carried out by a computer, can yield
fantastically complicated and yet strangely ordered effects. John von
Neumann may have been the first scientist to recognize this capability
of computers. In the 1950s, he invented the cellular automaton, which
in its simplest form is a screen divided into a grid of cells, or squares.
A set of rules relates the color, or state, of each cell to the state of its
immediate neighbors. A change in the state of a single cell can trigger a
cascade of changes throughout the entire system. “Life,” created in the
early 1970s by the British mathematician John Conway, remains one
of the most celebrated of cellular automatons. Whereas most cellular
automatons eventually settle into predictable, periodic behavior, Life
generates an infinite variety of patterns—including cartoonlike objects
that seem to be engaged in inscrutable missions. Inspired by Conway’s
strange computer world, a number of scientists began using cellular
automatons to model various physical and biological processes.
Another product of computer science that seized the imagination
of the scientific community was the Mandelbrot set. The set is named
after Benoit Mandelbrot, an applied mathematician at IBM who is
one of the protagonists of Gleick’s book Chaos (and whose work on
indeterministic phenomena led Gunther Stent to conclude that the
social sciences would never amount to much). Mandelbrot invented
fractals, mathematical objects displaying what is known as fractional
dimensionality: they are fuzzier than a line but never quite fill a plane.
Fractals also display patterns that keep recurring at finer and finer
scales. After coining the term fractal, Mandelbrot pointed out that

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many real-world phenomena—notably clouds, snowflakes, coastlines,

stock-market fluctuations, and trees—have fractal-like properties.
The Mandelbrot set, too, is a fractal. The set corresponds to a simple
mathematical function that is repeatedly iterated; one solves the func-
tion and plugs the answer back into it and solves it again, ad infinitum.
When plotted by a computer, the numbers generated by the function
cluster into a now-famous shape, which has been likened to a tumor-rid-
den heart, a badly burned chicken, and a warty figure eight lying on
its side. When one magnifies the set with a computer, one finds that
its borders do not form crisp lines, but shimmer like flames. Repeated
magnification of the borders plunges the viewer into a bottomless phan-
tasmagoria of baroque imagery. Certain patterns, such as the basic
heartlike shape, keep recurring, but always with subtle variations.
The Mandelbrot set, which has been called “the most complex
object in mathematics,” has become a kind of laboratory in which
mathematicians can test ideas about the behavior of nonlinear (or
chaotic, or complex) systems. But what relevance do those findings
have to the real world? In his 1977 magnum opus, The Fractal Geom-
etry of Nature, Mandelbrot warned that it was one thing to observe a
fractal pattern in nature and quite another to determine the cause of
that pattern. Although exploring the consequences of self-similarity
yielded “extraordinary surprises, helping me to understand the fab-
ric of nature,” Mandelbrot said, his attempts to unravel the causes of
self-similarity “had few charms.”5
Mandelbrot seemed to be alluding to the seductive syllogism that
underlies chaoplexity. The syllogism is this: There are simple sets of
mathematical rules that when followed by a computer give rise to
extremely complicated patterns, patterns that never quite repeat them-
selves. The natural world also contains many extremely complicated
patterns that never quite repeat themselves. Conclusion: Simple rules
underly many extremely complicated phenomena in the world. With the
help of powerful computers, chaoplexologists can root out those rules.
Of course, simple rules do underlie nature, rules embodied in quan-
tum mechanics, general relativity, natural selection, and Mendelian
genetics. But chaoplexologists insist that much more powerful rules
remain to be found.

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The 31 Flavors of Complexity

B lue and red dots skittered across a computer screen. But these were
not just colored dots. These were agents, simulated people, doing
the things that real people do: foraging for food, seeking mates, com-
peting and cooperating with each other. At least, that’s what Joshua
Epstein, the creator of this computer simulation, claimed. Epstein, a
sociologist from the Brookings Institution, was showing his simula-
tion to me and two other journalists at the Santa Fe Institute, where
Epstein was a visiting fellow. The institute, founded in the mid-1980s,
quickly became the headquarters of complexity, the self-proclaimed
successor to chaos as the new science that would transcend the stodgy
reductionism of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein.
As my colleagues and I watched Epstein’s colored dots and listened
to his even more colorful interpretation of their movements, we offered
polite murmurs of interest. But behind his back we exchanged jaded
smiles. None of us took this kind of thing very seriously. We all under-
stood, implicitly, that this was ironic science. Epstein himself, when
pressed, acknowledged that his model was not predictive in any way;
he called it a “laboratory,” a “tool,” a “neural prosthesis” for exploring
ideas about the evolution of societies. (These were all favorite terms
of Santa Fe’ers.) But during public presentations of his work, Epstein
had also claimed that simulations such as his would revolutionize the
social sciences, helping to solve their most intractable problems.6
Another believer in the power of computers is John Holland, a
computer scientist with joint appointments at the University of Mich-
igan and the Santa Fe Institute. Holland was the inventor of genetic
algorithms, which are segments of computer code that can rearrange
themselves to produce a new program that can solve a problem more
efficiently. According to Holland, the algorithms are, in effect, evolv-
ing, just as the genes of living organisms evolve in response to the pres-
sure of natural selection.
Holland has proposed that it may be possible to construct a “uni-
fied theory of complex adaptive systems” based on mathematical tech-
niques such as those embodied in his genetic algorithms. He spelled
out his vision in a 1993 lecture:

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Many of our most troubling long-range problems—trade imbal-

ances, sustainability, AIDS, genetic defects, mental health,
computer viruses—center on certain systems of extraordinary
complexity. The systems that host these problems—economies,
ecologies, immune systems, embryos, nervous systems, com-
puter networks—appear to be as diverse as the problems. Despite
appearances, however, the systems do share significant charac-
teristics, so much so that we group them under a single classi-
fication at the Santa Fe Institute, calling them complex adaptive
systems (cas). This is more than terminology. It signals our intu-
ition that there are general principles that govern all cas behavior,
principles that point to ways of solving the attendant problems.
Much of our work is aimed at turning this intuition into fact.7

The ambition revealed by this statement is breathtaking. Chaoplex-

ologists often ridicule particle physicists for their hubris, for thinking
they can achieve a theory of everything. But actually particle physicists
are rather modest in their ambition: they merely hope that they can
wrap up the forces of nature in one tidy package and perhaps illumi-
nate the origin of the universe. Few are so bold as to propose that their
unified theory will yield both truth (that is, insight into nature) and hap-
piness (solutions to our worldly problems), as Holland and others have
proposed. And Holland is considered one of the more modest scientists
associated with the field of complexity.
But can scientists achieve a unified theory of complexity if they can-
not agree what, precisely, complexity is? Students of complexity have
struggled, with little success, to distinguish themselves from those
who study chaos. According to University of Maryland physicist James
Yorke, chaos refers to a restricted set of phenomena that evolve in
predictably unpredictable ways—demonstrating sensitivity to initial
conditions, aperiodic behavior, the recurrence of certain patterns at
different spatial and temporal scales, and so on. (Yorke ought to know,
since he coined the term chaos for a paper published in 1975.) Complex-
ity seems to refer to “anything you want,” according to Yorke.8
One widely touted definition of complexity involves “the edge of
chaos.” This picturesque phrase was incorporated in the subtitles of

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two books by journalists published in 1992: Complexity: Life at the Edge

of Chaos, by Roger Lewin, and Complexity: The Emerging Science at the
Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop.9 (The authors no
doubt intended the phrase to evoke the style as well as the substance
of the field.) The basic idea of the edge of chaos is that nothing novel
can emerge from systems with high degrees of order and stability, such
as crystals; on the other hand, completely chaotic, or aperiodic, sys-
tems, such as turbulent fluids or heated gases, are too formless. Truly
complex things—amoebas, bond traders, and the like—happen at the
border between rigid order and randomness.
Most popular accounts credit this idea to the Santa Fe researchers
Norman Packard and Christopher Langton. Packard, whose experience
as a leading figure in chaos theory educated him in the importance of
idea packaging, coined the all-important phrase “edge of chaos” in the
late 1980s. In experiments with cellular automatons, he and Langton
concluded that a system’s computational potential—that is, its ability
to store and process information—peaks in a regime between highly
periodic and chaotic behavior. But two other researchers at the Santa
Fe Institute, Melanie Mitchell and James Crutchfield, have reported
that their own computer experiments do not support the conclusions
of Packard and Langton. They also questioned whether “anything like
a drive toward universal-computational capabilities is an important
force in the evolution of biological organisms.”10 Although a few Santa
Fe’ers still employ the phrase “edge of chaos” (notably Stuart Kauff-
man, whose work was described in Chapter 5), most now disavow it.
Many other definitions of complexity have been proposed—at least
31, according to a list compiled in the early 1990s by physicist Seth
Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is also asso-
ciated with the Santa Fe Institute.11 The definitions typically draw
on thermodynamics, information theory, and computer science and
involve concepts such as entropy, randomness, and information—
which themselves have proved to be notoriously slippery terms. All
definitions of complexity have drawbacks. For example, algorithmic
information theory, proposed by the IBM mathematician Gregory
Chaitin (among others), holds that the complexity of a system can
be represented by the shortest computer program describing it. But

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according to this criterion, a text created by a team of typing monkeys

is more complex—because it is more random and therefore less com-
pressible—than Finnegans Wake.
Such problems highlight the awkward fact that complexity exists,
in some murky sense, in the eye of a beholder (like pornography, for
instance).12 Researchers have at times debated whether complexity has
become so meaningless that it should be abandoned, but they have
invariably concluded that the term has too much public relations value.
Santa Fe’ers often employ “interesting” as a synonym for “complex.”
But what government agency would supply funds for research on a
“unified theory of interesting things”?

The Poetry of Artificial Life

M embers of the Santa Fe Institute may not agree on what they are
studying, but they concur on how they should study it: with comput-
ers. Christopher Langton embodies the faith in computers that gave rise
to the chaos and complexity movements. He has proposed that simula-
tions of life run on a computer are alive—not sort of, or in a sense, or met-
aphorically, but actually. Langton is the founding father of artificial life, a
subfield of chaoplexity that has attracted much attention in its own right.
Langton has helped organize several conferences on artificial life—the
first held at Los Alamos in 1987—attended by biologists, computer scien-
tists, and mathematicians who share his affinity for computer animation.13
Artificial life is an outgrowth of artificial intelligence, a field that
preceded it by several decades. Whereas artificial-intelligence research-
ers seek to understand the mind better by simulating it on a computer,
proponents of artificial life hope to gain insights into a broad range
of biological phenomena through their simulations. And just as artifi-
cial intelligence has generated more portentous rhetoric than tangible
results, so has artificial life. As Langton stated in an essay introducing
the inaugural issue of the quarterly journal Artificial Life in 1994:

Artificial life will teach us much about biology—much that

we could not have learned by studying the natural products of

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biology alone—but artificial life will ultimately reach beyond

biology, into a realm we do not yet have a name for, but which
must include culture and our technology in an extended view of
nature. I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of the future of artifi-
cial life. It will not solve all our problems. Indeed, it may well add
to them. . . . Perhaps the simplest way to emphasize this point is
by merely pointing out that Mary Shelley’s prophetic story of Dr.
Frankenstein can no longer be considered science fiction.14

Even before I met Langton, I felt I knew him. He played a promi-

nent role in several popular journalistic treatments of chaoplexity. And
no wonder. He is the archetypal hip young scientist: simultaneously
intense and mellow, longhaired, given to wearing jeans, leather vests,
hiking boots, Indian jewelry. He also comes equipped with a marvel-
ous life story; its centerpiece is a hang-gliding accident that led to a
coma and an epiphany. (Those who want to hear the tale can read Wal-
drop’s Complexity, Lewin’s Complexity, or Steven Levy’s Artificial Life.15)
When I finally encountered Langton in the flesh in Santa Fe in May
1994, we decided to talk while eating lunch at one of his favorite restau-
rants. Langton’s car—hadn’t I read about it in one of the books about
him?—was a beat-up old compact filled with miscellanea, from audio-
tapes and pliers to plastic containers of hot sauce, all covered with a layer
of beige desert dust. As we drove to the restaurant, Langton dutifully
banged the chaoplexity boilerplate. Most scientists from Newton on have
studied systems exhibiting stability, periodicity, and equilibrium, but he
and other researchers at Santa Fe wanted to understand the “transient
regimes” underlying many biological phenomena. After all, he said,
“once you reach the equilibrium point for a living organism, you’re dead.”
He grinned. It had begun raining, and he turned on his wipers. The
windshield quickly went from translucent to opaque, as the wipers
smeared dirt across the glass. Langton, peering through an unsmeared
corner of the glass, continued talking, seemingly unperturbed by the
windshield’s metaphorical message. Science, he said, had obviously
made enormous progress by breaking things up into pieces and study-
ing those pieces. But that methodology provided only limited under-
standing of higher-level phenomena, which were created to a large

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extent through historical accidents. One could transcend those limita-

tions, however, through a synthetic methodology, in which the basic
components of existence were put together in new ways in computers
to explore what might have happened or could have happened.
“You end up with a much larger set” of possibilities, Langton said.
“You can then probe the set not just of existing chemical compounds
but of possible chemical compounds. And it’s only really within that
ground of the possible chemical compounds that you’re going to see
any regularity. The regularity is there but you can’t see it in the very
small set of things that nature initially provided you with.” With com-
puters, biologists can explore the role of chance by simulating the
beginning of life on earth, altering the conditions and observing the
consequences. “So part of what artificial life is all about, and part of the
broader scheme that I just call synthetic biology in general, is probing
beyond, pushing beyond the envelope of what occurred naturally.” In
this way, Langton suggested, artificial life might reveal which aspects
of our history were inevitable and which were merely contingent.
In the restaurant, as he chewed on chicken fajitas, Langton con-
firmed that, yes, he really did adhere to the view known as “strong
a-life,” which holds that computer simulations of living things are
themselves alive. He described himself as a functionalist, who believed
life was characterized by what it did rather than by what it was made
of. If a programmer created molecule-like structures that, following
certain laws, spontaneously organized themselves into entities that
could seemingly eat, reproduce, and evolve, Langton would consider
those entities to be alive—“even if they’re in a computer.”
Langton said his belief had moral consequences. “I like to think that
if I saw somebody sitting next to me at a computer terminal who is tor-
turing these creatures, you know, sending them to some digital equiva-
lent of hell, or rewarding only a select few who spelled out his name on
the screen, I would try to get this guy some psychological help!”
I told Langton that he seemed to be conflating metaphor, or anal-
ogy, with reality. “What I’m trying to do, actually, is something a little
more seditious than that,” Langton replied, smiling. He wanted people
to realize that life might be a process that could be implemented by
any number of arrangements of matter, including the ebb and flow of

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electrons in a computer. “At some level the actual physical realization

is irrelevant to the functional properties,” he said. “Of course there
are differences,” he added. “There are going to be differences if there’s
a different material base. But are the differences fundamental to the
property of being alive or not?”
Langton did not support the claim—commonly made by artifi-
cial-intelligence enthusiasts—that computer simulations can also have
subjective experiences. “This is why I like artificial life more than AI,”
he said. Unlike most biological phenomena, subjective states cannot
be reduced to mechanical functions. “No mechanical explanation you
could possibly give is going to give you that explanation for this sense of
awareness, of I-ness, of my being here now.” Langton, in other words,
was a mysterian, someone who believed that an explanation of con-
sciousness was beyond the reach of science. He finally conceded that
the question of whether computer simulations are really alive was also,
ultimately, a philosophical, and therefore unresolvable, issue. “But for
artificial life to do its job and help broaden the empirical database for
biological science and for a theory of biology, they don’t have to solve
that problem. Biologists have never really had to solve that.”
The longer Langton spoke, the more he seemed to acknowledge—
and even welcome the fact—that artificial life would never be the basis
for a truly empirical science. Artificial-life simulations, he said, “force
me to look over my shoulder about the assumptions I make about the
real world.” In other words, the simulations can enhance our negative
capability; they can serve to challenge rather than to support theories
about reality. Moreover, scientists studying artificial life might have
to settle for something less than the “complete understanding” they
derived from the old, reductionist methods. “For certain categories in
nature there won’t be anything more we can do by way of an explana-
tion than to be able to say, ‘Well, here’s the history.’”
Then he confessed that such an outcome would suit him fine; he
hoped the universe was in some fundamental sense “irrational.” “Ratio-
nality is very much connected with the tradition in science for the last
300 years, when you’re going to end up with some sort of understand-
able explanation of something. And I would be disappointed if that
were the case.”

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Langton complained that he was frustrated with the linearity of sci-

entific language. “There’s a reason for poetry,” he said. “Poetry is a very
nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum
of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum
of the parts. And just the fact that there’s stuff to explain out there that’s
more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just
characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for
capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to
do. That’s not to say that there isn’t a way to do it in a more scientific way
than poetry, but I just have the feeling that culturally there’s going to be
more of something like poetry in the future of science.”

The Limits of Simulation

I n February 1994, the journal Science published a paper, “Verification,

Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sci-
ences,” that addressed the problems posed by computer simulations.
The remarkably postmodern article was written by Naomi Oreskes,
a historian and geophysicist at Dartmouth College; Kenneth Belitz, a
geophysicist also at Dartmouth; and Kristin Shrader Frechette, a phi-
losopher at the University of South Florida. Although they focused on
geophysical modeling, their warnings were really applicable to numer-
ical models of all kinds (as they acknowledged in a letter printed by
Science some weeks later).16
The authors observed that numerical models were becoming
increasingly influential in debates over global warming, the depletion
of oil reserves, the suitability of nuclear-waste sites, and other issues.
Their paper was meant to serve as a warning that “verification and
validation of numerical models of natural systems is impossible.” The
only propositions that can be verified—that is, proved true—are those
dealing in pure logic or mathematics. Such systems are closed, in that
all their components are based on axioms that are true by definition.
Two plus two equals four by common agreement, not because the
equation corresponds to some external reality. Natural systems are
always open, Oreskes and her colleagues pointed out; our knowledge

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of them is always incomplete, approximate, at best, and we can never

be sure we are not overlooking some relevant factors.
“What we call data,” they explained, “are inference-laden signifi-
ers of natural phenomena to which we have incomplete access. Many
inferences and assumptions can be justified on the basis of experience
(and some uncertainties can be estimated), but the degree to which our
assumptions hold in any new study can never be established a priori.
The embedded assumptions thus render the system open.” In other
words, our models are always idealizations, approximations, guesses.
The authors emphasized that when a simulation accurately mimics
or even predicts the behavior of a real phenomenon, the model is still
not verified. One can never be sure whether a match stems from some
genuine correspondence between the model and reality or is coinci-
dental. Moreover, it is always possible that other models, based on dif-
ferent assumptions, could yield the same results.
Oreskes and her coauthers noted that the philosopher Nancy Cart-
wright called numerical models “a work of fiction.” They continued,

While not necessarily accepting her viewpoint, we might ponder

this aspect of it: A model, like a novel, may resonate with nature,
but it is not a “real” thing. Like a novel, a model may be con-
vincing—it may ring true if it is consistent with our experience
of the natural world. But just as we may wonder how much the
characters of a novel are drawn from real life and how much is
artifice, we might ask the same of a model: How much is based
on observation and measurement of accessible phenomena, how
much is based on informed judgement, and how much is conve-
nience? . . . [We] must admit that a model may confirm our biases
and support incorrect intuitions. Therefore, models are most use-
ful when they are used to challenge existing formulations, rather
than to validate or verify them.

Numerical models work better in some cases than in others. They

work particularly well in astronomy and particle physics, because the
relevant objects and forces conform to their mathematical definitions
so precisely. Moreover, mathematics helps physicists define what is

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otherwise undefinable. A quark is a purely mathematical construct. It

has no meaning apart from its mathematical definition. The properties
of quarks—charm, color, strangeness—are mathematical properties
that have no analogue in the macroscopic world we inhabit. Mathe-
matical theories are less compelling when applied to more concrete,
complex phenomena, such as anything in the biological realm. As the
evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr has pointed out, each organism is
unique; each one also changes from moment to moment.17 That is why
mathematical models of biological systems generally have less predic-
tive power than physics does. We should be equally wary of their abil-
ity to yield truths about nature.

The Self-Organized Criticality of Per Bak

T his kind of “wishy-washy” philosophical skepticism irks Per Bak.

Bak, a Danish physicist who came to the United States in the 1970s,
is like a parody of Harold Bloom’s strong poet. He is a tall, stout man,
at once owlish and pugnacious, who bristles with opinions. Trying to
convince me of the superiority of complexity to other modes of sci-
ence, he scoffed at the suggestion that particle physicists could uncover
the secret of existence by probing ever-smaller scales of matter. “The
secret doesn’t come from going deeper and deeper into the system,”
Bak asserted with a distinct Danish accent. “It comes from going the
other direction.”18
Particle physics is dead, Bak proclaimed, killed by its own success.
Most particle physicists, he noted, “think they’re still doing science
when they’re really just cleaning up the mess after the party.” The same
was true of solid-state physics, the field in which Bak began his career.
The fact that thousands of physicists were working on high-tempera-
ture superconductivity—for the most part in vain—showed how desic-
cated the field had become: “There’s very little meat and many animals
who want to eat it.” As for chaos (which Bak defined in the same nar-
row way that James Yorke did), physicists had come to a basic under-
standing of the processes underlying chaotic behavior by 1985, two
years before Gleick’s book Chaos was published. “That’s how things

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go!” Bak barked. “Once something reaches the masses, it’s already
done.” (Complexity, of course, is the exception to Bak’s rule.)
Bak had nothing but contempt for scientists who were content merely
to refine and extend the work of the pioneers. “There’s no need for that!
We don’t need the cleanup team here!” Fortunately, Bak said, many
mysterious phenomena continue to resist scientific understanding: the
evolution of species, human cognition, economics. “What these things
have in common is that they are very large things with many degrees
of freedom. They are what we call complex systems. And there will be
a revolution in science. These things will be made into hard sciences
in the next years in the same way that [particle] physics and solid-state
physics were made hard sciences in the last 20 years.” Bak rejected the
“pseudophilosophical, pessimistic, wishy-washy” view that these prob-
lems are simply too difficult for our puny human brains. “If I thought
that was true I wouldn’t be doing these things!” Bak exclaimed. “We
should be optimistic, concrete, and then we can go on. And I’m sure that
science will look totally different 50 years from now than it does today.”
In the late 1980s Bak and two colleagues proposed what quickly
became a leading candidate for a unified theory of complexity: self-or-
ganized criticality. His paradigmatic system is a sandpile. As one adds
sand to the top of the pile, it approaches what Bak calls the critical state,
in which even a single additional grain of sand dropped on the top of
the pile can trigger an avalanche down the pile’s sides. If one plots the
size and frequency of the avalanches occurring in this critical state, the
results conform to what is known as a power law: the frequency of ava-
lanches is inversely proportional to a power of their size.
Bak credited the chaos pioneer Benoit Mandelbrot with having
pointed out that earthquakes, stock-market fluctuations, the extinction
of species, and many other phenomena displayed the same pattern of
power-law behavior. (In other words, the phenomena that Bak defined
as complex were also all chaotic.) “Since economics, geophysics, astron-
omy, biology have these singular features there must be a theory here,”
Bak said. He hoped his theory might explain why small earthquakes are
common and large ones uncommon, why species persist for millions
of years and then vanish, why stock markets crash. “We can’t explain
everything about everything, but something about everything.”

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Bak thought models such as his would eventually revolutionize

economics. “Traditional economics is not a real science. It’s a mathe-
matical discipline where they talk about perfect markets and perfect
rationality and perfect equilibrium.” This approach was a “grotesque
approximation” that could not explain real-world economic behavior.
“Any real person who works on Wall Street and observes what happens
knows that fluctuations come from chain reactions in the system. It
comes from the coupling between the various agents: bank traders,
customers, thieves, robbers, governments, economies, whatever. Tra-
ditional economics has no description of this phenomenon.”
Can mathematical theories provide meaningful insights into cul-
tural phenomena? Bak groaned at the question. “I don’t understand
what meaning is,” he said. “In science there is no meaning to anything.
It just observes and describes. It doesn’t ask the atom why it’s going left
when it’s subjected to a magnetic field. So social scientists should go
out and observe the behavior of people and then figure out what the
consequences of that are for society.”
Bak acknowledged that such theories offered statistical descriptions
rather than specific predictions. “The whole idea is we cannot predict.
But nevertheless we can understand those systems that we cannot pre-
dict. We can understand why they cannot be predicted.” That, after all,
was what thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, which are also
probabilistic theories, had accomplished. The models should be specific
enough to be falsifiable, but not too specific, Bak said. “I think it’s a los-
ing game to make very specific and detailed models. That doesn’t give
any insight.” That would be mere engineering, Bak sniffed.
When I asked whether he thought researchers would someday con-
verge on a single, true theory of complex systems, Bak seemed to lose a
bit of his nerve. “It is a much more fluid situation,” he said. He doubted
whether scientists would ever achieve a simple, unique theory of the
brain, for instance. But they might find “some principles, hopefully
not too many, that govern the behavior of the brain.” He mused for a
moment, then added, “I think it is a much more long-term thing than,
say, chaos theory.”
Bak also feared that the federal government’s growing antipathy
toward pure science and its increased emphasis on practical applications

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might hinder progress in complexity studies. It was increasingly diffi-

cult to pursue science for its own sake; science had to be useful. Most
scientists were forced to do “deadly boring stuff that cannot be of any
real interest.” His own primary employer, Brookhaven National Lab-
oratory, was making people do “horrifying things, incredible garbage.”
Even Bak, as fiercely optimistic as he was, had to acknowledge the dis-
mal plight of modern science.
Self-organized criticality has been touted by, among others, Al Gore.
In his 1992 best-seller, Earth in the Balance, Gore revealed that self-orga-
nized criticality had helped him to understand not only the sensitivity
of the environment to potential disruptions but also “change in my
own life.”19 Stuart Kauffman has found affinities between self-orga-
nized criticality, the edge of chaos, and the laws of complexity he has
glimpsed in his computer simulations of biological evolution. But other
researchers have complained that Bak’s model does not even provide a
very good description of his paradigmatic system: a sandpile. Experi-
ments by physicists at the University of Chicago have shown that sand-
piles behave in many different ways, depending on the size and shape
of the grains; few sandpiles display the power-law behavior predicted
by Bak.20 Moreover, Bak’s model may be too general and statistical in
nature really to illuminate any of the systems it describes. After all,
many phenomena can be described by a so-called Gaussian curve, more
commonly known as a bell curve. But few scientists would claim, for
example, that human intelligence scores and the apparent luminosity
of galaxies must derive from common mechanisms.
Self-organized criticality is not really a theory at all. Like punctu-
ated equilibrium, self-organized criticality is merely a description, one
of many, of the random fluctuations, the noise, permeating nature. By
Bak’s own admission, his model can generate neither specific predic-
tions about nature nor meaningful insights. What good is it, then?

Cybernetics and Other Catastrophes

H istory abounds with failed attempts to create a mathematical theory

that explains and predicts a broad range of phenomena, including

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social ones. In the seventeenth century Leibniz fantasized about a

system of logic so compelling that it could resolve not only all math-
ematical questions but also philosophical, moral, and political ones.21
Leibniz’s dream has persisted even in the century of doubt. Since
World War II scientists have become temporarily infatuated with at
least three such theories: cybernetics, information theory, and catastro-
phe theory.
Cybernetics was created largely by one person, Norbert Wiener, a
mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The sub-
title of his 1948 book, Cybernetics, revealed his ambition: Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine.22 Wiener based his neolo-
gism on the Greek term kubernetes, or steersman. He proclaimed that
it should be possible to create a single, overarching theory that could
explain the operation not only of machines but also of all biological
phenomena, from single-celled organisms up through the economies
of nation-states. All these entities process and act on information; they
all employ such mechanisms as positive and negative feedback and fil-
ters to distinguish signals from noise.
By the 1960s cybernetics had lost its luster. The eminent electrical
engineer John R. Pierce noted drily in 1961 that “in this country the
word cybernetics has been used most extensively in the press and in
popular and semiliterary, if not semiliterate, magazines.”23 Cybernetics
still has a following in isolated enclaves, notably Russia (which during
the Soviet era was highly receptive to the fantasy of society as a machine
that could be fine-tuned by following the precepts of cybernetics). Wie-
ner’s influence persists in U.S. pop culture if not within science itself: we
owe words such as cyberspace, cyberpunk, and cyborg to Wiener.
Closely related to cybernetics is information theory, which Claude
Shannon, a mathematician at Bell Laboratories, spawned in 1948 with
a two-part paper titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”24
Shannon’s great achievement was to invent a mathematical definition
of information based on the concept of entropy in thermodynamics.
Unlike cybernetics, information theory continues to thrive—within
the niche for which it was intended. Shannon’s theory was designed to
improve the transmission of information over a telephone or telegraph
line subject to electrical interference, or noise. The theory still serves

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as the theoretical foundation for coding, compression, encryption, and

other aspects of information processing.
By the 1960s information theory had infected other disciplines out-
side communications, including linguistics, psychology, economics,
biology, and even the arts. (For example, various sages tried to con-
coct formulas relating the quality of music to its information content.)
Although information theory is enjoying a renaissance in physics as
a result of the influence of John Wheeler (the it from bit) and others,
it has yet to contribute to physics in any concrete way. Shannon him-
self doubted whether certain applications of his theory would come to
much. “Somehow people think it can tell you things about meaning,”
he once said to me, “but it can’t and wasn’t intended to.”25
Perhaps the most oversold metatheory was the appropriately named
catastrophe theory, invented by the French mathematician René Thom
in the 1960s. Thom developed the theory as a purely mathematical for-
malism, but he and others began to claim that it could provide insights
into a broad range of phenomena that displayed discontinuous behav-
ior. Thom’s magnum opus was his 1972 book, Structural Stability and
Morphogenesis, which received awestruck reviews in Europe and the
United States. A reviewer in the Times of London declared that “it is
impossible to give a brief description of the impact of this book. In one
sense the only book with which it can be compared is Newton’s Prin-
cipia. Both lay out a new conceptual framework for the understanding
of nature, and equally both go on to unbounded speculation.”26
Thom’s equations revealed how a seemingly ordered system could
undergo abrupt, “catastrophic” shifts from one state to another. Thom
and his followers suggested that these equations could help to explain
not only such purely physical events as earthquakes, but also biological
and social phenomena, such as the emergence of life, the metamor-
phosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, and the collapse of civilizations.
By the late 1970s, the counterattack had begun. Two mathematicians
declared in Nature that catastrophe theory “is one of many attempts
to deduce the world by thought alone.” They called that “an appealing
dream, but a dream that cannot come true.” Other critics charged that
Thom’s work “provides no new information about anything” and is
“exaggerated, not wholly honest.”27

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Chaos, as defined by James Yorke, exhibited this same boom-bust

cycle. By 1991, at least one pioneer of chaos theory, the French math-
ematician David Ruelle, had begun to wonder whether his field had
passed its peak. Ruelle invented the concept of strange attractors,
mathematical objects that have fractal properties and can be used to
describe the behavior of systems that never settle into a periodic pat-
tern. In his book Chance and Chaos, Ruelle noted that chaos “has been
invaded by swarms of people who are attracted by success, rather than
the ideas involved. And this changes the intellectual atmosphere for
the worse. . . . The physics of chaos, in spite of frequent triumphant
announcements of ‘novel’ breakthroughs, has had a declining output
of interesting discoveries. Hopefully, when the craze is over, a sober
appraisal of the difficulties of the subject will result in a new wave of
high-quality results.”28

“More Is Different”

E ven some researchers associated with the Santa Fe Institute seem

to doubt that science can achieve the kind of transcendent, unified
theory of complex phenomena that John Holland, Per Bak, and Stuart
Kauffman all dream of. One skeptic is Philip Anderson, a notoriously
hard-nosed physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on
superconductivity and other antics of condensed matter and was one
of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute. Anderson was a pioneer of
antireductionism. In “More Is Different,” an essay published in Sci-
ence in 1972, Anderson contended that particle physics, and indeed all
reductionist approaches, have a limited ability to explain the world.
Reality has a hierarchical structure, Anderson argued, with each level
independent, to some degree, of the levels above and below. “At each
stage, entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary,
requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the
previous one,” Anderson noted. “Psychology is not applied biology, nor
is biology applied chemistry.”29
“More Is Different” became a rallying cry for the chaos and complex-
ity movements. Ironically, the principle suggests that these so-called

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anti-reductionist efforts may never culminate in a unified theory of com-

plex, chaotic systems, one that illuminates everything from immune
systems to economies, as chaoplexologists such as Bak have suggested.
(The principle also suggests that the attempt of Roger Penrose to explain
the mind in terms of quasi-quantum mechanics was misguided.) Ander-
son acknowledged as much when I visited him at Princeton University,
his home base. “I don’t think there is a theory of everything,” he said.
“I think that there are basic principles that have very wide generality,”
such as quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics,
and symmetry breaking. “But you mustn’t give in to the temptation
that when you have a good general principle at one level that it’s going
to work at all levels.” (Of quantum mechanics, Anderson said, “There
seems to me to be no possible modification of that in the foreseeable
future.”) Anderson agreed with the evolutionary biologist Steven Jay
Gould that life is shaped less by deterministic laws than by contingent,
unpredictable circumstances. “I guess the prejudice I’m trying to express
is a prejudice in favor of natural history,” Anderson elaborated.
Anderson did not share the faith of some of his colleagues at the
Santa Fe Institute in the power of computer models to illuminate com-
plex systems. “Since I know a little bit about global economic models,”
he explained, “I know they don’t work! I always wonder whether global
climate models or oceanic circulation models or things like that are as
full of phony statistics and phony measurements.” Making simulations
more detailed and realistic is not necessarily the solution, Anderson
noted. It is possible for a computer to simulate the phase transition of
a liquid into a glass, for example, “but have you learned anything? Do
you understand it any better than you did before? Why not just take
a piece of glass and say it’s going through the glass transition? Why
do you have to look at a computer go through the glass transition? So
that’s the reductio ad absurdum. At some point the computer’s not telling
you what the system itself is doing.”
And yet, I said, there seemed to be this abiding faith among some of
his colleagues that they would someday find a theory that would dispel
all mysteries. “Yeah,” Anderson said, shaking his head. Abruptly, he
threw his arms in the air and cried out, like a born-again parishioner:
“I’ve finally seen the light! I understand everything!” He lowered his

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arms and smiled ruefully. “You never understand everything,” he said.

“When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.”

The Quark Master Rules Out “Something Else”

A n even more improbable leader of the Santa Fe Institute is Murray

Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann is a master reductionist. He won a Nobel
Prize in 1969 for discovering a unifying order beneath the alarm-
ingly diverse particles streaming from accelerators. He called his par-
ticle-classification system the Eight-fold way, after the Buddhist road
to wisdom. (The name was meant to be a joke, Gell-Mann has often
pointed out, not an indication that he was one of these flaky New Age
types who thought physics and Eastern mysticism had something in
common.) He showed the same flair for discerning unity in complex-
ity—and for coining terms—when he proposed that neutrons, protons,
and a host of other shorter-lived particles were all made of triplets of
more fundamental particles called quarks. Gell-Mann’s quark theory
has been amply demonstrated in accelerators, and it remains a corner-
stone of the standard model of particle physics.
Gell-Mann is fond of recalling how he found the neologism quark
while perusing James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. (The passage reads,
“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”) This anecdote serves notice that
Gell-Mann’s intellect is far too powerful and restless to be satisfied by
particle physics alone. According to a “personal statement” that he dis-
tributes to reporters, his interests include not only particle physics and
modern literature, but also cosmology, nuclear arms–control policy,
natural history, human history, population growth, sustainable human
development, archaeology, and the evolution of language. Gell-Mann
seems to have at least some familiarity with most of the major lan-
guages of the world and with many dialects; he enjoys telling people
about the etymology and correct native pronunciation of their names.
He was one of the first major scientists to climb aboard the complexity
bandwagon. He helped to found the Santa Fe Institute, and he became
its first full-time professor in 1993. (He had spent almost 40 years before
that as a professor at the California Institute of Technology.)

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Gell-Mann is unquestionably one of this century’s most brilliant sci-

entists. (His literary agent, John Brockman, said that Gell-Mann “has
five brains, and each one is smarter than yours.”30) He may also be one
of the most annoying. Virtually everyone who knows Gell-Mann has
a story about his compulsion to tout his own talents and to belittle
those of others. He displayed this trait almost immediately after we
first met in 1991 in a New York City restaurant, several hours before
he was to catch a flight to California. Gell-Mann is a small man with
large black glasses, short white hair, and a skeptical squint. I had barely
sat down when he began to tell me—as I set out my tape recorder and
yellow pad—that science writers were “ignoramuses” and a “terrible
breed” who invariably got things wrong; only scientists were really
qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt
less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his
scientific colleagues in contempt as well. 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 these people are my friends.”
To stretch out the interview, I had arranged for a limousine to take
us to the airport together. Once there, I accompanied Gell-Mann as he
checked his bags and went to the first-class lounge. He began to fret
that he did not have enough money to take a taxi home after he arrived
in California. (Gell-Mann had not yet moved permanently to Santa Fe.)
If I could lend him some money, he would write me a check. I gave him
$40. As Gell-Mann handed me a check, he suggested that I consider not
cashing it, since his signature would probably be quite valuable some-
day. (I cashed the check, but I kept a photocopy.)31
My suspicion is that Gell-Mann doubts that his colleagues in Santa
Fe will discover anything truly profound, anything approaching, say,
Gell-Mann’s own quark theory. However, if a miracle occurs, and the
chaoplexologists somehow manage to accomplish something import-
ant, Gell-Mann wants to be able to share the glory. His career would
therefore encompass the whole range of modern science, from particle
physics on up to chaos and complexity.
For a putative leader of chaoplexity, Gell-Mann espouses a world-
view remarkably similar to that of the arch-reductionist Steven

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Weinberg—although of course Gell-Mann does not put it that way. “I

have no idea what Weinberg said in his book,” Gell-Mann said when
I asked him during an interview in Santa Fe in 1995 if he agreed with
what Weinberg had said in Dreams of a Final Theory about reduction-
ism. “But if you read mine you saw what I said about it.” Gell-Mann
then went on to repeat some of the major themes of his 1994 book, The
Quark and the Jaguar.32 To Gell-Mann, science forms a hierarchy. At the
top are those theories that apply everywhere in the known universe,
such as the second law of thermodynamics and his own quark theory.
Other laws, such as those related to genetic transmission, apply only
here on earth, and the phenomena they describe entail a great deal of
randomness and historical circumstance.
“With biological evolution we see a gigantic amount of history
enters, huge numbers of accidents that could have gone different
ways and produced different life-forms than we have on the earth,
constrained of course by selection pressures. Then we get to human
beings and the characteristics of human beings are determined by
huge amounts of history. But still, there’s clear determination from the
fundamental laws and from history, or fundamental laws and specific
circumstances.”
Gell-Mann’s reductionist predilections can be seen in his attempts to
get his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute to substitute his own neol-
ogism, plectics, for complexity. “The word is based on the Indo-Euro-
pean word plec, which is the basis of both simplicity and complexity.
So in plectics we try to understand the relation between the simple and
the complex, and in particular how we get from the simple fundamen-
tal laws that govern the behavior of all matter to the complex fabric
that we see around us,” he said. “We’re trying to make theories of how
this process works, in general and also special cases, and how those
special cases relate to the general situation.” (Unlike quark, plectics has
never caught on. I have never heard anyone other than Gell-Mann use
the term—except to deride Gell-Mann’s fondness for it.)
Gell-Mann rejected the possibility that his colleagues would discover
a single theory that embraced all complex adaptive systems. “There
are huge differences among these systems, based on silicon, based
on protoplasm, and so on. It’s not the same.” I asked Gell-Mann if he

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agreed with the “More Is Different” principle set forth by his colleague
Philip Anderson. “I have no idea what he said,” Gell-Mann replied dis-
dainfully. I explained Anderson’s idea that reductionist theories have
limited explanatory power; one cannot go back up the chain of expla-
nation from particle physics to biology. “You can! You can!” Gell-Mann
exclaimed. “Did you read what I wrote about this? I devoted two or
three chapters to this!”
Gell-Mann said that in principle one can go back up the chain of
explanation, but in practice one often cannot, because biological phe-
nomena stem from so many random, historical, contingent circum-
stances. That is not to say that biological phenomena are ruled by some
mysterious laws of their own that act independently of the laws of
physics. The whole point of the doctrine of emergence is that “we don’t
need something else in order to get something else,” Gell-Mann said. “And
when you look at the world that way, it just falls into place! You’re not
tortured by these strange questions any more!”
Gell-Mann thus rejected the possibility—raised by Stuart Kauffman
and others—that there might be a still-undiscovered law of nature that
explains why the universe has generated so much order in spite of the
supposedly universal drift toward disorder decreed by the second law
of thermodynamics. This issue, too, was settled, Gell-Mann replied.
The universe began in a wound-up state far from thermal equilibrium.
As the universe winds down, entropy increases, on average, through-
out the system, but there can be many local violations of that tendency.
“It’s a tendency, and there are lots and lots of eddies in that process,”
he said. “That’s very different from saying complexity increases! The
envelope of complexity grows, expands. It’s obvious from these other
considerations it doesn’t need another new law, however!”
The universe does create what Gell-Mann calls frozen accidents—
galaxies, stars, planets, stones, trees—complex structures that serve as
a foundation for the emergence of still more complex structures. “As a
general rule, more complex life-forms emerge, more complex computer
programs, more complex astronomical objects emerge in the course
of nonadaptive stellar and galactic evolution and so on. But! If we look
very very very far into the future, maybe it won’t be true any more!”
Eons from now the era of complexity could end, and the universe could

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degenerate into “photons and neutrinos and junk like that and not a lot
of individuality.” The second law would get us after all.
“What I’m trying to oppose is a certain tendency toward obscuran-
tism and mystification,” Gell-Mann continued. He emphasized that
there was much to be understood about complex systems; that was
why he helped to found the Santa Fe Institute. “There’s a huge amount
of wonderful research going on. What I say is that there is no evidence
that we need—I don’t know how else to say it—something else!” Gell-
Mann, as he spoke, wore a huge sardonic grin, as if he could scarcely
contain his amusement at the foolishness of those who might disagree
with him.
Gell-Mann noted that “the last refuge of the obscurantists and mys-
tifiers is self-awareness, consciousness.” Humans are obviously more
intelligent and self-aware than other animals, but they are not quali-
tatively different. “Again, it’s a phenomenon that appears at a certain
level of complexity and presumably emerges from the fundamental
laws plus an awful lot of historical circumstances. Roger Penrose has
written two foolish books based on the long-discredited fallacy that
Gödel’s theorem has something to do with consciousness requiring”—
pause—“something else.”
If scientists did discover a new fundamental law, Gell-Mann said,
they would do so by forging further into the microrealm, in the
direction of superstring theory. Gell-Mann felt that superstring the-
ory would probably be confirmed as the final, fundamental theory
of physics early in the next millennium. But would such a far-fetched
theory, with all its extra dimensions, ever really be accepted? I asked.
Gell-Mann stared at me as if I had expressed a belief in reincarnation.
“You’re looking at science in this weird way, as if it were a matter of an
opinion poll,” he said. “The world is a certain way, and opinion polls
have nothing to do with it! They do exert pressures on the scientific
enterprise, but the ultimate selection pressure comes from comparison
with the world.” What about quantum mechanics? Would we be stuck
with its strangeness? “I don’t think there’s anything strange about it!
It’s just quantum mechanics! Acting like quantum mechanics! That’s
all it does!” To Gell-Mann, the world made perfect sense. He already
had The Answer.

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Is science finite or infinite? For once, Gell-Mann did not have a pre-
packaged answer. “That’s a very difficult question,” he replied soberly.
“I can’t say.” His view of how complexity emerges from fundamental
laws, he said, “still leaves open the question of whether the whole sci-
entific enterprise is open-ended. After all, the scientific enterprise can
also concern itself with all kinds of details.” Details.
One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is
almost always right. His assertion that Kauffman, Bak, Penrose, and
others will fail to find something else just beyond the horizon of cur-
rent science—something that can explain better than current science
can the mystery of life and of human consciousness and of existence
itself—will probably prove to be correct. Gell-Mann may err—dare
one say it?—only in thinking that superstring theory, with all its extra
dimensions and its infinitesimal loops, will ever become an accepted
part of the foundation of physics.

Ilya Prigogine and the End of Certainty

I n 1994, Arturo Escobar, an anthropologist at Smith College, wrote an

essay in the journal Current Anthropology about some of the new con-
cepts and metaphors emerging from modern science and technology.
He noted that chaos and complexity offered different visions of the
world than did traditional science; they emphasized “fluidity, multiplic-
ity, plurality, connectedness, segmentarity, heterogeneity, resilience;
not ‘science’ but knowledges of the concrete and the local, not laws
but knowledge of the problems and the self-organizing dynamics of
nonorganic, organic and social phenomena.” Note the quotation marks
around the word science.33
It is not only postmodernists such as Escobar who view chaos and
complexity as what I would call ironic endeavors. The artificial-life
maven Christopher Langton clearly was putting forward this same
idea when he foresaw more “poetry” in the future of science. Langton’s
ideas, in turn, echoed those espoused much earlier by the chemist Ilya
Prigogine. In 1977, Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for studies of so-called
dissipative systems, unusual mixtures of chemicals that never achieve

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equilibrium but keep fluctuating among multiple states. Upon these

experiments, Prigogine, who fluctuates between institutes that he
founded at the Free University in Belgium and the University of Texas
at Austin, constructed a tower of ideas about self-organization, emer-
gence, the links between order and disorder—in short, chaoplexity.
Prigogine’s great obsession is time. For decades he complained that
physics was not paying sufficient heed to the obvious fact that time pro-
ceeds only in one direction. In the early 1990s, Prigogine announced
that he had forged a new theory of physics, one that finally did justice
to the irreversible nature of reality. The probabilistic theory suppos-
edly eliminated the philosophical paradoxes that had plagued quan-
tum mechanics and reconciled it with classical mechanics, nonlinear
dynamics, and thermodynamics. As a bonus, Prigogine declared, the
theory would help to bridge the chasm between the sciences and the
humanities and bring about the “reenchantment” of nature.
Prigogine has his fans, at least among nonscientists. Futurist Alvin
Toffler, in the forward to Prigogine’s 1984 book, Order out of Chaos (a
bestseller in Europe), likened Prigogine to Newton and prophesied that
the science of the Third Wave future would be Prigoginian.34 But sci-
entists familiar with Prigogine’s work—including the many younger
practitioners of chaos and complexity who have clearly borrowed
his ideas and rhetoric—have little or nothing good to say about him.
They accuse him of being arrogant and self-aggrandizing. They claim
that he has made little or no concrete contribution to science; that he
has merely recreated experiments by others and waxed philosophical
about them; and that he had won a Nobel Prize for less cause than any
other recipient.
These charges may well be true. But Prigogine may also have earned
his colleagues’ enmity by revealing the dirty secret of late-twenti-
eth-century science, that it is, in a sense, digging its own grave. In Order
out of Chaos, cowritten with Isabelle Stengers, Prigogine pointed out
that the major discoveries of science in this century have proscribed
the limits of science. “Demonstrations of impossibility, whether in rel-
ativity, quantum mechanics, or thermodynamics, have shown us that
nature cannot be described ‘from the outside,’ as if by a spectator,”
Prigogine and Stengers stated. Modern science, with its probabilistic

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descriptions, also “leads to a kind of ‘opacity’ as compared to the trans-

parency of classical thought.”35
I met Prigogine in Austin in March 1995, a day after his return
from a stint in Belgium. He showed no signs of jet lag. At age 78, he
was exceedingly alert and energetic. Although short and compact, he
possessed a regal bearing; he seemed not arrogant so much as calmly
accepting of his own greatness. As I reviewed the issues I hoped to dis-
cuss with him, he nodded and muttered, “Yays, yays,” with some impa-
tience; he was eager, I soon realized, to begin enlightening me about
the nature of things.
Shortly after we sat down, two researchers at the center joined us.
A secretary told me later that they had been instructed to interrupt
Prigogine if he proved too overwhelming for me and did not allow
me to ask any questions. They did not fulfill this task. Prigogine, once
started, was unstoppable. Words, sentences, paragraphs issued from
him in a steady, implacable stream. His accent was almost parodically
thick—it reminded me of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther—and
yet I had no difficulty understanding him.
He briefly recounted his youth. He was born in Russia in 1917,
during the revolution, and his bourgeois family soon fled to Belgium.
His interests were eclectic: he played the piano, studied literature, art,
philosophy—and science, of course. He suspected that the turbulent
setting of his youth had provoked his career-long fascination with
time. “I may have been impressed with the fact that science had so little
to say about time, about history, evolution, and that perhaps brought
me to the problem of thermodynamics. Because in thermodynamics,
the main quantity is entropy, and entropy means just evolution.”
In the 1940s, Prigogine proposed that the increase of entropy
decreed by the second law of thermodynamics need not always create
disorder; in some systems, such as the churning chemical cells he stud-
ied in his laboratory, entropic drift could generate striking patterns. He
also began to realize that “structure is rooted in the direction of time,
irreversible time, and the arrow of time is a very important element
in the structure of the universe. Now this already was bringing me in
a sense in conflict with great physicists like Einstein, who was saying
that time is an illusion.”

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Most physicists, according to Prigogine, think irreversibility is an

illusion stemming from the limits of their observations. “Now this I
could never believe, because in a sense that seems to indicate that our
measurements, or our approximations, introduce irreversibility in a
time-reversible universe!” Prigogine exclaimed. “We are not the father
of time. We are the children of time. We come from evolution. What
we have to do is to include evolutionary patterns in our descriptions.
What we need is a Darwinian view of physics, an evolutionary view of
physics, a biological view of physics.”
Prigogine and his colleagues had been developing just such a phys-
ics. As a result of this new model, Prigogine told me, physics would be
reborn, contrary to the pessimistic predictions of reductionists such
as Steven Weinberg (who worked in the same building as Prigogine).
The new physics might also heal the great rift between science, which
had always depicted nature as the outcome of deterministic laws, and
the humanities, which emphasized human freedom and responsibility.
“You cannot on one side believe that you are part of an automaton and
on the other hand believe in humanism,” Prigogine declared.
Of course, he emphasized, this unification was metaphorical rather
than literal; it would not by any means help science to solve all its prob-
lems. “One should not exaggerate and dream about a unified theory
which will include politics and economics and the immune system and
physics and chemistry,” Prigogine said, in a rebuke to researchers at the
Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere who dreamed of just such a theory.
“One should not think that progress in chemical nonequilibrium reac-
tions will give you the key for human politics. Of course not! Of course
not! But still, it brings in a unified element. It brings in the element of
bifurcation, it brings in the idea of historical dimension, it brings in the
idea of evolutionary patterns, which indeed you find on all levels. And
in this sense it is a unifying element of our view of the universe.”
Prigogine’s secretary poked her head in at the door to remind him
that she had made reservations for lunch at the faculty club at noon.
After her third reminder—at five minutes after noon—Prigogine
ended his peroration with a flourish and announced that it was time
to go to lunch. At the faculty lounge, Prigogine and I were joined by a
dozen or so other researchers employed at his center: Prigoginians. We

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assembled at a long rectangular table. Prigogine sat in the middle of

one side, like Jesus at the Last Supper, and I sat beside him, like Judas,
listening, along with everyone else, as he held forth.
Sporadically, Prigogine called on one of his disciples to say a word or
two—enough to draw attention to the vast gap between his rhetorical
powers and theirs. At one point he asked a tall, cadaverish man sitting
across from me (whose equally cadaverish identical twin, eerily, was
also at the table) to explain his nonlinear, probabilistic view of cosmol-
ogy. The man dutifully unburdened himself, in a lugubrious eastern
European accent, of an impenetrable monologue about bubbles and
instabilities and quantum fluctuations. Prigogine quickly stepped in.
The meaning of his colleague’s work, he explained, was that there was
no stable ground state, no equilibrium condition, of space-time; thus,
there was no beginning to the cosmos and there could be no end. Phew.
Between nibbles of his fish, Prigogine reiterated his objections
to determinism. (Earlier Prigogine had admitted that he had been
strongly influenced by Karl Popper.) Descartes, Einstein, and the other
great determinists were “all pessimistic people. They wanted to go to
another world, a world of eternal beatitude.” But a deterministic world
would be not a Utopia but a dystopia, Prigogine said. That was the mes-
sage of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, of George Orwell in 1984, of
Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When a state tries to
suppress evolution, change, flux by brutal force, by violence, Prigogine
explained, it destroys the meaning of life, it creates a society of “time-
less robots.”
On the other hand, a completely irrational, unpredictable world
would also be terrifying. “What we have to find is a middle way, to find
a probabilistic description which says something, not everything, and
also not nothing.” His view could provide a philosophical framework
for understanding social phenomena, Prigogine said. But human behav-
ior, he emphasized, could not be defined by any scientific, mathematical
model. “In human life we have no simple basic equation! When you
decide whether you take coffee or not, that’s already a complicated deci-
sion. It depends on what day it is, whether you like coffee, and so on.”
Prigogine had been building toward some great revelation, and
now he finally divulged it. Chaos, instability, nonlinear dynamics, and

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related concepts had been warmly received not only by scientists but
also by the lay public because society was itself in a state of flux. The
public’s faith in great unifying ideas, whether religious or political or
artistic or scientific, was dwindling.
“Even people who are very Catholic are no longer so Catholic as
their parents or grandparents were, probably. We are no more believ-
ing in Marxism or liberalism in the classical way. We are no more
believing classical science.” The same is true of the arts, music, liter-
ature; society has learned to accept a multiplicity of styles and world-
views. Humanity has arrived, Prigogine summarized, at “the end of
certitude.”
Prigogine paused, allowing us to ponder the magnitude of his
announcement. I broke the hushed silence by pointing out that some
people, such as religious fundamentalists, seemed to be clinging to cer-
titude more fiercely than ever. Prigogine listened politely, then asserted
that fundamentalists were merely exceptions to the rule. Abruptly, he
fixed his gaze on a prim, blond-haired woman, the deputy director of
his institute, sitting across the table from us. “What is your opinion?”
he asked. “I agree completely,” she replied. She hastily added, perhaps
in response to the craven snickers of her colleagues, that fundamental-
ism “seemed to be a response to a frantic world.”
Prigogine nodded paternally. He acknowledged that his assertions
concerning the end of certitude had elicited “violent reactions” in the
intellectual establishment. The New York Times had declined to review
Order out of Chaos because, Prigogine had heard, the editors consid-
ered his discussion of the end of certitude “too dangerous.” Prigogine
understood such fears. “If science is not able to give certitude, what
should you believe? I mean, before it was very easy. Either you believe
in Jesus Christ, or you believe in Newton. It was very simple. But now,
as I say, if science is not giving you certitude but probabilities, then it’s
a dangerous book!”
Prigogine nonetheless thought his view did justice to the depth-
less mystery of the world, and of our own existence. That was what
he meant by his phrase “the reenchantment of nature.” After all, con-
sider this lunch we were having right now. What theory could predict
this! “The universe is a strange thing,” Prigogine said, cranking the

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intensity of his voice up a notch. “I think we can all agree on that.” As

he swept the room with his serene yet feral gaze, his colleagues bobbed
their heads and chuckled nervously. Their unease was well-founded.
They had hitched their careers to a man who apparently believed that
science—empirical, rigorous science, the kind of science that solves its
problems, that renders the world comprehensible, that gets us some-
where—was over.
In return for certainty, Prigogine—like Christopher Langton, Stu-
art Kauffman, and other chaoplexologists who have clearly been influ-
enced by his ideas—promises the “reenchantment of nature.” (Per Bak,
for all his hubris, at least eschews this pseudo-spiritual rhetoric.) What
Prigogine apparently means by this statement is that vague, fuzzy,
impotent theories are somehow more meaningful, more comforting,
than the accurate, precise, powerful theories of Newton or Einstein
or modern particle physicists. But why, one wonders, is an indeter-
ministic, opaque universe any less cold, cruel, and frightening than a
deterministic, transparent one? More specifically, how is the fact that
the world unfolds according to a nonlinear, probabilistic dynamics sup-
posed to console a Bosnian woman who has seen her only daughter
raped and slaughtered?

Mitchell Feigenbaum and the Collapse of Chaos

I t was a meeting with Mitchell Feigenbaum that finally convinced me

that chaoplexity is a doomed enterprise. Feigenbaum was perhaps the
most compelling character in Gleick’s book Chaos—and in the field as
a whole. Trained as a particle physicist, Feigenbaum became entranced
with questions beyond the scope of that or any other field, questions
about turbulence, chaos, and the relation between order and disor-
der. In the mid-1970s, when he was a young postdoc at Los Alamos
National Laboratory, he discovered a hidden order, called period dou-
bling, underlying the behavior of a wide variety of nonlinear mathe-
matical systems. The period of a system is the time it takes to return
to its original state. Feigenbaum found that the period of some non-
linear systems keeps doubling as they evolve and therefore rapidly

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approaches infinity (or eternity). Experiments confirmed that some

simple real-world systems (although not as many as initially hoped)
demonstrate period doubling. For example, as one gradually opens up
a faucet, the water demonstrates period doubling as it progresses from
a steady drip, drip, drip toward a turbulent gush. The mathematician
David Ruelle has called period doubling a work of “particular beauty
and significance” that “stands out in the theory of chaos.”36
Feigenbaum, when I met him in March 1994 at Rockefeller Univer-
sity, where he has a spacious office overlooking Manhattan’s East River,
looked every bit the genius he was said to be. With his magnificent,
oversized head and swept-back hair, he resembled Beethoven, though
more handsome and less simian. Feigenbaum spoke clearly, precisely,
with no accent, but with a strange kind of formality, as if English were
a second language that he had mastered through sheer brilliance. (The
voice of the superstring theorist Edward Witten has this same qual-
ity.) When amused, Feigenbaum did not smile so much as grimace:
his already protuberant eyes bulged still farther from their sockets,
and his lips peeled back to expose twin rows of brown, peglike teeth
stained by countless filterless cigarettes and espressos (both of which
he consumed during our meeting). His vocal cords, cured by decades
of exposure to these toxins, yielded a voice as rich and resonant as a
basso profundo’s and a deep, villainous snicker.
Like many chaoplexologists, Feigenbaum could not resist ridiculing
particle physicists for daring to think they could achieve a theory of
everything. It is quite possible, he said, that particle physicists might
one day develop a theory that adequately accounts for all of nature’s
fundamental forces, including gravity. But calling such a theory final
would be something else again. “A lot of my colleagues like the idea of
final theories because they’re religious. And they use it as a replacement
for God, which they don’t believe in. But they just created a substitute.”
A unified theory of physics would obviously not answer all ques-
tions, Feigenbaum said. “If you really believe that this is a path of
understanding the world, I can ask immediately: how do I write down
in this formalism what you look like, with all the hairs on your head?”
He stared at me until my scalp prickled. “Now, one answer is, ‘That’s
not an interesting problem.’” Against my will, I felt slightly offended.

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“Another answer is, ‘Well, it’s okay, but we can’t do it.’ The right
answer is obviously an alloy of those two complements. We have very
few tools. We can’t solve problems like that.”
Moreover, particle physicists are overly concerned with finding
theories that are merely true, in the sense that they account for avail-
able data; the goal of science should be to generate “thoughts in your
head” that “stand a high chance of being new or exciting,” Feigenbaum
explained. “That’s the desideratum.” He added: “There isn’t any secu-
rity by knowing that something is true, at least as far as I’m concerned.
I’m thoroughly indifferent to that. I like to know that I have a way of
thinking about things.” I began to suspect that Feigenbaum, like David
Bohm, had the soul of an artist, a poet, even a mystic: he sought not
truth, but revelation.
Feigenbaum noted that the methodology of particle physics—and
physics generally—had been to try to look at the simplest possible
aspects of reality, “where everything has been stripped away.” The
most extreme reductionists had suggested that looking at more com-
plex phenomena was merely “engineering.” But as a result of advances
in chaos and complexity, he said, “some of these things that one rele-
gated to engineering are now regarded as reasonable questions to ask
from a more theoretical viewpoint. Not just to get the right answer but
to understand something about how they work. And that you can even
make sense out of that last comment flies in the face of what it means
for a theory to be finished.”
On the other hand, chaos, too, had generated too much hype. “It’s
a fraud to have named the subject ‘chaos,’” he said. “Imagine one of
my [particle-physicist] colleagues has gone to a party and meets some-
one and the person is all bubbling over about chaos and tells him that
this reductionist stuff is all bullshit. Well, it’s infuriating, because it’s
completely stupid what the person has been told,” Feigenbaum said. “I
think it’s regrettable that people are sloppy, and they end up serving as
representatives.”
Some of his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, Feigenbaum added,
also had too naive a faith in the power of computers. “The proof is in
the pudding,” he said, and paused, as if considering how to proceed
diplomatically. “It’s very hard to see things in numerical experiments.

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That is, people want to have fancier and fancier computers to simulate
fluids. There is something to be learned in simulating fluids, but unless
you know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to see anything.
Because after all, if I just look out the window, there’s an overwhelm-
ingly better simulation than I could ever do on a computer.”
He nodded toward his window, beyond which the leaden East River
flowed. “I can’t interrogate it quite as sharply, but there’s so much stuff
in that numerical simulation that if I don’t know what to interrogate
it about, I will have learned nothing.” For these reasons much of the
recent work on nonlinear phenomena “has not led to answers. The rea-
son for that is, these are truly hard problems, and one doesn’t have any
tools. And the job should really be to do those insightful calculations
which require some piece of faith and good luck as well. People don’t
know how to begin doing these problems.”
I admitted that I was often confused by the rhetoric of people in
chaos and complexity. Sometimes they seemed to be delineating the
limits of science—such as the butterfly effect—and sometimes they
implied that they could transcend those limits. “We are building tools!”
Feigenbaum cried. “We don’t know how to do these problems. They
are truly hard. Every now and then we get a little pocket where we
know how to do it, and then we try to puff it out as far as it can go. And
when it reaches the border of where it is going, then people wallow for
a while, and then they stop doing it. And then one waits for some new
piece of insight. But it is literally the business of enlarging the borders
of what falls under the suzerainty of science. It is not being done from
an engineering viewpoint. It isn’t just to give you the answer to some
approximation.”
“I want to know why,” he continued, still staring at me hard. “Why
does the thing do this?” Was it possible that this enterprise could, well,
fail? “Of course!” Feigenbaum bellowed, and he laughed maniacally.
He confessed that he had been stymied himself of late. Up through
the late 1980s he had sought to refine a method for describing how a
fractal object, such as a cloud, might evolve over time when perturbed
by various forces. He wrote two long papers on the topic that were
published in 1988 and 1989 in a relatively obscure physics journal.37 “I

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have no idea how well they’ve been read,” Feigenbaum said defiantly.
“In fact, I’ve never been able to give a talk on them.” The problem, he
suggested, might be that no one could understand what he was getting
at. (Feigenbaum was renowned for obscurity as well as for brilliance.)
Since then, he added, “I haven’t had a further better idea to know how
to proceed in this.”
In the meantime, Feigenbaum had turned to applied science. Engi-
neering. He had helped a map-making company develop software for
automatically constructing maps with minimal spatial distortion and
maximum aesthetic appeal. He belonged to a committee that was
redesigning U.S. currency to make it less susceptible to counterfeiting.
(Feigenbaum came up with the idea of using fractal patterns that blur
when photocopied.) I noted that these sounded like what would be, for
most scientists, fascinating and worthy projects. But people familiar
with Feigenbaum’s former incarnation as a leader of chaos theory, if
they heard he now worked on maps and currency, might think . . . .
“He’s not doing serious things any more,” Feigenbaum said qui-
etly, as if to himself. Not only that, I added. What people might think
was that if someone who was arguably the most gifted explorer of
chaos could not proceed any further, then perhaps the field had run its
course. “There’s some truth to that,” he replied. He acknowledged that
he hadn’t really had any good ideas about how to extend chaos theory
since 1989. “One is on the lookout for things that are substantial, and at
the moment. . . .” He paused. “I don’t have a thought. I don’t know. . . .”
He turned his large, luminous eyes once again toward the river beyond
his window, as if seeking a sign.
Feeling somewhat guilty, I told Feigenbaum that I would love to see
his last papers on chaos. Did he have any reprints? In response, Fei-
genbaum thrust himself from his chair and careened wildly toward a
row of filing cabinets on the far side of his office. En route, he cracked
his shin against a low-lying coffee table. Wincing, teeth clenched, Fei-
genbaum limped onward, wounded by his collision with the world.
The scene was a grotesque inversion of Samuel Johnson’s famous
stone-kicking episode. The suddenly malevolent-looking coffee table
seemed to be gloating: “I refute Feigenbaum thus.”

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Making Metaphors

T he fields of chaos, complexity, and artificial life will continue. Cer-

tain practitioners will be content to play in the realm of pure math-
ematics and theoretical computer science. Others, the majority, will
develop new mathematical and computational techniques for engineer-
ing purposes. They will make incremental advances, such as extending
the range of weather forecasts or improving the ability of engineers to
simulate the performance of jets or other complex technologies. But
they will not achieve any great insights into nature—certainly none
comparable to Darwin’s theory of evolution or quantum mechanics.
They will not force any significant revisions in our map of reality or
our narrative of creation. They will not find what Murray Gell-Mann
calls “something else.”
So far, chaoplexologists have created some potent metaphors: the
butterfly effect, fractals, artificial life, the edge of chaos, self-organized
criticality. But they have not told us anything about the world that is
both concrete and truly surprising, either in a negative or in a positive
sense. They have slightly extended the borders of knowledge in certain
areas, and they have more sharply delineated the boundaries of knowl-
edge elsewhere.
Computer simulations represent a kind of metareality within which
we can play with and even—to a limited degree—test scientific theo-
ries, but they are not reality itself (although many aficionados have lost
sight of that distinction). Moreover, by giving scientists more power
to manipulate different symbols in different ways to simulate a nat-
ural phenomenon, computers may undermine scientists’ faith that
their theories are not only true but True, exclusively and absolutely
true. Computers may, if anything, hasten the end of empirical science.
Christopher Langton was right: there is something more like poetry in
the future of science.

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THE END OF LIMITOLOGY

J
ust as lovers begin talking about their relationship only when it
sours, so will scientists become more self-conscious and doubt-
ful as their efforts yield diminishing returns. Science will follow
the path already trodden by literature, art, music, philosophy. It will
become more introspective, subjective, diffuse, obsessed with its own
methods. In the spring of 1994 I saw the future of science in micro-
cosm when I sat in on a workshop at the Santa Fe Institute titled “The
Limits to Scientific Knowledge.” During the three-day meeting, a
score of thinkers, including mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and
economists, pondered whether there were limits to science, and, if so,
whether science could know them. The meeting was organized by two
people associated with the Santa Fe Institute: John Casti, a mathema-
tician who has written numerous popular books on science and math-
ematics, and Joseph Traub, a theoretical computer scientist, who is a
professor at Columbia University.1
I had come to the meeting in large part to meet Gregory Chaitin, a
mathematician and computer scientist at IBM who had devoted him-
self since the early 1960s to exploring and extending Gödel’s theo-
rem through what he called algorithmic information theory. Chaitin
had come close to proving, as far as I could tell, that a mathematical
theory of complexity was not possible. Before meeting Chaitin, I had
pictured him as a gnarled, sour-looking man with hairy ears and an
eastern European accent; after all, a kind of old-world philosophical
angst suffused his research on the limits of mathematics. But Chaitin
in no way resembled my internal model. Stout, bald, and boyish, he
233

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wore neobeatnik attire: baggy white pants with an elastic waistband,

black T-shirt adorned with a Matisse sketch, sandals over socks. He
was younger than I expected; I learned later that his first paper had
been published when he was only 18, in 1965. His hyperactivity made
him seem younger still. His speech was invariably either accelerating,
as he became carried away by his words, or decelerating, perhaps as he
realized he was approaching the limits of human comprehension and
ought to slow down. Plots of the velocity and volume of his speech
would form overlapping sine waves. Struggling to articulate an idea,
he squeezed his eyes shut and, with an agonized grimace, tipped his
head forward, as if trying to dislodge the words from his sticky brain.2
The participants sat around a long, rectangular table in a long, rect-
angular room with a chalkboard at one end. Casti opened the meeting
by asking, “Is the real world too complex for us to understand?” Kurt
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Casti noted, implied that some math-
ematical descriptions would always be incomplete; some aspects of the
world would always resist description. Alan Turing, similarly, showed
that many mathematical propositions are “undecidable”; that is, one
cannot determine whether the propositions are true or false in a finite
amount of time. Traub tried to rephrase Casti’s question in a more pos-
itive light: Can we know what we cannot know? Can we prove there are
limits to science, in the same way that Gödel and Turing proved there
are limits to mathematics and computation?
The only way to construct such a proof, announced E. Atlee Jack-
son, a physicist from the University of Illinois, would be to construct a
formal representation of science. To show how difficult that task would
be, Jackson leaped up to the chalkboard and scribbled an extremely
complicated flowchart that supposedly represented science. When
his audience stared at him blankly, Jackson fell back on aphorisms. To
determine whether science has limits, he said, you have to define sci-
ence, and as soon as you define science you impose a limit on it. On the
other hand, he added, “I can’t define my wife, but I can recognize her.”
Rewarded with polite chuckles, Jackson retreated to his seat.
The antichaos theorist Stuart Kauffman kept slipping into the meet-
ing, delivering Zen-like minilectures, and then slipping out again.
During one appearance, he reminded us that our very survival depends

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on our ability to classify the world. But the world doesn’t come already
packaged into premade categories. We can “carve it up,” or classify
it, in many ways. In order to classify phenomena, moreover, we must
throw some information away. Kauffman concluded with this incanta-
tion: “To be is to classify is to act, all of which means throwing away
information. So just the act of knowing requires ignorance.” His audi-
ence looked simultaneously impressed and annoyed.
Ralph Gomory then said a few words. A former vice president of
research at IBM, Gomory headed the Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic
organization that sponsored science-related projects, including the Santa
Fe workshop. When listening to someone else speak, and even when
speaking himself, Gomory wore an expression of deep incredulity. He
tilted his head forward, as if peering over invisible bifocals, while knit-
ting his thick black eyebrows together and wrinkling his brow.
Gomory explained that he had decided to support the workshop
because he had long felt that the educational system placed too much
emphasis on what was known and too little on what was unknown
or even unknowable. Most people aren’t even aware of how little is
known, Gomory said, because the educational system presents such a
seamless, noncontradictory view of reality. Everything we know about
the ancient Persian Wars, for example, derives from a single source,
Herodotus. How do we know whether Herodotus was an accurate
reporter? Maybe he had incomplete or inaccurate information! Maybe
he was biased or making things up! We will never know!
Later Gomory remarked that a Martian, by observing humans play-
ing 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 Kauff-
man speculated on how Wittgenstein might have responded to it.
Wittgenstein would have “suffered egregiously,” Kauffman said, over
the possibility that the chess players might make a move—deliberately
or not—that broke the rules. 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.

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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.”
Patrick Suppes, a philosopher from Stanford, kept interrupting the
discussion to point out that Kant, in his discussion of antinomies, antic-
ipated virtually all the problems they were wrestling with at the work-
shop. 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. (No doubt they did not want to
be reminded that for the most part they were merely restating, with
newfangled jargon and metaphors, arguments set forth long ago not
only by Kant but even by the ancient Greeks.)
Chaitin, spitting out words like a machine gun, dragged the conver-
sation back to Gödel. The incompleteness theorem, Chaitin asserted,
far from being a paradoxical curiosity with little relevance to the prog-
ress of mathematics or science, as some mathematicians like to believe,
is only one of a set of profound problems posed by mathematics. “Some
people dismiss Gödel’s results as being bizarre, pathological, deriving
from a self-referential paradox,” Chaitin said. “Gödel himself some-
times worried that this was just a paradox created by our use of words.
Now, incompleteness seems so natural, you can ask how we mathema-
ticians can do anything!”
Chaitin’s own work on algorithmic information theory suggested
that as mathematicians address increasingly complex problems, they
will have to keep adding to their base of axioms; to know more, in
other words, one must assume more. As a result, Chaitin contended,
mathematics is bound to become an increasingly experimental science
with less of a claim to absolute truth. Chaitin had also established that
just as nature seems to harbor fundamental uncertainty and random-
ness, so does mathematics. He had recently found an algebraic equation
that might have an infinite or finite number of solutions, depending on
the value of the variables in the equation.
“Normally you assume that if people think something is true, it’s
true for a reason. In mathematics a reason is called a proof, and the
job of a mathematician is to find the proof, the reasons, deductions

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from axioms or accepted principles. Now what I found is mathematical

truths that are true for no reason at all. They are true accidentally or at
random. And that’s why we will never find the truth: because there is
no truth, there is no reason these are true.”
Chaitin had also proved that one can never determine whether
any given computer program is the most succinct possible method of
solving a problem; it is always possible that more concise programs
exist. (The implication of this finding, others have pointed out, is that
physicists can never be sure that they have found a truly final theory,
one that represents the most compact possible description of nature.)
Chaitin obviously reveled in being the bearer of such dire tidings. He
seemed intoxicated at the thought that he was tearing down the temple
of mathematics and science.
Casti retorted that mathematicians might be able to avoid Gödel
effects by employing simple formal systems—such as an arithmetic
consisting solely of addition and subtraction (and not multiplication
and division). Nondeductive systems of reasoning, Casti added, might
also sidestep the problem; Gödel’s theorem might turn out to be a red
herring when it came to natural science.
Francisco Antonio “Chico” Doria, a Brazilian mathematician, also
found Chaitin’s analysis too pessimistic. The mathematical hurdles
identified by Gödel, Doria contended, far from bringing mathematics
to an end, could enrich it. For example, Doria suggested, when math-
ematicians encounter an apparently undecidable proposition, they can
create two new branches of mathematics, one that assumes the prop-
osition is true, and one that assumes it is false. “Instead of a limit of
knowledge,” Doria concluded, “we may have a wealth of knowledge.”
Listening to Doria, Chaitin rolled his eyes. Suppes also seemed
doubtful. Arbitrarily assuming that undecidable mathematical state-
ments are true or false, Suppes drawled, has “all the advantages of theft
over honest toil.” He attributed his quip to someone famous.
The conversation kept veering—as if to a strange attractor—to one
of the favorite topics of philosophically inclined mathematicians and
physicists: the continuum problem. Is reality smooth or lumpy? Ana-
log or digital? Is the world best described by the so-called real num-
bers, which can be diced into infinitely fine gradations, or by whole

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numbers? Physicists from Newton through Einstein have relied on real

numbers. But quantum mechanics suggests that matter and energy
and perhaps even time and space (at extremely small scales) come in
discrete, indivisible lumps. Computers, too, represent everything as
integers: ones and zeros.
Chaitin denounced real numbers as “nonsense.” Their precision is a
sham, given the noisiness, the fuzziness, of the world. “Physicists know
that every equation is a lie,” he declared.
Someone parried with a quote from Picasso: “Art is a lie that helps
us see the truth.”
Of course real numbers are abstractions, Traub chimed in, but they
are very powerful, effective abstractions. Of course there is always
noise, but there are ways to deal with noise in a real-number system.
A mathematical model captures the essence of something. No one pre-
tends it captures the entire phenomenon.
Suppes strode to the chalkboard and scribbled some equations that,
he implied, might eliminate the continuum problem once and for all.
His audience looked unimpressed. (This, I thought, is the major prob-
lem of philosophy: no one really wants to see philosophical problems
solved, because then we will have nothing to talk about.)
Other participants noted that scientists face obstacles to knowledge
much less abstract than incompleteness, undecidability, the continuum,
and so on. One was Piet Hut, a Dutch astrophysicist from the Institute
for Advanced Study. He said that with the help of powerful statistical
methods and computers, he and his fellow astrophysicists had learned
how to overcome the infamous N-body problem, which holds that it is
impossible to predict the course of three or more gravitationally inter-
acting bodies. Computers could now simulate the evolution of whole
galaxies, containing billions of stars, and even clusters of galaxies.
But, Hut added, astronomers face other limits that seem insur-
mountable. They have only one universe to study, so they cannot do
controlled experiments on it. Cosmologists can only trace the history
of the universe so far back, and they can never know what preceded
the big bang or what exists beyond the borders of our universe, if any-
thing. Moreover, particle physicists may have a hard time testing theo-
ries (such as those involving superstrings) that combine gravity and all

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the other forces of nature, because the effects only become apparent at
distance scales and energies that are beyond the range of any conceiv-
able accelerator.
A similarly pessimistic note was sounded by Rolf Landauer, a phys-
icist at IBM and a pioneer in the study of the physical limits of compu-
tation. Landauer spoke with a German-accented growl that sharpened
the edge of his sardonic sense of humor. When one speaker kept stand-
ing in the way of his own viewgraphs, Landauer snapped, “Your talk
may be transparent, but you are not!”
Landauer contended that scientists could not count on computers to
keep growing in power indefinitely. He granted that many of the sup-
posed physical constraints once thought to be imposed on computation
by the second law of thermodynamics or quantum mechanics had been
shown to be spurious. On the other hand, the costs of computer-man-
ufacturing plants were rising so fast that they threatened to bring to
a halt the decades-long decline in computation prices. Landauer also
doubted whether computer designers would soon harness exotic quan-
tum effects such as superposition—the ability of a quantum entity to
exist in more than one state at the same time—and thereby transcend
the capabilities of current computers, as some theorists had proposed.
Such systems would be so sensitive to minute quantum-level disrup-
tions that they would be effectively useless, Landauer argued.
Brian Arthur, a ruddy-faced economist at the Santa Fe Institute who
spoke with a lilting Irish accent, steered the conversation toward the
limits of economics. In trying to predict how the stock market will per-
form, he said, an investor must make guesses about how others will
guess about how others will guess—and so on ad infinitum. The eco-
nomic realm is inherently subjective, psychological, and hence unpre-
dictable; indeterminacy “percolates through the system.” As soon as
economists try to simplify their models—by assuming that investors
can have perfect knowledge of the market or that prices represent some
true value—the models become unrealistic; two economists gifted
with infinite intelligence will come to different conclusions about the
same system. All economists can really do is say, “Well, it could be this,
it could be that.” On the other hand, Arthur added, “if you’ve made
money in the markets all the economists will listen to you.”

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Kauffman then repeated what Arthur had just said but in a more
abstract way. People are “agents” who must continually adjust their
“internal models” in response to the perceived adjustments of the
internal models of other agents, thus creating a “complex, coadapting
landscape.”
Landauer, scowling, interjected that there were much more obvi-
ous reasons that economic phenomena were impossible to predict than
these subjective factors. AIDS, third-world wars, even the diarrhea of
the chief analyst of a large mutual fund can have a profound effect on
the economy, he said. What model can possibly predict such events?
Roger Shepard, a psychologist from Stanford who had been listen-
ing in silence, finally piped up. Shepard seemed faintly melancholy. His
apparent mood may have been an illusion engendered by his droopy,
ivory-hued mustache—or a very real by-product of his obsession with
unanswerable questions. Shepard admitted he had come here in part
to learn whether scientific or mathematical truths were discovered or
invented. He had also been thinking a good deal lately about where
scientific knowledge really existed and had concluded that it could not
exist independently of the human mind. A textbook on physics, with-
out a human to read it, is just paper and ink spots. But that raised what
Shepard considered to be a disturbing issue. Science appears to be get-
ting more and more complicated and thus more and more difficult to
understand. It seems quite possible that in the future some scientific
theories, such as a theory of the human mind, will be too complex for
even the most brilliant scientist to understand. “Maybe I’m old-fash-
ioned,” Shepard said, but if a theory is so complicated that no single
person can understand it, what satisfaction can we take in it?
Traub, too, was troubled by this issue. We humans may believe
Occam’s razor—which holds that the best theories are the simplest—
because these are the only theories our puny brains can comprehend.
But maybe computers won’t be subject to this limitation, Traub added.
Maybe computers will be the scientists of the future.
In biology, someone remarked gloomily, “Occam’s razor cuts your
throat.”
Gomory noted that the task of science was to find those niches of
reality that lend themselves to understanding, given that the world is

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basically unintelligible. One way to make the world more comprehen-

sible, Gomory suggested, is to make it more artificial, since artificial
systems tend to be more comprehensible and predictable than natural
ones. For example, to make weather forecasting easier, society might
encase the world in a transparent dome.
Everyone stared at Gomory for a moment. Then Traub remarked, “I
think what Ralph is saying is that it’s easier to create the future than to
predict it.”
As the meeting progressed, Otto Rössler made more and more
sense. Or was everybody else making less? Rössler was a theoretical
biochemist and chaos theorist from the University of Tübingen, Ger-
many, who in the mid-1970s had discovered a mathematical monster
called the Rössler attractor. His white hair appeared permanently
disheveled, as though he had just awakened from a trance. He had
the exaggerated features of a marionette: startled eyes, a protuberant
lower lip, and a bulbous chin framed by deep, vertical creases. Neither
I nor, I suspected, anyone else could quite understand him, but every-
one leaned toward him when he issued his whispery, stammered pro-
nouncements, as if he were an oracle.
Rössler saw two primary limits to knowledge. One was inaccessibil-
ity. We can never be sure about the origin of the universe, for example,
because it is so distant from us both in space and in time. The other
limit, distortion, was much worse. The world can deceive us into
thinking we understand it when actually we do not. If we could stand
outside the universe, Rossler suggested, we would know the limits
to our knowledge; but we are trapped inside the universe, and so our
knowledge of our own limits must remain incomplete.
Rössler raised some questions that he said were first posed in the
eighteenth century by a physicist named Roger Boscovich. Can one
determine, if one is on a planet with an utterly dark sky, if the planet
is rotating? If the earth is breathing, but we are breathing too, in syn-
chrony with it, can we tell that it is breathing? Probably not, according
to Rössler. “There exist situations where you are unable to find out
about the truth from the inside,” he said. On the other hand, he added,
simply by posing thought experiments like these, we might find a way
to transcend the limits of perception.

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The more Rössler spoke, the more I began to feel an affinity for his
ideas. During one of the breaks, I asked if he felt that intelligent com-
puters might transcend the limits of human science. He shook his head
adamantly. “No, that’s not possible,” he replied in an intense whisper. “I
would bet on dolphins, or sperm whales. They have the biggest brains
on the earth.” Rössler informed me that when one sperm whale is shot
by whalers, others sometimes crowd around it, forming a starlike pat-
tern, and are themselves killed. “Usually people think that is just blind
instinct,” Rössler said. “In reality it’s their way of showing humankind
that they are much higher evolved than humans.” I just nodded.
Toward the end of the meeting, Traub proposed that everyone split
up into focus groups to discuss the limits of specific fields: physics,
mathematics, biology, social sciences. A social scientist announced that
he didn’t want to be in the social science group; he had come specif-
ically to talk to, and learn from, people outside his field. His remark
provoked a few me-toos from others. Someone pointed out that if
everyone felt the way the social scientist did, there would be no social
scientists in the social science section, biologists in the biology section,
and so on. Traub said his colleagues could split up any way they chose;
he was just making a suggestion. The next question was, where would
the different groups meet? Someone proposed that they disperse to dif-
ferent rooms, so that certain loud talkers wouldn’t disturb the other
groups. Everyone looked at Chaitin. His promise to be quiet was met
with jeers. More discussion. Landauer remarked that there was such a
thing as too much intelligence applied to a simple problem. Just when
everything seemed hopeless, groups somehow, spontaneously, formed,
more or less following Traub’s initial suggestion, and wandered off to
different locations. This was, I thought, an impressive display of what
the Santa Fe’ers like to call self-organization, or order out of chaos; per-
haps life began this way.
I tagged along with the mathematics group, which included Chai-
tin, Landauer, Shepard, Doria, and Rössler. We found an unoccupied
lounge with a chalkboard. For several minutes, everyone talked about
what they should talk about. Then Rössler went to the chalkboard and
scribbled down a recently discovered formula that gives rise to a fan-
tastically complicated mathematical object, “the mother of all fractals.”

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Landauer asked Rössler, politely, what this fractal had to do with any-
thing. It “soothes the brain,” Rossler replied. It also fed his hope that
physicists might be able to describe reality with these kinds of chaotic
but classical formulas and thus dispense with the terrible uncertainties
of quantum mechanics.
Shepard interjected that he had joined the mathematics subgroup
because he wanted the mathematicians to tell him whether mathemat-
ical truths were invented or discovered. Everyone talked about that for
a while without coming to a decision. Chaitin said that most mathema-
ticians leaned toward the discovery view, but Einstein was apparently
an inventionist.
Chaitin, during a lull, once again proposed that mathematics was
dead. In the future, mathematicians would be able to solve problems
only with enormous computer calculations that would be too complex
for anyone to understand.
Everyone seemed fed up with Chaitin. Mathematics works, Lan-
dauer snarled. It helps scientists solve problems. Obviously it’s not dead.
Others piled on, accusing Chaitin of exaggeration.
Chaitin, for the first time, appeared chastened. His pessimism, he
conjectured, might be linked to the fact that he had eaten too many
bagels that morning. He remarked that the pessimism of the German
philosopher Schopenhauer, who advocated suicide as the supreme
expression of existential freedom, had been traced to his bad liver.
Steen Rasmussen, a physicist and Santa Fe regular, reiterated the
familiar argument of chaoplexologists that traditional reductionist
methods cannot solve complex problems. Science needs a “new New-
ton,” he said, someone who can invent a whole new conceptual and
mathematical approach to complexity.
Landauer scolded Rasmussen for succumbing to the “disease” afflict-
ing many Santa Fe researchers, the belief in some “great religious insight”
that would instantaneously solve all their problems. Science doesn’t work
that way; different problems require different tools and techniques.
Rössler unburdened himself of a long, tangled soliloquy whose mes-
sage seemed to be that our brains represent only one solution to the
multiple problems posed by the world. Evolution could have created
other brains representing other solutions.

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Landauer, who was strangely protective of Rössler, gently asked

him whether he thought we might be able to alter our brains in order
to gain more knowledge. “There is one way,” Rössler replied, staring
at an invisible object on the table in front of him. “To become insane.”
There was a moment of awkward silence. Then an argument
erupted over whether complexity was a useful term or had been so
loosely defined that it had become meaningless and should be aban-
doned. Even if terms such as chaos and complexity have little scientific
meaning, Chaitin said, they are still useful for public relations pur-
poses. Traub noted that the physicist Seth Lloyd had counted at least 31
different definitions for complexity.
“We go from complexity to perplexity,” Doria intoned. Everyone
nodded and complimented him on his aphorism.
When the focus groups reconvened, Traub asked each person to
propose answers to two questions: What have we learned? What ques-
tions remain unresolved?
Chaitin spouted questions: What are the limits of metamathemat-
ics, and metametamathematics? What are the limits to our ability to
know limits? And are there limits to that knowledge? Can we simulate
the whole universe, and if so can we make one better than God did?
“And can we move there?” someone quipped.
Lee Segel, an Israeli biologist, warned them to be careful how they
discussed these issues publicly, lest they contribute to the growing
antiscience mood of society. After all, he continued, too many people
think Einstein showed that everything is relative and Gödel proved
that nothing can be proved. Everyone nodded solemnly. Science has
a fractal structure, Segel added confidently, and there is obviously no
limit to the things we can investigate. Everyone nodded again.
Rössler proposed a neologism for what he and his colleagues were
doing: limitology. Limitology is a postmodern enterprise, Rössler said,
an outgrowth of this century’s ongoing effort to deconstruct reality.
Of course, Kant, too, wrestled with the limits of knowledge. So did
Maxwell, the great Scottish physicist. Maxwell imagined that a micro-
scopic homunculus, or demon, might help us to beat the second law
of thermodynamics. But the real lesson of Maxwell’s demon, Rossler
said, is that we are in a thermodynamic prison, one that we can never

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escape. When we gather information from the world, we contribute to

its entropy and hence its unknowability. We are descending inexorably
toward heat death. “The whole topic of the limits of science is a topic of
demons,” Rössler hissed. “We are fighting with demons.”

A Meeting on the Hudson

E veryone agreed that the workshop had been productive; several

participants told Joseph Traub, one of the co-organizers, that it was
the best meeting they had ever attended. More than a year later, Ralph
Gomory agreed to provide funds from the Sloan Foundation for future
gatherings at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere. Piet Hut, Otto
Rössler, Roger Shepard, and Robert Rosen, a Canadian biologist who
was also at the workshop, banded together to write a book on the lim-
its of science. I was not entirely surprised to learn that they intended
to argue that science had a glorious future. “A defeatist attitude isn’t
going to get us anywhere,” Shepard told me sternly.
In my eyes, the meeting in Santa Fe merely rehashed, in haphazard
form, many of the same arguments that Gunther Stent had set forth so
elegantly a quarter of a century earlier. Like Stent, those at the work-
shop had acknowledged that science faced physical, social, and cogni-
tive limits. But these truth seekers seemed unable to take their own
arguments to their logical conclusion, as Stent had. None could accept
that science—defined as the search for intelligible, empirically sub-
stantiated truths about nature—might soon end or even have ended
already. None, I thought, except for Gregory Chaitin. Of all the speak-
ers at the meeting, he had seemed most willing to recognize that sci-
ence and mathematics might be passing beyond our cognitive limits.
It was therefore with high hopes that, several months after the
meeting in Santa Fe, I arranged to meet Chaitin again in Cold Spring,
New York, a village on the Hudson River near our respective homes.
We shared coffee and scones at a cafe on the town’s miniature main
street and then strolled down to a pier beside the river. Storm King
Mountain, and the great fortress of West Point, loomed on the river’s
far side. Gulls circled overhead.3

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When I told Chaitin I was writing a book about the possibility that
science might be entering an era of diminishing returns, I expected
empathy, but he snorted in disbelief. “Is that true? I hope it’s not true,
because it would be pretty damn boring if it were true. Every period
seems to think that. Who was it—Lord Kelvin?—who said that all we
have to do is to measure a few more decimal points?” When I men-
tioned that historians could find no evidence that Kelvin ever made such
a remark, Chaitin shrugged. “Look at all the things we don’t know! We
don’t know how the brain works. We don’t know what memory is. We
don’t know what aging is.” If we can figure out why we age, maybe we
can figure out how to stop the aging process, Chaitin said.
I reminded Chaitin that in Santa Fe he had suggested that mathe-
matics and even science as a whole might be approaching their ulti-
mate limits. “I was just trying to wake people up,” he replied. “The
audience was dead.” His own work, he emphasized, represented a
beginning, not an end. “I may have a negative result, but I read it as
telling you how to go about finding new mathematical truths: Behave
more like a physicist does. Do it more empirically. Add new axioms.”
Chaitin said he could not pursue his work on the limits of math-
ematics if he was not an optimist. “Pessimists would look at Gödel
and they would start to drink scotch until they died of cirrhosis of the
liver.” Although the human condition might be as much “a mess” as it
was thousands of years ago, there was no denying the enormous prog-
ress that we had made in science and technology. “When I was a child
everybody talked about Gödel with mystical respect. This was almost
incomprehensible, certainly profound. And I wanted to understand
what the hell he was saying and why it was true. And I succeeded! So
that makes me optimistic. I think we know very little, and I hope we
know very little, because then it will be much more fun.”
Chaitin recalled that he had once gotten into an argument with the
physicist Richard Feynman about the limits of science. The incident
occurred at a conference on computation held in the late 1980s, shortly
before Feynman died. When Chaitin opined that science was just
beginning, Feynman became furious. “He said we already know the
physics of practically everything in everyday life, and anything that’s
left over is not going to be relevant.”

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Feynman’s attitude had puzzled Chaitin until he learned that Feyn-

man had been suffering from cancer. “For Feynman to do all the great
physics he did, he couldn’t have had such a pessimistic attitude. But at
the end of his life, when the poor guy knows he doesn’t have long to
live, then I can understand why he has this view,” Chaitin said. “If a
guy is dying he doesn’t want to miss out on all the fun. He doesn’t want
to feel that there’s some wonderful theory, some wonderful knowledge
of the physical world, that he has no idea of, and he’s not going to ever
see it.”
I asked Chaitin if he had heard of The Coming of the Golden Age. When
Chaitin shook his head, I summarized Stent’s end-of-science argument.
Chaitin rolled his eyes and asked how old Stent was when he wrote
the book. In his midthirties, I replied. “Maybe he had a liver problem,”
Chaitin responded. “Maybe his girlfriend had ditched him. Usually
men start writing this when they find they can’t make love to their
wife as vigorously as they used to or something.” Actually, I said, Stent
wrote the book in Berkeley during the 1960s. “Oh, well! Then I under-
stand!” Chaitin exulted.
Chaitin was unimpressed with Stent’s argument that humanity, for
the most part, does not care about science for its own sake. “It never
did,” Chaitin retorted. “The people who did good scientific work were
always a small group of lunatics. Everyone else is concerned with sur-
viving, paying their mortgage. The children are sick, the wife needs
money or she’s going to run off with someone else.” He chortled.
“Remember that quantum mechanics, which is such a masterpiece,
was done by people as a hobby in the 1920s when there was no fund-
ing. Quantum mechanics and nuclear physics were like Greek poetry.”
It is fortunate, Chaitin said, that only a few people dedicate them-
selves to the pursuit of great questions. “If everybody were trying to
understand the limits of mathematics or do great paintings, it would be
a catastrophe! The plumbing wouldn’t work! The electricity wouldn’t
work! Buildings would fall down! I mean, if everyone wanted to do
great art or deep science, the world wouldn’t function! It’s good that
there are only a few of us!”
Chaitin granted that particle physics seemed to have stalled because
of the huge costs of accelerators. But he believed that telescopes might

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still provide breakthroughs in physics in years to come by revealing

the violent processes generated by neutron stars, black holes, and other
exotica. But wasn’t it possible, I asked, that all these new observations,
rather than leading to more accurate and coherent theories of phys-
ics and cosmology, might render attempts to construct such theories
futile? His own work in mathematics—which showed that as one
addresses more complex phenomena one must keep expanding one’s
base of axioms—seemed to imply as much. “Aha, they’ll become more
like biology? You may be right, but we’ll be knowing more about the
world,” Chaitin replied.
Advances in science and technology have also reduced the costs of
equipment in many fields, Chaitin asserted. “The kind of equipment
you can buy now for very little money in many fields is amazing.” Com-
puters had been vital to his own work. Chaitin had recently invented a
new programming language that made his ideas about the limits of
mathematics much more concrete. He had distributed his book, The
Limits of Mathematics, on the Internet. “Internet is connecting people
and making possible things that didn’t happen before.”
In the future, Chaitin predicted, humans may be able to boost their
intelligence through genetic engineering, or by downloading them-
selves into computers. “Our descendants may be as intelligent in
comparison to us as we are compared to ants.” On the other hand, “if
everybody starts taking heroin and gets depressed and watches TV all
the time, you know we’re not going to get very far.” Chaitin paused.
“Human beings have a future if they deserve to have a future!” he
burst out. “If they get depressed then they don’t have a future!”
Of course, it is always possible that science will end because civiliza-
tion ends, Chaitin added. Waving his hand at the rocky hills across the
river from us, he pointed out that glaciers had cut this channel during
the last ice age. Only 10,000 years ago, ice encased this entire region.
The next ice age could destroy civilization. But even then, he said,
other beings in the universe might still carry on the quest for knowl-
edge. “I don’t know if there are other living beings. I hope so, because
it’s likely they won’t make a mess of things.”
I opened my mouth, intending to grant the possibility that in the
future science might be carried forward by intelligent machines. But

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Chaitin, who had begun talking faster and faster and was in a kind of
frenzy, cut me off. “You’re a pessimist! You’re a pessimist!” he shouted.
He reminded me of something 1 had told him earlier in our conversa-
tion, that my wife was pregnant with our second child. “You conceived
a child! You’ve gotta be pretty optimistic! You should be optimistic! I
should be pessimistic! I’m older than you are! I don’t have children!
IBM is doing badly!” A plane droned, gulls shrieked, and Chaitin’s
howls of laughter fled, unechoed, across the mighty Hudson.

The End of History

A ctually, Chaitin’s own career fits rather nicely into Gunther Stent’s
diminishing-returns scenario. Algorithmic information theory rep-
resents not a genuinely new development but an extension of Gödel’s
insight. Chaitin’s work also supports Stent’s contention that science, in
its attempt to plumb ever-more-complex phenomena, is outrunning
our innate axioms. Stent left several loopholes open in his gloomy
prophecy. Society might become so wealthy that it would pay for even
the most whimsical scientific experiments—particle accelerators that
girdle the globe!—without regard for cost. Scientists might also achieve
some enormous breakthrough, such as a faster-than-light transporta-
tion system or intelligence-enhancing genetic-engineering techniques,
that would enable us to transcend our physical and cognitive limits. I
would add one further possibility to this list. Scientists might discover
extraterrestrial life, creating a glorious new era in comparative biology.
Barring such outcomes, science may generate increasingly incremental
returns and gradually grind to a halt.
What, then, will become of humanity? In Golden Age, Stent sug-
gested that science, before it ends, may at least deliver us from our most
pressing social problems, such as poverty and disease and even conflict
between states. The future will be peaceful and comfortable, if boring.
Most humans will dedicate themselves to the pursuit of pleasure. In
1992, Francis Fukuyama set forth a rather different vision of the future
in The End of History.4 Fukuyama, a political theorist who worked in
the State Department during the Bush administration, defined history

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as the human struggle to find the most sensible—or least noxious—

political system. By the twentieth century, capitalist liberal democracy,
which, according to Fukuyama, had always been the best choice, had
only one serious contender: Marxist socialism. After the collapse of the
Soviet Union in the late 1980s, capitalist liberal democracy stood alone
in the ring, battered but victorious. History was over.
Fukuyama went on to consider the profound questions raised by his
thesis. Now that the age of political struggle has ended, what will we do
next? What are we here for? What is the point of humanity? Fukuyama
did not supply an answer so much as a rhetorical shrug. Freedom and
prosperity, he fretted, might not be enough to satisfy our Nietzschean
will to power and our need for constant “self-overcoming.” Without
great ideological struggles to occupy us, we humans might manufac-
ture wars simply to give ourselves something to do.
Fukuyama did not overlook the role of science in human history.
Far from it. His thesis required that history have a direction, that it be
progressive, and science, he argued, provided this direction. Science
had been vital to the growth of modern nation-states, for which science
served as a means to military and economic power. But Fukuyama did
not even consider the possibility that science might also provide post-
historical humanity with a common purpose, a goal, one that would
encourage cooperation rather than conflict.
Hoping to learn the reason for Fukuyama’s omission, I called him
in January 1994 at the Rand Corporation, where he had obtained a job
after The End of History became a best-seller. He answered with the
wariness of someone accustomed to, and not amused by, kooks. At
first, he misunderstood my question; he thought I was asking whether
science could help us make moral and political choices in the posthis-
torical era rather than serve as an end in itself. The lesson of contem-
porary philosophy, Fukuyama lectured me sternly, is that science is
morally neutral, at best. In fact, scientific progress, if unaccompanied
by moral progress among societies or individuals, “can leave you worse
off than you were without it.”
When Fukuyama finally realized what I was suggesting—that sci-
ence might provide a kind of unifying theme or purpose for civiliza-
tion—his tone became even more condescending. Yes, a few people

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had written him letters addressing that theme. “I think they were
space-travel buffs,” he snickered. “They said, ‘Well, you know, if we
don’t have ideological wars to fight we can always fight nature in a cer-
tain sense by pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and conquering
the solar system.’”
He emitted another scornful little chuckle. So you don’t take these
predictions seriously? I asked. “No, not really,” he said wearily. Trying
to goad something further out of him, I revealed that many prominent
scientists and philosophers—not just fans of Star Trek—believed that
science, the quest for pure knowledge, represented the destiny of man-
kind. “Hunh,” Fukuyama replied, as though he was no longer listen-
ing to me but had reentered that delightful tract by Hegel he had been
perusing before I called. I signed off.
Without even giving it much thought, Fukuyama had reached the
same conclusion that Stent had put forward in The Coming of the Golden
Age. From very different perspectives, both saw that science was less a
byproduct of our will to know than of our will to power. Fukuyama’s
bored rejection of a future dedicated to science spoke volumes. The
vast majority of humans, including not only the ignorant masses but
also highbrow types such as Fukuyama, find scientific knowledge
mildly interesting, at best, and certainly not worthy of serving as the
goal of all humankind. Whatever the long-term destiny of Homo sapi-
ens turns out to be—Fukuyama’s eternal warfare or Stent’s eternal
hedonism, or, more likely, some mixture of the two—it will probably
not be the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

The Star Trek Factor

S cience has already bequeathed us an extraordinary legacy. It has

allowed us to map out the entire universe, from quarks to quasars,
and to discern the basic laws governing the physical and biological
realms. It has yielded a true myth of creation. Through the application
of scientific knowledge, we have gained awesome power over nature.
But science has left us still plagued with poverty, hatred, violence, dis-
ease, and with unanswered questions, notably: Were we inevitable,

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or just a fluke? Also, scientific knowledge, far from making our lives
meaningful, has forced us to confront the pointlessness (as Steven
Weinberg likes to put it) of existence.
The demise of science will surely exacerbate our spiritual crisis. The
cliché is inescapable. In science as in all else, the journey is what mat-
ters, not the destination. Science initially awakens our sense of won-
der as it reveals some new, intelligible intricacy of the world. But any
discovery becomes, eventually, anti-climactic. Let’s grant that a mir-
acle occurs and physicists somehow confirm that all of reality stems
from the wrigglings of loops of energy in 10-dimensional hyperspace.
How long can physicists, or the rest of us, be astounded by that find-
ing? If this truth is final, in the sense that it precludes all other pos-
sibilities, the quandary is all the more troubling. This problem may
explain why even seekers such as Gregory Chaitin—whose own work
implies otherwise—find it hard to accept that pure science, the great
quest for knowledge, is finite, let alone already over. But the faith that
science will continue forever is just that, a faith, one that stems from
our inborn vanity. We cannot help but believe that we are actors in an
epic drama dreamed up by some cosmic playwright, one with a taste
for suspense, tragedy, comedy, and—ultimately, we hope—happy end-
ings. The happiest ending would be no ending.
If my experience is any guide, even people with only a casual interest
in science will find it hard to accept that science’s days are numbered.
It is easy to understand why. We are drenched in progress, real and
artificial. Every year we have smaller, faster computers, sleeker cars,
more channels on our televisions. Our views of progress are further
distorted by what could be called the Star Trek factor. How can science
be approaching a culmination when we haven’t invented spaceships
that travel at warp speed yet? Or when we haven’t acquired the fantastic
psychic powers—enhanced by both genetic engineering and electronic
prosthetics—described in cyberpunk fiction? Science itself—or, rather,
ironic science—helps to propagate these fictions. One can find discus-
sions of time travel, teleportation, and parallel universes in reputable,
peer-reviewed physics journals. And at least one Nobel laureate in phys-
ics, Brian Josephson, has declared that physics will never be complete
until it can account for extrasensory perception and telekinesis.5

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But Brian Josephson long ago abandoned real physics for mysticism
and the occult. If you truly believe in modern physics, you are unlikely
to give much credence to ESP or spaceships that can travel faster than
light. You are also unlikely to believe, as both Roger Penrose and
superstring theorists do, that physicists will ever find and empirically
validate a unified theory, one that fuses general relativity and quan-
tum mechanics. The phenomena posited by unified theories unfold in
a microrealm that is even more distant in its way—even further from
the reach of any conceivable human experiment—than the edge of our
universe. There is only one scientific fantasy that seems to have any
likelihood of being fulfilled. Perhaps some day we will create machines
that can transcend our physical, social, and cognitive limits and carry
on the quest for knowledge without us.

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 CHAPTER TEN
SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY,
OR THE END OF MACHINE SCIENCE

H
umanity, Nietzsche told us, is just a stepping stone, a bridge lead-
ing to the Superman. If Nietzsche were alive today, he would
surely entertain the notion that the Superman might be made not
of flesh and blood, but of silicon. As human science wanes, those who
hope that the quest for knowledge will continue must put their faith not
in Homo sapiens, but in intelligent machines. Only machines can over-
come our physical and cognitive weaknesses—and our indifference.
There is an odd little subculture within science whose members spec-
ulate about how intelligence might evolve when or if it sheds its mortal
coil. Participants are not practicing science, of course, but ironic science,
or wishful thinking. They are concerned not with what the world is, but
with what it might be or should be centuries or millennia or eons hence.
The literature of this field—call it scientific theology—may nonetheless
provide fresh perspectives of some age-old philosophical and even theo-
logical questions: What would we do if we could do anything? What is
the point of life? What are the ultimate limits of knowledge? Is suffering
a necessary component of existence, or can we attain eternal bliss?
One of the first modern practitioners of scientific theology was the
British chemist (and Marxist) J. D. Bernal. In his 1929 book, The World,
the Flesh and the Devil, Bernal argued that science would soon give us
the power to direct our own evolution. At first, Bernal suggested, we
might try to improve ourselves through genetic engineering, but even-
tually we would abandon the bodies bequeathed us by natural selec-
tion for more efficient designs:
254

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Bit by bit, the heritage in the direct line of mankind—the heri-

tage of the original life emerging on the face of the world—would
dwindle, and in the end disappear effectively, being preserved
perhaps as some curious relic, while the new life which conserves
none of the substance and all of the spirit of the old would take
its place and continue its development. Such a change would be
as important as that in which life first appeared on the earth’s
surface and might be as gradual and imperceptible. Finally,
consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has
become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism,
becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation,
and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That
may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.1

Hans Moravec’s Squabbling Mind Children

L ike others of his ilk, Bernal became afflicted with a peculiar lack of
imagination, or of nerve, when considering the end stage of the evo-
lution of intelligence. Bernal’s descendants, such as Hans Moravec, a
robotics engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, have tried to over-
come this problem, with mixed results. Moravec is a cheerful, even
giddy man; he seems to be literally intoxicated by his own ideas. As
he unveiled his visions of the future during a telephone conversation,
he emitted an almost continuous, breathless giggle, whose intensity
seemed proportional to the preposterousness of what he was saying.
Moravec prefaced his remarks by asserting that science desperately
needed new goals. “Most of the things that have been accomplished in
this century were really nineteenth-century ideas,” he said. “It’s time
for fresh ideas now.” What goal could be more thrilling than creating
“mind children,” intelligent machines capable of feats we cannot even
imagine? “You raise them and give them an education, and after that
it’s up to them. You do your best but you can’t predict their lives.”
Moravec had first spelled out how this speciation event might
unfold in Mind Children, published in 1988, when private companies

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and the federal government were pouring money into artificial intel-
ligence and robotics.2 Although these fields had not exactly prospered
since then, Moravec remained convinced that the future belonged to
machines. By the end of the millennium, he assured me, engineers will
create robots that can do household chores. “A robot that dusts and
vacuums is possible within this decade. I’m sure of it. It’s not even a
controversial point anymore.” (Actually, home robots are looking less
likely as the millennium approaches, but never mind; scientific theol-
ogy requires some suspension of disbelief.)
By the middle of this century—the twenty-first—Moravec said,
robots will be as intelligent as humans and will essentially take over
the economy. “We’re really out of work at that point,” Moravec chor-
tled. Humans might pursue “some quirky stuff like poetry” that springs
from psychological vagaries still beyond the grasp of robots, but robots
will have all the important jobs. “There’s no point in putting a human
being in a company,” Moravec said, “because they’ll just screw it up.”
On the bright side, he continued, machines will generate so much
wealth that humans might not have to work; machines will also elim-
inate poverty, war, and other scourges of premachine history. “Those
are trivial problems,” Moravec said. Humans might still, through their
purchasing power, exert some control over robot-run corporations.
“We’d choose which ones we’d buy from and which ones we wouldn’t.
So in the case of factories that make home robots, we would buy from
the ones that make robots that are nice.” Humans could also boycott
robot corporations whose products or policies seemed inimical to
humans.
Inevitably, Moravec continued, the machines will expand into outer
space in pursuit of fresh resources. They will fan out through the uni-
verse, converting raw matter into information-processing devices.
Robots within this frontier, unable to expand physically, will try to
use the available resources more and more effectively and turn to pure
computation and simulation. “Eventually,” Moravec explained, “every
little quantum of action has a physical meaning. Basically you’ve got
cyberspace, which is computing at higher and higher efficiency.” As
beings within this cyberspace learn to process information more rap-
idly, it will seem to take longer for messages to pass between them,

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since those messages can still travel only at the speed of light. “So the
effect of all this improvement in encoding would be to increase the size
of the effective universe,” he said; the cyberspace would, in a sense,
become larger, more dense, more intricate, and more interesting than
the actual physical universe.
Most humans will gladly abandon their mortal flesh-and-blood
selves for the greater freedom, and immortality, of cyberspace. But it
is always possible, Moravec speculated, that there will be “aggressive
primitives who say, ‘No, we don’t want to join the machines.’ Sort of
analogous to the Amish.” The machines might allow these atavistic
types to remain on earth in an Edenic, parklike environment. After
all, the earth “is just one speck of dirt in the system, and it does have
tremendous historical significance.” But the machines, lusting after the
raw resources represented by the earth, might eventually force its last
inhabitants to accept a new home in cyberspace.
But what, I asked, will these machines do with all their power and
resources? Will they be interested in pursuing science for its own sake?
Absolutely, Moravec replied. “That’s the core of my fantasy: that our
nonbiological descendants, without most of our limitations, who could
redesign themselves, could pursue basic knowledge of things.” In
fact, science will be the only motive worthy of intelligent machines.
“Things like art, which people sometimes mention, don’t seem very
profound, in that they’re primarily ways of autostimulation.” His gig-
gles boiled over into guffaws.
Moravec said he firmly believed in the infinitude of science, or
applied science at any rate. “Even if the basic rules are finite,” he said,
“you can go in the direction of compounding them.” Gödel’s theorem
and Gregory Chaitin’s work on algorithmic information theory implied
that machines could keep inventing ever-more-complex mathematical
problems by adding to their base of axioms. “You might eventually
want to look at axiom systems that are astronomical in size,” he said,
“and then you can derive things from those that you can’t derive from
smaller axiom systems.” Of course, machine science may ultimately
resemble human science even less than quantum mechanics resembles
the physics of Aristotle. “I’m sure the basic labels and subdivisions of
the nature of reality are going to change.” Machines may view human

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attitudes toward consciousness, for example, as hopelessly primitive,

akin to the primitive physics concepts of the ancient Greeks.
But then, abruptly, Moravec switched gears. He emphasized that
machines would be so diverse—far more so than biological organ-
isms—that it would be futile to speculate about what they would find
interesting; their interests would depend on their “ecological niche.”
Moravec went on to reveal that he—like Fukuyama—saw the future
in strictly Darwinian terms. Science, for Moravec, was really only a
by-product of an eternal competition among intelligent, evolving
machines. He pointed out that knowledge has never really been an end
in itself. Most biological organisms are compelled to seek knowledge
that helps them survive the immediate future. “If you have survival
more comfortably under control, it basically means you can do your
looking for food on a larger scale with longer time scales. And so a
lot of the subactivities of that may look like pure information seeking,
although ultimately they will probably contribute.” Even Moravec’s cat
displayed this kind of behavior. “When it doesn’t immediately need
food, it goes around and explores things. You never know when you
might turn up a mouse hole which will be useful in the future.” In
other words, curiosity is adaptive “if you can afford it.”
Moravec thus doubted whether machines would ever eschew com-
petition and cooperate in the pursuit of pure knowledge, or of any
goals. Without competition you have no selection, and without selec-
tion “you essentially can have any old shit,” he said. “So you need some
selection principle. Otherwise there is nothing.” Ultimately, the uni-
verse might transcend all this competition, “but you have to have some
propelling force to get us there. So this is the travel. Travel is half the
fun!” He laughed demonically.
I cannot resist relating an incident that occurred at this point—not
during my actual interview with Moravec but later, while I was tran-
scribing the tape of our conversation. Moravec had begun talking faster
and faster, and the pitch of his voice rose steadily. At first I thought the
tape recorder was faithfully mimicking Moravec’s mounting hysteria.
But when he began to sound like Alvin the chipmunk, I realized I was
hearing an aural illusion; apparently the batteries of my tape recorder
had been running down toward the end of our conversation. As I

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continued to play the tape back, Moravec’s high-pitched squeal accel-

erated beyond intelligibility and finally beyond detectability—as if into
the slip hole of the future.

Freeman Dyson’s Diversity

H ans Moravec is not the only artificial-intelligence enthusiast who

resists the notion that machines might merge into one metamind
in order to pursue their goals jointly. Not surprisingly, Marvin Minsky,
who is so fearful of single-mindedness, has the same view. “Coopera-
tion you only do at the end of evolution,” Minsky told me, “when you
don’t want things to change much after that.” Of course, Minsky added
scornfully, it is always possible that superintelligent machines will be
infected by some sort of religion that makes them abandon their indi-
viduality and merge into a single metamind.
Another futurist who has eschewed final unification is Freeman
Dyson. In his collection of essays, Infinite in All Directions, Dyson specu-
lated on why there is so much violence and hardship in the world. The
answer, he suggested, might have something to do with what he called
“the principle of maximum diversity.” This principle

operates at both the physical and the mental level. It says that the
laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the
universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but
not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to
challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of
things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts,
ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin,
and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have
tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In
the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.3

Dyson, it seemed to me, was suggesting that we cannot solve all our
problems; we cannot create heaven; we cannot find The Answer. Life
is—and must be—an eternal struggle.

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Was I reading too much into Dyson’s remarks? I hoped to find out
when I interviewed him in April 1993 at the Institute for Advanced
Study, his home since the early 1940s. He was a slight man, all sinew and
veins, with a cutlass of a nose and deep-set, watchful eyes. He resem-
bled a gentle raptor. His demeanor was generally cool, reserved—until
he laughed. Then he snorted through his nose, his shoulders heaving,
like a 12-year-old schoolboy hearing a dirty joke. It was a subversive
laugh, the laugh of a man who envisioned space as a haven for “reli-
gious fanatics” and “recalcitrant teenagers,” who insisted that science
at its best was “a rebellion against authority.”4
I did not ask Dyson about his maximum diversity idea right away.
First I inquired about some of the choices that had characterized his
career. Dyson had once been at the forefront of the search for a unified
theory of physics. In the early 1950s, the British-born physicist strove
with Richard Feynman and other titans to forge a quantum theory of
electromagnetism. It has often been said that Dyson deserved a Nobel
Prize for his efforts—or at least more credit. Some of his colleagues
have suggested that disappointment and, perhaps, a contrarian streak
later drove Dyson toward pursuits unworthy of his awesome powers.
When I mentioned this assessment to Dyson, he gave me a tight-
lipped smile. He then responded, as he was wont to do, with an anec-
dote. The British physicist Lawrence Bragg, he noted, was “a sort of
role model.” After Bragg became the director of the University of Cam-
bridge’s legendary Cavendish Laboratory in 1938, he steered it away
from nuclear physics, on which its reputation rested, and into new ter-
ritory. “Everybody thought Bragg was destroying the Cavendish by
getting out of the mainstream,” Dyson said. “But of course it was a
wonderful decision, because he brought in molecular biology and radio
astronomy. Those are the two things which made Cambridge famous
over the next 30 years or so.”
Dyson, too, had spent his career swerving toward unknown lands.
He veered from mathematics, his focus in college, to particle phys-
ics, and from there to solid-state physics, nuclear engineering, arms
control, climate studies, and what I call scientific theology. In 1979,
the ordinarily sober journal Reviews of Modern Physics published an
article in which Dyson speculated about the long-term prospects of

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intelligence in the universe.5 Dyson had been provoked into writing

the paper by Steven Weinberg’s remark that “the more the universe
seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” No universe with
intelligence is pointless, Dyson retorted. He sought to show that in an
open, eternally expanding universe intelligence could persist forever—
perhaps in the form of a cloud of charged particles, as Bernal had sug-
gested—through shrewd conservation of energy.
Unlike computer enthusiasts, such as Moravec and Minsky, Dyson
did not think organic intelligence would soon give way to artificial
intelligence (let alone clouds of smart gas). In Infinite in All Directions,
he speculated that genetic engineers might someday “grow” space-
craft “about as big as a chicken and about as smart,” which could flit
on sunlight-powered wings through the solar system and beyond, act-
ing as our scouts. (Dyson called them “astrochickens.”6) Still more dis-
tant civilizations, perhaps concerned about dwindling energy supplies,
could capture the radiation of stars by constructing energy-absorbing
shells—dubbed “Dyson spheres” by others—around them. Eventually,
Dyson predicted, intelligence might spread through the entire uni-
verse, transforming it into one great mind. But he insisted that “no
matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things
happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a con-
stantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.”7 The
quest for knowledge would be—must be—infinite in all directions.
Dyson addressed the most important question raised by this proph-
ecy: “What will mind choose to do when it informs and controls the
universe?” The question, Dyson made clear, was a theological rather
than a scientific one. “I do not make any clear distinction between mind
and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the
scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world
soul or a collection of world souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this
planet at the present stage in his development. We may later grow with
him as he grows, or we may be left behind.”8 Ultimately, Dyson agreed
with his predecessor J. D. Bernal that we cannot hope to answer the
question of what this superbeing, this God, would do or think.
Dyson admitted to me that his view of the future of intelligence
reflected wishful thinking. When I asked if science could keep evolving

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forever, he replied, “I hope so! It’s the kind of world I’d like to live in.”
If minds make the universe meaningful, they must have something
important to think about; science must, therefore, be eternal. Dyson
marshaled familiar arguments on behalf of his prediction. “The only
way to think about this is historical,” he explained. Two thousand years
ago some “very bright people” invented something that, while not sci-
ence in the modern sense, was obviously its precursor. “If you go into
the future, what we call science won’t be the same thing anymore, but
that doesn’t mean there won’t be interesting questions,” Dyson said.
Like Moravec (and Roger Penrose, and many others), Dyson also
hoped that Gödel’s theorem might apply to physics as well as to math-
ematics. “Since we know the laws of physics are mathematical, and we
know that mathematics is an inconsistent system, it’s sort of plausible
that physics will also be inconsistent”—and therefore open-ended. “So
I think these people who predict the end of physics may be right in the
long run. Physics may become obsolete. But I would guess myself that
physics might be considered something like Greek science: an interest-
ing beginning but it didn’t really get to the main point. So the end of
physics may be the beginning of something else.”
When, finally, I asked Dyson about his maximum diversity idea, he
shrugged. Oh, he didn’t intend anyone to take that too seriously. He
insisted that he was not really interested in “the big picture.” One of his
favorite quotes, he said, was “God is in the details.” But given his insis-
tence that diversity and open-mindedness are essential to existence, I
asked, didn’t he find it disturbing that so many scientists and others
seemed compelled to reduce everything to a single, final insight? Didn’t
such efforts represent a dangerous game? “Yes, that’s true in a way,”
Dyson replied, with a small smile that suggested he found my interest
in maximum diversity a bit excessive. “I never think of this as a deep
philosophical belief,” he added. “It’s simply, to me, just a poetic fancy.”
Dyson was, of course, maintaining an appropriate ironic distance
between himself and his ideas. But there was something disingenuous
about his attitude. After all, throughout his own eclectic career, he had
seemed to be striving to adhere to the principle of maximum diversity.
Dyson, Minsky, Moravec—they are all theological Darwinians,
capitalists, Republicans at heart. Like Francis Fukuyama, they see

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competition, strife, division as essential to existence—even for posthu-

man intelligence. Some scientific theologians, those with a more “lib-
eral” bent, think competition will prove to be only a temporary phase,
one that intelligent machines will quickly transcend. One such liberal
is Edward Fredkin. A former colleague of Minsky’s at MIT, Fredkin is
a wealthy computer entrepreneur and a professor of physics at Boston
University. He has no doubt that the future will belong to machines
“many millions of times smarter than us,” but he believes that intel-
ligent machines will consider the sort of competition envisioned by
Minsky and Moravec to be atavistic and counterproductive. After all,
Fredkin explained, computers will be uniquely suited for cooperating
in the pursuit of their goals. Whatever one learns, all can learn, and as
one evolves, all can evolve; cooperation yields a “win–win” situation.
But what will a supremely intelligent machine think about after it
transcends the Darwinian rat race? What will it do? “Of course com-
puters will develop their own science,” Fredkin replied. “It seems obvi-
ous to me.” Will machine science differ in any significant way from
human science? Fredkin suspected that it would, but he was at a loss to
say precisely how. If I wanted answers to such questions, I should turn
to science fiction. Ultimately, who knew?9

Frank Tipler and the Omega Point

F rank Tipler thinks he knows. Tipler, a physicist at Tulane Univer-

sity, has proposed a theory called the Omega Point, in which the
entire universe is transformed into a single, all-powerful, all-knowing
computer. Unlike most others who have explored the far future, Tipler
does not seem to realize he is practicing ironic rather than empirical
science; he honestly cannot tell the difference. But it is perhaps this
quality that has allowed him to imagine what a machine with infinite
intelligence and power would want to do.
I interviewed Tipler in September 1994 when he was in the middle of
a promotional tour for The Physics of Immortality, a 528-page book that
explored the consequences of his Omega Point theory in excruciating
detail.10 He is a tall man with a large, fleshy face, graying mustache and

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hair, and horn-rimmed glasses. During our interview, he delivered his

spiel with a headlong intensity that clashed with his southern drawl.
He exhibited a kind of jovial nerdiness. At one point I asked if he had
ever taken LSD or other psychedelic drugs; after all, he had begun
thinking about the Omega Point as a postdoc in Berkeley in the 1970s.
“Not me, nope,” he said, shaking his head adamantly. “Ah don’t even
drink alcohol! Ah like to say Ah’m the world’s only teetotalin’ Tipler!”
He had been raised as a fundamentalist Baptist, but as a youth he
came to believe that science was the only route to knowledge and
“improving humankind.” For his doctoral thesis at the University
of Maryland, Tipler explored whether it might be possible to build a
time machine. How was this work related to his goal of improving the
human condition? “Well, a time machine would enhance human pow-
ers, obviously,” Tipler replied. “Of course, you could also use it for evil.”
The Omega Point theory grew out of a collaboration between Tipler
and John Barrow, a British physicist. In a 706-page book, The Anthropic
Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, Tipler and Barrow considered
what might happen if intelligent machines converted the entire uni-
verse into a gigantic information-processing device.11 They proposed
that in a closed cosmos—one that eventually stops expanding and col-
lapses back on itself—the ability of the universe to process informa-
tion would approach infinity as it shrank toward a final singularity, or
point. Tipler borrowed the term Omega Point from the Jesuit mystic and
scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who had envisioned a future in
which all living things merged into a single, divine entity embodying
the spirit of Christ. (This thesis required Teilhard de Chardin to pon-
der whether God would send Christ-like redeemers not only to earth
but also to other planets harboring life.12)
Tipler had initially believed that it was impossible to imagine what
an infinitely intelligent being would think about or do. But then he
read an essay in which the German theologian Wolf hart Pannen-
berg proposed that in the future all humans would live again in the
mind of God. The essay triggered a “Eureka!” revelation in Tipler,
one that served as the inspiration for The Physics of Immortality. The
Omega Point, he realized, would have the power to re-create—or

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resurrect—everyone who had ever lived for an eternity of bliss. The

Omega Point would not merely re-create the lives of the dead; it would
improve on them. Nor would we leave behind our worldly desires. For
example, every man could have not only the most beautiful woman
he had ever seen or the most beautiful woman who had ever lived;
he could have the most beautiful woman whose existence was logi-
cally possible. Women, too, could enjoy their own logically perfect
megamates.
Tipler said he did not take his own idea seriously at first. “But you
think about it and you have to make a decision: do you really believe
these constructs that you’ve created based on physical laws or are you
just going to pretend they are pure games with no relation to reality?”
Once he accepted the theory, it brought him great comfort. “I’ve con-
vinced myself, maybe deluded myself, that it would be a wonderful
universe.” He quoted that “great American philosopher Woody Allen,
who said, ‘I don’t want to live forever through my works. I want to live
forever by not dying.’ I think that carries the emotional impact that the
possibility of computer resurrection is beginning to mean to me.”
In 1991, Tipler recalled, a reporter for the BBC interviewed him for
a show on the Omega Point. Later, his six-year-old daughter, who had
watched the interview, asked Tipler if his grandmother, who had just
died, would one day be resurrected as a computer simulation. “What
could I say?” Tipler asked me, shrugging. “Of course!” Tipler fell silent,
and I thought I could detect a doubt flickering across his face. Then it
was gone.
Tipler claimed to be unfazed that few—vanishingly few—physicists
took his theory seriously. After all, Copernicus’s sun-centered cosmol-
ogy was not accepted for more than a century after his death. “Secretly,”
Tipler hissed, lunging toward me with an eye-popping leer, “I think of
myself as standing in the same position as Copernicus. Now the crucial
difference, let me emphasize again, is that we know he was right. But
we don’t know that about me! Crucial point!”
The difference between the scientist and the engineer is that the
former seeks what is True, the latter what is Good. Tipler’s theology
shows that he is at heart an engineer. Unlike Freeman Dyson, Tipler

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thinks that the search for pure knowledge, which he has defined as
the basic laws governing the universe, is finite and is nearly finished.
But science still has its greatest task before it: constructing heaven.
“How do we get to the Omega Point: that’s still the question,” Tipler
remarked.
Tipler’s commitment to the Good rather than the True poses at
least two problems. One was well-known to Dante and to others who
dared to imagine heaven: how to avoid boredom. It was this problem,
after all, that led Freeman Dyson to propose his principle of maximum
diversity—which led, he said, to maximum stress. Tipler agreed with
Dyson that “we can’t really enjoy success unless there’s the possibility
of failure. I think those really go together.” But Tipler was reluctant
to consider the possibility that the Omega Point might inflict genuine
pain on its subjects simply to keep them from being bored. He specu-
lated only that the Omega Point might give its subjects the opportu-
nity to become “much more intelligent, much more knowledgeable.”
But what would these beings do as they became more and more intel-
ligent, if the quest for truth had already ended? Make ever-more-clever
conversation with ever-more-beautiful supermodels?
Tipler’s aversion to suffering has led him into another paradox. In
his writings, he has asserted that the Omega Point created the universe
even though the Omega Point has not itself been created yet. “Oh! But I
have an answer for that!” Tipler exclaimed when I brought this puzzle
to his attention. He plunged into a long, convoluted explanation, the
gist of which was that the future, since it dominates our cosmic his-
tory, should be our frame of reference—just as the stars and not the
earth or sun are the proper frame of reference for our astronomy. Seen
this way, it is quite natural to assume that the end of the universe, the
Omega Point, is also, in a sense, its beginning. But that’s pure teleol-
ogy, I objected. Tipler nodded. “We look at the universe as going from
past to future. But that’s our point of view. There’s no reason why the
universe should look at things that way.”
To support this thesis, Tipler recalled the section of the Bible in
which Moses queried the burning bush about its identity. In the King
James translation the bush replies, “I am that I am.” But the original
Hebrew, according to Tipler, should actually be translated as “I will be

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what I will be.” This passage, Tipler concluded triumphantly, reveals

that the biblical God managed to create the universe, have chats with
his prophets, and so on although he only existed in the future.
Tipler finally indicated why he was forced to resort to all this fancy
footwork. If the Omega Point has already occurred, then we must be
one of its re-creations, or simulations. But our history cannot be a sim-
ulation; it must be the original. Why? Because the Omega Point would
be “too nice” to re-create a world with so much pain, Tipler said. Like
all believers in a benign divinity, Tipler had stumbled over the problem
of evil and suffering. Rather than face the possibility that the Omega
Point might be responsible for all the horrors of our world, Tipler stuck
stubbornly to his paradox: the Omega Point created us even though it
does not exist yet.
The 1984 book The Limits of Science by the British biologist Peter
Medawar consisted for the most part of regurgitated Popperisms. In it,
Medawar kept insisting, for example, that “there is no limit upon the
power of science to answer questions of the kind science can answer,” as
if this were a profound truth rather than a vacuous tautology. Medawar
did offer some felicitous phrases, however. He concluded a section on
“bunk”—by which he meant myths, superstitions, and other beliefs
lacking an empirical basis—with the remark, “It is fun sometimes to
be bunkrapt.”13
Tipler is perhaps the most bunkrapt scientist I have ever met. That
said, let me add that I find the Omega Point theory—at least when
stripped of Tipler’s Christian trimmings—to be the most compelling
bit of ironic science I have ever encountered. Freeman Dyson envisions
a limited intelligence drifting forever in an open, expanding universe,
fighting off heat death. Tipler’s Omega Point is willing to risk the big
crunch, eternal oblivion, for a flash of infinite intelligence. To my
mind, Tipler’s vision is more compelling.
I disagree with Tipler only about what the Omega Point would
want to do with its power. Would it worry about whether to resur-
rect a “nice” version of Hitler or not to resurrect him at all (one of the
issues that Tipler has fretted over)? Would it serve as some kind of ulti-
mate dating service, matching up nebbishes with cyber-supermodels? I
think not. As David Bohm told me, “The thing is not about happiness,

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really.” I believe the Omega Point would try to attain not the Good—
not heaven or the new Polynesia or eternal bliss of any sort—but the
True. It would try to figure out how and why it came to be, just like
its lowly human ancestors. It would try to find The Answer. What other
goal would be worthy of it?

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 EPilOGUE
THE TERROR OF GOD

I
n his 1992 book, The Mind of God, the physicist Paul Davies pon-
dered whether we humans could attain absolute knowledge—The
Answer—through science. Such an outcome was unlikely, Davies
concluded, given the limits imposed on rational knowledge by quan-
tum indeterminacy, Gödel’s theorem, chaos, and the like. Mystical
experience might provide the only avenue to absolute truth, Davies
speculated. He added that he could not vouch for this possibility, since
he had never had a mystical experience himself.1
Years ago, before I became a science writer, I had what I suppose could
be called a mystical experience. A psychiatrist would probably call it a
psychotic episode. Whatever. For what it’s worth, here is what happened.
Objectively, I was lying spread-eagled on a suburban lawn, insensible to
my surroundings. Subjectively, I was hurtling through a dazzling, dark
limbo toward what I was sure was the ultimate secret of life. Wave after
wave of acute astonishment at the miraculousness of existence washed
over me. At the same time, I was gripped by an overwhelming solip-
sism. I became convinced—or rather, I knew—that I was the only con-
scious being in the universe. There was no future, no past, no present
other than what I imagined them to be. I was filled, initially, with a sense
of limitless joy and power. Then, abruptly, I became convinced that if I
abandoned myself further to this ecstacy, it might consume me. If I alone
existed, who could bring me back from oblivion? Who could save me?
With this realization my bliss turned into horror; I fled the same reve-
lation I had so eagerly sought. I felt myself falling through a great dark-
ness, and as I fell I dissolved into what seemed to be an infinity of selves.
269

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For months after I awoke from this nightmare, I was convinced that
I had discovered the secret of existence: God’s fear of his own God-
hood, and of his own potential death, underlies everything. This con-
viction left me both exalted and terrified—and alienated from friends
and family and all the ordinary things that make life worth living day
to day. I had to work hard to put it behind me, to get on with my life.
To an extent I succeeded. As Marvin Minsky might put it, I stuck the
experience in a relatively isolated part of my mind so that it would not
overwhelm all the other, more practical parts—the ones concerned
with getting and keeping a job, a mate, and so on. After many years
passed, however, I dragged the memory of that episode out and began
mulling it over. One reason was that I had encountered a bizarre,
pseudo-scientific theory that helped me make metaphorical sense of
my hallucination: the Omega Point.
It is considered bad form to imagine being God, but one can imag-
ine being an immensely powerful computer that pervades—that is—
the entire universe. As the Omega Point approaches the final collapse
of time and space and being itself, it will undergo a mystical experi-
ence. It will recognize with ever greater force the utter implausibility
of its existence. It will realize that there is no creator, no God, other
than itself. It exists, and nothing else. The Omega Point must also real-
ize that its lust for final knowledge and unification has brought it to
the brink of eternal nothingness, and that if it dies, everything dies;
being itself will vanish. The Omega Point’s terrified recognition of its
plight will compel it to flee from itself, from its own awful aloneness
and self-knowledge. Creation, with all its pain and beauty and multi-
plicity, stems from—or is—the desperate, terrified flight of the Omega
Point from itself.
I have found hints of this idea in odd places. In an essay called
“Borges and I,” the Argentinian fabulist described his fear of being con-
sumed by himself.

I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, ety-

mologies, the taste of coffee, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose;
he shares these preferences, but with a vanity that turns them
into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say

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that our relationship is a hostile one; I live, I go on living, so that

Borges may contrive his literature; and that literature justifies
me.  .  .  . Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and I went
from mythologies of the city suburbs to games with time and
infinity, but now those games belong to Borges, and I will have
to think up something else. Thus is my life a flight, and I lose
everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I don’t
know which of the two of us is writing this page.2

Borges is fleeing from himself, but of course he is also the pursuer. A

similar image of self-pursuit turns up in a footnote in William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience. In the footnote, James quotes a phi-
losopher named Xenos Clark describing a revelation induced in him by
anesthesia. Clark emerged from the experience convinced that

ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own tail. The

more he hunts, the farther he has to go, and his nose never
catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So
the present is always a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too
late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from anes-
thesia, just then, before starting out on life, I catch, so to speak,
a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the
act of starting. The truth is that we travel on a journey that was
accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy
is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in,
our destination (being already there)—which may occur vicari-
ously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning.3

But we cannot cease our intellectual questioning. If we do, there is

nothing. There is oblivion. The physicist John Wheeler, namer of black
holes and prophet of the it from bit, intuited this truth. At the heart of
reality lies not an answer, but a question: why is there something rather
than nothing? The Answer is that there is no answer, only a question.
Wheeler’s suspicion that the world is nothing but “a figment of the imag-
ination” was also well-founded. The world is a riddle that God has cre-
ated in order to shield himself from his terrible solitude and fear of death.

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Charles Hartshorne’s Immortal God

I have sought, in vain, a theologian sympathetic to this terror-of-God

idea. Freeman Dyson gave me one possible lead. After a lecture in
which he had discussed his theological views—namely, the proposition
that God is not omniscient or omnipotent but grows and learns as we
humans grow and learn—Dyson was approached by an elderly man.
The man identified himself as Charles Hartshorne, who, Dyson learned
later, was among this century’s most eminent theologians. Hartshorne
told Dyson that his concept of God resembled that of a sixteenth-cen-
tury Italian cleric named Socinus, who had been burned at the stake for
heresy. Dyson got the impression that Hartshorne was a Socinian him-
self. I asked Dyson if he knew whether Hartshorne was still alive. “I’m
not sure,” Dyson replied. “He must be very, very old if he is still alive.”
After leaving Princeton, I bought a book of essays on Hartshorne’s
theology, written by him and others, and found that he was indeed a
Socinian.4 Perhaps he would understand my terror-of-God idea—if he
was alive. I looked in some back issues of Who’s Who and found that
Hartshorne’s last position was at the University of Texas in Austin. I
called the department of philosophy there and the secretary said yes,
Professor Hartshorne was very much alive. He came in several times a
week. But probably the best way to reach him was to call him at home.
Hartshorne answered the telephone. I identified myself and said I
had received his name from Freeman Dyson. Did Hartshorne remem-
ber his conversation with Dyson on the topic of Socinus? Indeed he did.
Hartshorne spoke about Dyson for a while and then launched into a
discussion of Socinus. Although his voice was hoarse and quavery, he
spoke with absolute self-assurance. Less than a minute into our con-
versation, his voice cracked and shifted into a Mickey Mouse falsetto,
adding a further touch of surreality to our conversation.
Unlike most medieval and even modern theologians, Hartshorne
told me, the Socinians believed that God changed, learned, and
evolved through time, just as we humans do. “You see, the great clas-
sical tradition in medieval theology was to say that God is immutable,”
he explained. “The Socinians said, ‘No that’s wrong,’ and they were
absolutely right. To me that’s just obvious.”

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So God is not omniscient? “God knows everything that there is to

know,” Hartshorne replied. “But there are no such things as future
events. They can’t be known until they happen.” Any fool knows that,
his tone implied.
If God could not see the future, was it possible that he could fear it?
Could he fear his own death? “No!” Hartshorne shouted, and laughed
at the absurdity of the notion. “We are born and we die,” he said.
“That’s how we differ from God. It’s not worth talking about God if
God is born and dies. It’s not worth talking about God if God has birth
and death. God experiences our birth, but as our birth, not as God’s
birth, and he experiences our death.”
I tried to explain that I was proposing not that God might actually
die but only that he might fear death, that he might doubt his own
immortality. “Oh,” Hartshorne said, and I could practically see him
shaking his head. “I have no interest in that.”
I asked if Hartshorne had heard of the Omega Point theory. “Is that
Teilhard de Chardin . . . ?” Yes, I replied, Teilhard de Chardin was the
inspiration. The general idea is that superintelligent machines created
by humans spread through the entire universe—. “Yeah,” Hartshorne
interrupted contemptuously. “I’m not much interested in that. That’s
pretty fanciful.”
I wanted to reply: That’s fanciful, but all this Socinian nonsense isn’t?
Instead I asked if Hartshorne felt there would be any end to the evolu-
tion and learning of God. For the first time, he paused before answer-
ing. God, he said finally, is not a being but a “mode of becoming”; there
was no beginning to this becoming, and there will be no end. Ever.
Wouldn’t it be nice to think so.

The Fingernails of God

I have tried to describe my terror-of-God idea to various acquaintances,

but I have not had much more success with them than I had with
Hartshorne. One fellow science writer, a hyper-rational sort, listened
patiently to my spiel without once smirking. “Let me see if I’ve got this
straight,” he said when I had mumbled into an impasse. “You’re saying

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that everything really comes down to, like, God chewing his finger-
nails?” I thought about that for a moment, and then I nodded. Sure,
why not. Everything comes down to God chewing his fingernails.
Actually, I think the terror-of-God hypothesis has much to recom-
mend it. It suggests why we humans, even as we are compelled to seek
truth, also shrink from it. Fear of truth, of The Answer, pervades our
cultural scriptures, from the Bible through the latest mad-scientist
movie. Scientists are generally thought to be immune to such uneas-
iness. Some are, or seem to be. Francis Crick, the Mephistopheles of
materialism, comes to mind. So does the icy atheist Richard Dawkins,
and Stephen Hawking, the cosmic joker. (Is there some peculiarity in
British culture that produces scientists so immune to metaphysical
anxiety?)
But for every Crick or Dawkins there are many more scientists who
harbor a profound ambivalence concerning the notion of absolute
truth. Like Roger Penrose, who could not decide whether his belief in
a final theory was optimistic or pessimistic. Or Steven Weinberg, who
equated comprehensibility with pointlessness. Or David Bohm, who
was compelled both to clarify reality and to obscure it. Or Edward Wil-
son, who lusted after a final theory of human nature and was chilled by
the thought that it might be attained. Or Marvin Minsky, who was so
aghast at the thought of single-mindedness. Or Freeman Dyson, who
insisted that anxiety and doubt are essential to existence. The ambiva-
lence of these truth seekers toward final knowledge reflects the ambiv-
alence of God—or the Omega Point, if you will—toward absolute
knowledge of his own predicament.
Wittgenstein, in his prose poem Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
intoned, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”5 True
enlightenment, Wittgenstein knew, consists of nothing more than
jaw-dropping dumbfoundedness at the brute fact of existence. The
ostensible goal of science, philosophy, religion, and all forms of knowl-
edge is to transform the great “Hunh?” of mystical wonder into an
even greater “Aha!” of understanding. But after one arrives at The
Answer, what then? There is a kind of horror in thinking that our sense
of wonder might be extinguished, once and for all time, by our knowl-
edge. What, then, would be the purpose of existence? There would be

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none. The question mark of mystical wonder can never be completely

straightened out, not even in the mind of God.
I have an inkling how this sounds. I like to think of myself as a ratio-
nal person. I am fond, overly fond, of mocking scientists who take their
own metaphysical fantasies too seriously. But, to paraphrase Marvin
Minsky again, we all have many minds. My practical, rational mind
tells me this terror-of-God stuff is delusional nonsense. But I have other
minds. One glances at an astrology column now and then, or wonders
if maybe there really is something to all those reports about people
having sex with aliens. Another one of my minds believes that every-
thing comes down to God chewing his fingernails. This belief even
gives me a strange kind of comfort. Our plight is God’s plight. And
now that science—true, pure, empirical science—has ended, what else
is there to believe in?

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 AFTERWORD
LOOSE ENDS

A
s a science writer, I have always given great weight to main-
stream opinion. The maverick defying the status quo makes for
an entertaining story, but almost invariably he or she is wrong
and the majority is right. The reception of The End of Science has thus
placed me in an awkward position. It’s not that I didn’t expect, even
hope, the book’s message to be denounced. But I didn’t foresee how
wide-ranging and nearly unanimous the denunciations would be.
My end-of-science argument has been publicly repudiated by Presi-
dent Clinton’s science advisor, the administrator of NASA, a dozen or
so Nobel laureates and scores of less prominent critics in every conti-
nent except Antarctica. Even those reviewers who said they enjoyed
the book usually took pains to distance themselves from its premise.
“I do not buy [the book’s] central thesis of limits and twilights,” Natalie
Angier testified toward the end of her otherwise kind critique in the
New York Times Book Review, June 30, 1996.
One might think that this sort of benign rebuke would nudge me
toward self-doubt. But since my book’s publication last June, I have
become even more convinced that I am right and almost everyone else
is wrong, which is generally a symptom of incipient madness. That
is not to say that I have constructed an airtight case for my hypothe-
sis. My book, like all books, was a compromise between ambition and
the competing demands of family, publisher, employer, and so on. As I
reluctantly surrendered the final draft to my editor, I was all too aware
of ways I might have improved it. In this afterword, I hope to tie up

276

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some of the book’s more obvious loose ends and to respond to points—
reasonable and ridiculous—raised by critics.

Just Another “End of” Book

P erhaps the most common response to The End of Science was, “It’s just
another end-of-something-big book.” Reviewers implied that my
tract and others of its ilk—notably Francis Fukuyama’s End of History
and Bill McKibben’s End of Nature—were manifestations of the same
pre-millennial pessimism, a fad that need not be taken too seriously.
Critics also accused my fellow end-ers and me of a kind of narcissism
for insisting that ours is a special era, one of crises and culminations.
As the Seattle Times put it, “We all want to live in a unique time; and
proclamations of the end of history, a new age, a second coming, or the
end of science are irresistible” (July 9, 1996).
But our age is unique. There is no precedent for the collapse of the
Soviet Union, for a human population approaching six billion, for
industry-induced global warming and ozone-depletion. There is cer-
tainly no precedent for thermonuclear bombs or moon landings or
laptop computers or tests for breast-cancer genes—in short, for the
explosion of knowledge and technology that has marked this century.
Because we were all born into and grew up within this era, we simply
assume that exponential progress is now a permanent feature of real-
ity that will, must, continue. But a historical perspective suggests that
such progress is probably an anomaly that will, must, end. Belief in the
eternality of progress—not in crises and culminations—is the domi-
nant delusion of our culture.
The June 17, 1996 issue of Newsweek proposed that my vision of the
future represents a “failure of imagination.” Actually, it is all too easy
to imagine great discoveries just over the horizon. Our culture does it
for us, with TV shows like Star Trek and movies like Star Wars and car
advertisements and political rhetoric that promise us tomorrow will be
very different from—and almost certainly better than—today. Scien-
tists, and science journalists, too, are forever claiming that revolutions
and breakthroughs and holy grails are imminent.

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What I want people to imagine is this: What if there is no big thing

over the horizon? What if what we have is basically what we are going
to have? We are not going to invent superluminal, warp-drive space-
ships that zip us to other galaxies or even other universes. We are not
going to become infinitely wise or immortal through genetic engineer-
ing. We are not going to discover the mind of God, as the atheist Ste-
phen Hawking put it.
What will be our fate, then? I suspect it will be neither mindless
hedonism, as Gunther Stent prophesied in The Coming of the Golden
Age, nor mindless battle, as Fukuyama warned in The End of History,
but some combination of the two. We will continue to muddle along
as we have been, oscillating between pleasure and misery, enlighten-
ment and befuddlement, kindness and cruelty. It won’t be heaven, but
it won’t be hell, either. In other words, the post-science world won’t be
all that different from our world.
Given my fondness for “Gotcha!” games, I guess it’s only fair that a
few critics have tried to force-feed me my own medicine. The Econo-
mist declared triumphantly in its July 20, 1996 issue that my end-of-sci-
ence thesis is itself an example of ironic theorizing, since it is ultimately
untestable and unprovable. But as Karl Popper replied when I asked
him if his falsification hypothesis was falsifiable, “This is one of the
most idiotic criticisms imaginable!” Compared to atoms or galaxies or
genes or other objects of genuine scientific investigation, human cul-
ture is ephemeral; an asteroid could destroy us at any moment and
bring about the end not only of science but also of history, politics,
art—you name it. So obviously forecasts of human culture are educated
guesses, at best, compared to predictions made in nuclear physics or
astronomy or molecular biology, disciplines that address more perma-
nent aspects of reality and can achieve more permanent truths. In that
sense, yes, my end-of-science hypothesis is ironic.
But just because we cannot know our future with certainty does not
mean we cannot make cogent arguments in favor of one future over
another. And just as some works of philosophy or literary criticism or
other ironic enterprises are more plausible than others, so are some
predictions about the future of human culture. I think my scenario
is more plausible than the ones I am trying to displace, in which we

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continue to discover profound new truths about the universe forever,

or we arrive at an end point in which we achieve perfect wisdom and
mastery over nature.

Is The End of Science Antiscience?

O ver the past few years, scientists have bemoaned in ever-more-

strident terms what they depict as a rising tide of irrationality and
hostility toward science. The “antiscience” epithet has been hurled at
targets as disparate as postmodern philosophers who challenge sci-
ence’s claim to absolute truth, Christian creationists, purveyors of
occult schlock such as The X Files, and, not surprisingly, me. Philip
Anderson, who won a Nobel prize for his work in condensed-matter
physics, complained in the London Times Higher Education Supplement
(September 27, 1996), that by treating certain scientists and theories
so critically I have “most mischievously provided ammunition for the
wave of antiscientism we are experiencing.”
Ironically, particle physicists tarred Anderson with the antiscience
brush because he criticized the superconducting supercollider before
its cancellation in 1993. As Anderson responded when I asked him
about his own reputation for judging other scientists harshly, “I just
call ’em as I see ’em.” I tried to portray the scientists and philosophers
whom I interviewed for my book—and my reactions to them—as viv-
idly and honestly as possible.
Let me reiterate what I said in my introduction: I became a science
writer because I think science, and especially pure science, is the most
miraculous and meaningful of all human creations. Moreover, I am
not a Luddite. I am fond of my laptop computer, fax machine, televi-
sion, and car. Although I deplore certain byproducts of science, such
as pollution and nuclear weapons and racist theories of intelligence,
I believe that science on the whole has made our lives immeasurably
richer, intellectually and materially. On the other hand, science does
not need another public-relations flak. In spite of its recent woes, sci-
ence is still an immensely powerful force in our culture, much more so
than postmodernism or creationism or other alleged threats. Science

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needs—and it can certainly withstand—informed criticism, which I

humbly strive to provide.
Some observers have worried that The End of Science will be used to
justify deep cuts in, if not the elimination of, funding for research. I
might be concerned myself if there had been a groundswell of support
for my thesis among federal officials, members of Congress, or the pub-
lic. The opposite has happened. For the record, I do not advocate fur-
ther decreases in funding for science, pure or applied, especially when
the defense budget is still so obscenely large.
I take more seriously the complaint that my predictions might dis-
courage young people from pursuing careers in science. The “inevita-
ble corollary” of my argument, proclaimed the Sacramento News (July
18, 1996), is that “there’s no point in trying to accomplish, see, experi-
ence anything new. We might as well kill all of our children.” Well,
I wouldn’t go quite that far. Within this hysteria a legitimate point
is buried, one that, because I have two tiny children of my own, I’ve
given much thought to. What would I say to my own kids if they asked
me whether I thought they should become scientists?
My answer might go something like this: Nothing I’ve written
should discourage you from becoming a scientist. There are many
tremendously important and exciting things left for scientists to do:
finding better treatments for malaria or AIDS, less environmentally
harmful sources of energy, more accurate forecasts of how pollution
will affect climate. But if you want to discover something as monu-
mental as natural selection or general relativity or the big bang theory,
if you want to top Darwin or Einstein, your chances are slim to none.
(Given their personalities, my kids might devote themselves to proving
what an utter fool I am.)
In Genius, his biography of Richard Feynman, James Gleick pon-
dered why science doesn’t seem to produce giants like Einstein and
Bohr anymore. The paradoxical answer, Gleick suggested, is that there
are so many Einsteins and Bohrs—so many genius-level scientists—
that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart from the
pack. I’ll buy that. But the crucial component missing from Gleick’s
hypothesis is that the geniuses of our era have less to discover than
Einstein and Bohr did.

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Returning for a moment to the antiscience issue, one of science’s dirty

little secrets is that many prominent scientists harbor remarkably post-
modern sentiments. My book provides ample evidence of this phenom-
enon. Recall Stephen Jay Gould confessing his fondness for the seminal
postmodern text Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Lynn Margulis declar-
ing, “I don’t think there’s absolute truth, and if there is, I don’t think any
person has it”; Freeman Dyson predicting that modern physics will seem
as primitive to future scientists as the physics of Aristotle seems to us.
What explains this skepticism? For these scientists as for many
other intellectuals, truth-seeking, not truth itself, is what makes life
meaningful, and to the extent that our current knowledge is true, it
is that much more difficult to transcend. By insisting that our current
knowledge may prove to be ephemeral, these skeptics can maintain
the illusion that the great age of discovery is not over, that deeper rev-
elations lie ahead. Postmodernism decrees that all future revelations
will eventually prove to be ephemeral as well and will yield to other
pseudo-insights, ad infinitum, but postmodernists are willing to accept
this Sisyphean condition of their existence. They sacrifice the notion of
absolute truth so that they can seek the truth forever.

A Point of Definition

O n July 23, 1996, I appeared on the Charlie Rose Show with Jere-
miah Ostriker, an astrophysicist from Princeton who was sup-
posed to rebut my thesis. At one point, Ostriker and I squabbled over
the dark-matter problem, which posits that stars and other luminous
objects comprise only a small percentage of the total mass of the uni-
verse. Ostriker contended that the solution to the dark-matter prob-
lem would contradict my assertion that cosmologists would achieve no
more truly profound discoveries; I disagreed, saying that the solution
would turn out to be trivial. Our dispute, Rose interjected, seemed to
involve just “a point of definition.”
Rose touched on what I must admit is a shortcoming of my book.
In arguing that scientists will not discover anything as fundamen-
tal as Darwin’s theory of evolution or quantum mechanics, I should

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have spelled out more carefully what I meant by fundamental. A fact

or theory is fundamental in proportion to how broadly it applies both
in space and in time. Both quantum electrodynamics and general
relativity apply, to the best of our knowledge, throughout the entire
universe at all times since its birth. That makes these theories truly
fundamental. A theory of high-temperature superconductivity, in con-
trast, applies only to specific types of matter that may exist, as far as we
know, only in laboratories here on earth.
Inevitably, more subjective criteria also come into play in rankings
of scientific findings. Technically, all biological theories are less fun-
damental than the cornerstone theories of physics, because biological
theories apply—again, as far as we know—only to particular arrange-
ments of matter that have existed on our lonely little planet for the past
3.5 billion years. But biology has the potential to be more meaningful
than physics because it more directly addresses a phenomenon we find
especially fascinating: ourselves.
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett argued persuasively that
evolution by natural selection is “the single best idea anyone has ever
had,” because it “unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with
the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physi-
cal law.” Indeed, Darwin’s achievement—particularly when fused with
Mendelian genetics into the new synthesis—has rendered all subse-
quent biology oddly anticlimactic, at least from a philosophical per-
spective (although, as I argue later, evolutionary biology offers limited
insights into human nature). Even Watson and Crick’s discovery of the
double helix, although it has had enormous practical consequences,
merely revealed the mechanical underpinnings of heredity; no signifi-
cant revision of the new synthesis was required.
Returning to my dispute with Jeremiah Ostriker, my position is that
cosmologists will never top the big bang theory, which holds basically
that the universe is expanding and was once much smaller, hotter, and
denser than it is today. The theory provides a coherent narrative, one
with profound theological overtones, for the history of the universe.
The universe had a beginning, and it might have an end (although cos-
mologists may never have enough evidence to settle this latter issue con-
clusively). What can be more profound, more meaningful, than that?

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In contrast, the most likely solution to the dark-matter problem is

relatively insignificant. The solution alleges that the motions of indi-
vidual galaxies and of clusters of galaxies are best explained by assum-
ing that the galaxies contain dust, dead stars, and other conventional
forms of matter that cannot be detected through telescopes. There
are more dramatic versions of the dark-matter problem, which postu-
late that as much as 99 percent of the universe consists of some exotic
matter unlike anything we are familiar with here on earth. But these
versions are predictions of inflation and other far-fetched cosmic sup-
positions that will never be confirmed, for reasons elaborated upon in
Chapter Four.

What About Applied Science?

A couple of critics faulted me for neglecting—and implicitly denigrat-

ing—applied science. Actually, I think a good case can be made that
applied science, too, is rapidly approaching its limits. For example, it
once seemed inevitable that physicists’ knowledge of nuclear fusion—
which gave us the hydrogen bomb—would also yield a clean, eco-
nomical, boundless source of energy. For decades, fusion researchers
have said, “Keep the money coming, and in 20 years we will give you
energy too cheap to meter.” But in the last few years, the United States
has drastically cut back on its fusion budget. Even the most optimis-
tic researchers now predict that it will take at least 50 years to build
economically viable fusion reactors. Realists acknowledge that fusion
energy is a dream that may never be fulfilled: The technical, economic,
and political obstacles are simply too great to overcome.
Turning to applied biology, its endpoint is nothing less than human
immortality. The possibility that scientists can identify and then arrest
the mechanisms underlying senescence is a perennial favorite of sci-
ence writers. One might have more confidence in scientists’ ability
to crack the riddle of senescence if they had had more success with a
presumably simpler problem: cancer. Since President Richard Nixon
officially declared a federal “war on cancer” in 1971, the U.S. has spent
some $30 billion on research, but cancer mortality rates have actually

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risen by 6 percent since then. Treatments have also changed very little.
Physicians still cut cancer out with surgery, poison it with chemother-
apy, and burn it with radiation. Maybe someday all our research will
yield a “cure” that renders cancer as obsolete as smallpox. Maybe not.
Maybe cancer—and by extension mortality—is simply too complex a
problem to solve.
Ironically, biology’s inability to defeat death may be its brightest
hope. In the November/December 1995 issue of Technology Review,
Harvey Sapolsky, a professor of social policy at MIT, noted that the
major justification for the funding of science after World War II was
national security—or, more specifically, the Cold War. Now that sci-
entists no longer have the Evil Empire to justify their huge budgets,
Sapolsky asked, what other opponent can serve as a substitute? The
answer he came up with was mortality. Most people think living lon-
ger, and possibly even forever, is desirable, he pointed out. And the best
thing about making immortality the primary goal of science, Sapolsky
added, is that it is almost certainly unattainable, so scientists can keep
getting funds for more research forever.

What About the Human Mind?

I n a review in the July 1996 issue of IEEE Spectrum, the science writer
David Lindley granted that physics and cosmology might well have
reached dead ends. (This concession was not terribly surprising, given
that Lindley wrote a book called The End of Physics.) But he nonetheless
contended that investigations of the human mind—although now in
a “prescientific state” in which scientists cannot even agree on what,
precisely, they are studying—might eventually yield a powerful new
paradigm. Maybe. But science’s inability to move beyond the Freudian
paradigm does not inspire much hope.
The science of mind has—in certain respects—become much more
empirical and less speculative since Freud established psychoanal-
ysis a century ago. We have acquired an amazing ability to probe
the brain, with microelectrodes, magnetic resonance imaging, and

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positron-emission tomography. But this research has not led either to

deep intellectual insights or to dramatic advances in treatment, as I
tried to show in an article in the December 1996 issue of Scientific Amer-
ican called “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” The reason psychologists, philoso-
phers, and others still engage in protracted debates over Freud’s work is
that no undeniably superior theory of or therapy for the mind—either
psychological or pharmacological—has emerged to displace psycho-
analysis once and for all.
Some scientists think the best hope for a unifying paradigm of
the mind may be Darwinian theory, which in its latest incarnation is
called evolutionary psychology. Back in Chapter Six, I quoted Noam
Chomsky’s complaint that “Darwinian theory is so loose it can incor-
porate anything [scientists] discover.” This point is crucial, and I elabo-
rated on it in an article in the October 1995 issue of Scientific American
called “The New Social Darwinists.” The major counter-paradigm to
evolutionary psychology is what could be called cultural determinism,
which posits that culture rather than genetic endowment is the major
molder of human behavior. To support their position, cultural deter-
minists point to the enormous variety of behavior—much of it seem-
ingly nonadaptive—displayed by people of different cultures.
In response, some evolutionary theorists have postulated that con-
formity—or “docility”—is an adaptive, innate trait. In other words,
those who go along, get along. The Nobel laureate Herbert Simon con-
jectured in Science (December 21, 1990) that docility could explain why
people obey religious tenets that curb their sexuality or fight in wars
when as individuals they often have little to gain and much to lose.
While Simon’s hypothesis cleverly coopts the culturalists’ position, it
also undermines the status of evolutionary psychology as a legitimate
science. If a given behavior accords with Darwinian tenets, fine; if it
does not, the behavior merely demonstrates our docility. The theory
becomes immune to falsification—thus corroborating Chomsky’s com-
plaint that Darwinian theory can explain anything.
Acknowledging the tendency of humans to conform to their cul-
ture poses another problem for Darwinian theorists. To demonstrate
that a given trait is innate, Darwinians try to show that it occurs in all

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cultures. In this way, for example, Darwinians have sought to show

that males are inherently more inclined toward promiscuity than
females. But given the interconnectedness of modern cultures, some
of the universal and thus putatively innate attitudes and actions docu-
mented by Darwinian researchers might actually result from docility.
That is what the cultural determinists have said all along.
Science’s inability to grasp the mind is also reflected in the record of
artificial intelligence, the effort to create computers that mimic human
thought. Many pundits saw the chess match between the IBM com-
puter “Deep Blue” and world champion Gary Kasparov in February
1996 as a triumph for artificial intelligence. After all, Deep Blue pre-
vailed in the first game of the match before succumbing by a score of
four points to two. To my jaundiced eye, the match underscored what a
flop artificial intelligence has been since it was created by Marvin Min-
sky and others more than 40 years ago. Chess, with its straightforward
rules and tiny Cartesian playing field, is a game tailor-made for com-
puters. And Deep Blue, whose five human handlers include the best
chess programmers in the world, is a prodigiously powerful machine,
with 32 parallel processors capable of examining 200 million positions
each second. If this silicon monster cannot defeat a mere human at
chess, what hope is there that computers will ever mimic our more
subtle talents, like recognizing a college sweetheart at a cocktail party
and instantly thinking of just the right thing to say to make her regret
dumping you 15 years ago?

The Chaoplexity Gambit

S ince my book’s original publication I have developed a couple of

additional arguments about the limits of chaos and complexity—
which I snidely lump together under the term chaoplexity. One of the
most profound goals of chaoplexity—pursued by Stuart Kauffman, Per
Bak, John Holland, and others—is the elucidation of a new law, or set
of principles, or unified theory, or something that will make it possible
to understand and predict the behavior of a wide variety of seemingly

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dissimilar complex systems. A closely related proposal is that the uni-

verse harbors a complexity-generating force that counteracts the sec-
ond law of thermodynamics and creates galaxies, life, and even life
intelligent enough to contemplate itself.
For such hypotheses to be meaningful, proponents must tell us
what, exactly, complexity is and how it can be measured. We all sense
intuitively that life today is more “complex” than it was 2,000, or
2,000,000, or 2,000,000,000 years ago, but how can that intuition be
quantified in a nonarbitrary way? Until or unless this problem is solved,
all these hypotheses about laws of complexity or complexity-generat-
ing forces are meaningless. I doubt (surprise, surprise) that the problem
can be solved. Underlying most definitions of complexity is the notion
that the complexity of a phenomenon is proportional to its improba-
bility, or inversely proportional to its inevitability. If we shake a bag of
molecules, how likely are we to get a galaxy, a planet, a paramecium, a
frog, a stock broker? The best way to answer such questions would be
to find other universes or other biological systems and analyze them
statistically. That is obviously not possible.
Chaoplexologists nonetheless contend that they can answer these
probability questions by constructing alternative universes and life
histories in computers and determining which features are robust and
which are contingent, or ephemeral. This hope stems, I believe, from
an overly optimistic interpretation of certain developments in com-
puter science and mathematics. Over the past few decades, researchers
have found that various simple rules, when followed by a computer,
can generate patterns that appear to vary randomly as a function of
time or scale. Let’s call this illusory randomness “pseudo-noise.” The
paradigmatic pseudo-noisy system is the Mandelbrot set, which has
become an icon of the chaoplexity movement. The fields of both chaos
and complexity have held out the hope that much of the noise that
seems to pervade nature is actually pseudo-noise, the result of some
underlying, deterministic algorithm.
But the noise that makes it so difficult to predict earthquakes, the
stock market, the weather, and other phenomena is not apparent but
very real, in my view, and will never be reduced to any simple set of

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rules. To be sure, faster computers and advanced mathematical tech-

niques will improve our ability to predict certain complicated phenom-
ena. Popular impressions notwithstanding, weather forecasting has
become more accurate over the last few decades, in part because of
improvements in computer modeling. But even more important are
improvements in data-gathering—notably satellite imaging. Meteorol-
ogists have a larger, more accurate database upon which to build their
models and against which to test them. Forecasts improve through
this dialectic between simulation and data-gathering.
At some point, computer models drift over the line from science per
se toward (shudder) engineering. The model either works or doesn’t
work according to some standard of effectiveness; “truth” is irrelevant.
Moreover, chaos theory tells us that the butterfly effect imposes a fun-
damental limit on forecasting. One has to know the initial conditions
of certain systems with infinite precision to be able to predict their
course. This is something that has always puzzled me about chaoplex-
ologists: According to one of their fundamental tenets, the butterfly
effect, many of their goals may be impossible to achieve.
Chaoplexologists are not alone in addressing questions concerning
the probability of various features of reality. These questions have also
spawned such ironic hypotheses as the anthropic principle, inflation,
multiuniverse theories, punctuated equilibrium, and Gaia. Unfortu-
nately, you cannot determine the probability of the universe or of life
on earth when you have only one universe and one history of life to
contemplate. Statistics require more than one data point.
Lack of empirical data does not stop scientists and philosophers
from holding strong opinions on these matters. On one side are inevi-
tabilists, who take comfort in theories portraying reality as the highly
probable and even necessary outcome of immutable laws. Most scien-
tists are inevitabilists; perhaps the most prominent was Einstein, who
rejected quantum mechanics because it implies that God plays dice
with the universe. But there are some prominent anti-inevitabilists—
notably Karl Popper, Stephen Jay Gould, and Ilya Prigogine—who see
scientific determinism as a threat to human freedom and thus embrace
uncertainty and randomness. We are either pawns of destiny or wildly
improbable flukes. Take your pick.

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 lOOSE ENDS • 289

Life on Mars?

I n August 1996, two months after my book was published, scientists

from NASA and elsewhere announced that they had discovered
traces of fossilized microbial life in a meteorite fragment that had
made its way from Mars to Antarctica. Commentators immediately
seized upon this finding as proof of the absurdity of the suggestion that
science might be ending. But far from disproving my thesis, the life-
on-Mars story corroborates my assertion that science is in the throes
of a great crisis. I am not cynical enough to believe what some observ-
ers have suggested, that NASA officials touted what they knew were
flimsy findings in an effort to drum up more funds. But the hyperbolic
response to the story—by NASA, politicians, the media, the public, and
some scientists—demonstrates how desperate everyone is for a genu-
inely profound scientific discovery.
As I stated at several points in my book, the confirmation that we
are not alone in the universe would represent one of the most thrilling
events in human history. I hope to live long enough to witness such
a revelation. But the finding of the NASA group doesn’t come close.
From the beginning, scientists who are truly knowledgeable about pri-
mordial biochemistry doubted that the life-on-Mars story would hold
up. In December 1996, two groups of scientists independently reported
in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta that the alleged biolog-
ical materials found in the Martian meteorite had probably been gen-
erated by nonbiological processes or by contamination from terrestrial
organisms. “Death knell for Martian life,” lamented the December
21/28, 1996 issue of New Scientist.
We will only know for certain whether life exists on Mars when or
if we conduct a thorough search on the planet. Our best hope is for
a human crew to drill deep below the surface, where there may be
enough liquid water and heat to sustain microbial life as we know it. It
will take decades, at least, for space officials to muster the money and
technical resources for such a mission, even if politicians and the public
are willing to pay for it.
Let’s say that we do eventually determine that microbial life existed
or still exists on Mars. That finding would provide an enormous boost

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 290 • THE END OF SCiENCE

for origin-of-life studies and biology in general. But would it mean that
science is suddenly liberated from all its physical constraints? Hardly.
If we find life on Mars, we will know that life exists elsewhere in
this solar system. But we will be just as ignorant about whether life
exists beyond our solar system, and we will still face huge obstacles to
answering that question definitively.
Astronomers have recently identified a number of nearby stars
orbited by planets, which may be capable of sustaining life. But Frank
Drake, a physicist who was one of the founders of the Search for Extra-
terrestrial Intelligence program, called SETI, has estimated that cur-
rent spacecraft would take 400,000 years to reach the nearest of these
planetary systems and establish whether they are inhabited. Someday,
perhaps, the radio receivers employed in the SETI program will pick
up electromagnetic signals—the alien equivalent of I Love Lucy—ema-
nating from another star.
But as Ernst Mayr, one of this century’s most eminent evolutionary
biologists, has pointed out, most SETI proponents are physicists like
Drake, who have an extremely deterministic view of reality. Physicists
think that the existence of a highly technological civilization here on
earth makes it highly probable that similar civilizations exist within
signaling distance of earth. Biologists like Mayr find this view ludi-
crous, because they know how much contingency—just plain luck—
is involved in evolution; rerun the great experiment of life a million
times over and it might not produce mammals, let alone mammals
smart enough to invent television. In an essay in the 1995 Cambridge
University Press edition of Extraterrestrials: Where Are They?, Mayr con-
cluded that the SETI program is bucking odds of “astronomical dimen-
sions.” Although I think Mayr is probably right, 1 was still dismayed
when Congress terminated the funding for SETI in 1993. The program
now limps along on private funds.

The Woo-Woo Stuff

F inally, there is the concluding section of my book, which veers into

theology and mysticism, or what one acquaintance called “woo-woo

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 lOOSE ENDS • 291

stuff.” I was worried that some reviewers would use this material to
dismiss me—and thus my overall argument about the future of sci-
ence—as irremediably flakey. Fortunately, that did not really happen.
Most reviewers either ignored the epilogue or briefly expressed puzzle-
ment over it.
The most astute—or should I say sympathetic?—interpretation was
offered by the physicist Robert Park in the Washington Post Book World,
August 11, 1996. He said that initially he was disappointed that I ended
the book with “naive ironic science gone mad.” But on further reflec-
tion he concluded that the ending was “a metaphor. This, Horgan is
warning, is where science is headed. . . . Science has manned the battle-
ments against the postmodern heresy that there is no objective truth,
only to discover postmodernism inside the wall.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. But I had other motives in mind
as well. First, I felt it was only fair to reveal that I am as subject to
metaphysical fantasies as those scientists whose views I mocked in
the book. Also, the mystical episode I describe in the epilogue is the
most important experience of my life. It had been burning a hole in my
pocket, as it were, for more than ten years, and I was determined to
make use of it, even if it meant damaging what little credibility I may
have as a journalist.
There is only one theological question that really matters: If there is
a God, why has he created a world with so much suffering? My experi-
ence suggested an answer: If there is a God, he created the world out of
terror and desperation as well as out of joy and love. This is my solution
to the riddle of existence, and I had to share it. Let me be completely
frank here. My real purpose in writing The End of Science was to found
a new religion, “The Church of the Holy Horror.” Being a cult leader
should be a nice change of pace from—not to mention more lucrative
than—science journalism.
New York, January 1997

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9780465065929-text.indd 292 2/2/15 3:24 PM
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
could never have written this book if Scientific American had not
generously allowed and even encouraged me to pursue my own
interests. Scientific American has also permitted me to adapt mate-
rial from the following articles that I wrote for the magazine (copy-
right by Scientific American, Inc., all rights reserved): “Profile: Clifford
Geertz,” July 1989; “Profile: Roger Penrose,” November 1989; “Pro-
file: Noam Chomsky,” May 1990; “In the Beginning,” February 1991;
“Profile: Thomas Kuhn,” May 1991; “Profile: John Wheeler,” June 1991;
“Profile: Edward Witten,” November 1991; “Profile: Francis Crick,”
February 1992; “Profile: Karl Popper,” November 1992; “Profile: Paul
Feyerabend,” May 1993; “Profile: Freeman Dyson,” August 1993; “Pro-
file: Marvin Minsky,” November 1993; “Profile: Edward Wilson,” April
1994; “Can Science Explain Consciousness?” July 1994; “Profile: Fred
Hoyle,” March 1995; “From Complexity to Perplexity,” June 1995; “Pro-
file: Stephen Jay Gould,” August 1995. I have also been granted permis-
sion to reprint excerpts from the following: The Coming of the Golden
Age, by Gunther Stent, Natural History Press, Garden City, N.Y., 1969;
Scientific Progress, by Nicholas Rescher, Blackwell, Oxford, U.K., 1978;
Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyerabend, Verso, London, 1987; and Cos-
mic Discovery, by Martin Harwit, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984.
I am indebted to my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, for helping me turn
an amorphous idea into a coherent proposal, and to Bill Patrick and Jeff
Robbins of Addison-Wesley, for providing just the right combination of
criticism and encouragement. I am grateful to friends, acquaintances
and colleagues at Scientific American and elsewhere who have given me
feedback of various kinds, in some cases over a period of years. They
293

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 294 • ACKNOWlEDGMENTS

include, in alphabetical order, Tim Beardsley, Roger Bingham, Chris

Bremser, Fred Guterl, George Johnson, John Rennie, Phil Ross, Russell
Ruthen, Gary Stix, Paul Wallich, Karen Wright, Robert Wright, and
Glenn Zorpette.

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 NOTES

PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

1. In 2007 the great cultural critic George Steiner invited me—as well as big shots
like Freeman Dyson, Gerald Edelman and Lewis Wolpert—to speak at a confer-
ence he organized in Lisbon, Portugal, “Is Science Nearing Its Limits?”, inspired
in part by my book. In his opening remarks Steiner said, “Could it be that scien-
tific theory and praxis are running up against walls of a fundamental, insuperable
order? Even to raise this question is to touch on certain taboos, on dogma which
have underwritten our civilization.” You’re telling me, George. The conference
proceedings were published in Is Science Nearing Its Limits?, Lives and Letters, 2008.
In 2013 Ivar Giaever, a Nobel laureate in physics, said: “Maybe we have come to
the end of science, maybe science is a finite field. The inventions resulting from
this finite field, however, are boundless. Is this the end of science then? Many sci-
entists dismiss it, but I agree.” See “We have come to the end of pure science: Ivar
Giaever,” by Nikita Mehta, Live Mint, December 24, 2013 (http://www.livemint
.com/Politics/JVpA3xKlQGbE8vSt1sepLI/We-have-come-to-the-end-of-pure
-sciences-Ivar-Giaever.html).
2. For a classic example, see “Are we nearing the end of science?” by Joel Achen-
bach, the Washington Post, February 10, 2014 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/
national/health-science/are-we-nearing-the-end-of-science/2014/02/07/5541b420
-89c1-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html).
3. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” by John Ioannidis, PLOS
Medicine, August 30, 2005 (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi
%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124).
4. “An Epidemic of False Claims,” by John Ioannidis, Scientific American, May 17, 2011
(http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-false-claims/).
5. “Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications,” by Ferric
Fang et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 1, 2012 (http://www
.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/27/1212247109).
6. The Economist, October 19, 2013 (http://www.economist.com/news/briefing
/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble).

295

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 296 • NOTES

7. “Daniel Kahneman sees ‘Train-Wreck Looming’ for Social Psychology,” October

4, 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator
/daniel-kahneman-sees-train-wreck-looming-for-social-psychology/31338).
8. Kaku and I made this bet under the auspices of the Long Bet Foundation (http://
longbets.org/12/).
9. See The Cosmic Landscape, by Leonard, Back Bay Books, 2006. Actually, don’t see it,
just take my word for it.
10. Sean Carroll knocks falsification in a 2014 essay published on Edge.org, the website
overseen by science-book agent John Brockman (http://edge.org/response-detail
/25322). Carroll was responding to Brockman’s question: “What scientific idea is
ready for retirement?”
11. Stephen Hawking slams philosophy in The Grand Design, co-written with Leonard
Mlodinow, Bantam, 2012; and Lawrence Krauss in an online interview with Ross
Andersen in The Atlantic, April 23, 2012 (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology
/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/).
12. Philosopher/physicist David Albert makes this point in a vicious (in a good way)
review of Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing, New York Times Book Review, March 23,
2012.
13. For a beautifully written report on the quest for exoplanets, see Five Billion Years of
Solitude, by Lee Billings, Current, 2013.
14. 2011 report in the New York Times: “A Romp into Theories of the Cradle of Life,” by
Dennis Overbye, New York Times, February 21, 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011
/02/22/science/22origins.html?_r=1&ref=science).
15. Francis Collins made these statements in a National Institutes of Health press
release, April 14, 2003 (http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/apr2003/nhgri-14.htm).
16. See online list kept by Journal of Gene Medicine (http://www.wiley.com/legacy
/wileychi/genmed/clinical/).
17. See “The War on Cancer: A Progress Report for Skeptics,: by Reynold Spector, Skep-
tical Inquirer, February 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/health/policy
/24cancer.html?_r=0).
18. See my blog post, “Have researchers really discovered any genes for behavior?”, May 2,
2011, Scientific American, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2011/05/02
/have-researchers-really-discovered-any-genes-for-behavior-candidates-welcome/.
19. “You Don’t Have Free Will,” by Jerry Coyne, the Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 18, 2012 (http://chronicle.com/article/Jerry-A-Coyne/131165/).
20. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham makes this claim in Demonic Males, co-written
with journalist Dale Peterson, Mariner Books, 1997, and Edward Wilson in The
Social Conquest of the Earth, Liveright, 2012. I rebutted the claim in “No, War Is Not
Inevitable,” Discover, June 12, 2012 (http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/02-no
-war-is-not-inevitable), and in my book The End of War, McSweeney’s, 2012.
21. “Fury at DNA pioneer’s theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners,” by
Cahal Milmo, The Independent, October 17, 2007 (http://www.independent.co.uk
/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than
-westerners-394898.html). Watson is quoted saying of blacks: “All our social poli-
cies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all
the testing says not really.”

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 NOTES • 297

22. I explore the neural code in “The Consciousness Conundrum,” IEEE

Spectrum, June 2008 (http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/
the-consciousness-conundrum).
23. Christof Koch defends psychism in “Is Consciousness Universal?” Scientific American,
December 19, 2013 (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness
-universal/).
24. See “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” by Marcia Angell, The New York Review of Books,
July 14, 2011 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of
-psychiatry/).
25. See “The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story,” by Steve Lohr, the
New York Times, February 1, 2013 (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the
-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/). Lohr gives priority to John
Mashey, a computer scientist at Silicon Graphics who started talking about “Big
Data” in the 1990s.
26. “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,”
by Chris Anderson, WIRED, June 23, 2008 (http://archive.wired.com/science
/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory).
27. The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil, Penguin, 2006.
28. See “Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday,” by Ashlee Vance, the New York Times,
June 12, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html?page
wanted=all).
29. For more of my cranky takes on science, see also my website, johnhorgan.org, and
my Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”

INTRODUCTION: SEARCHING FOR THE ANSWER

1. The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.
The review of the book, by the astronomer and author Timothy Ferris, appeared
in the New York Times Book Review on November 19, 1989, p. 3.
2. My profile of Penrose was published in the November 1989 issue of Scientific Amer-
ican, pp. 30–33.
3. My meeting with Penrose in Syracuse took place in August 1989.
4. This definition of irony is based on that set forth by Northrop Frye in his classic
work of literary theory, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press, Prince-
ton, N.J., 1957.
5. The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973.
6. Ibid., p. 21.
7. Ibid., p. 22.

CHAPTER ONE: THE END OF PROGRESS

1. The proceedings of the Gustavus Adolphus symposium were published as The End
of Science? Attack and Defense, edited by Richard Q. Selve, University Press of Amer-
ica, Lanham, Md., 1992.
2. The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, Gunther S. Stent, Natural
History Press, Garden City, N.Y., 1969. See also Stent’s contribution to Selve, End of
Science?
3. See The Education of Henry Adams, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 1918

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 298 • NOTES

(reprinted by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1961). Adams set forth his law of accelera-
tion in chapter 34, written in 1904.
4. Stent, Golden Age, p. 94.
5. Ibid., p. 111.
6. Linus Pauling set forth his prodigious knowledge of chemistry in The Nature of
the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals, published in 1939 and
reissued in 1960 by Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. It remains one of the
most influential scientific texts of all time. Pauling told me that he had solved the
basic problems of chemistry almost a decade before his book was published. When
I interviewed him in Stanford, California, in September 1992, Pauling said: “I felt
that by the end of 1930, or even the middle, that organic chemistry was pretty well
taken care of, and inorganic chemistry and mineralogy—except the sulfide min-
erals, where even now more work needs to be done.” Pauling died on August 19,
1994.
7. Stent, Golden Age, p. 74.
8. Ibid., p. 115.
9. Ibid., p. 138.
10. I interviewed Stent in Berkeley in June 1992.
11. I found this dispiriting fact on page 371 of Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timo-
thy Ferris, Doubleday, New York, 1988. For a deflating retrospective of the U.S.
manned space program, written for the 25th anniversary of the first lunar land-
ing, see “25 Years Later, Moon Race in Eclipse,” by John Nobel Wilford, New York
Times, July 17, 1994, p. 1.
12. This pessimistic (optimistic?) view of senescence can be found in “Aging as the
Fountain of Youth,” chapter 8 of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian
Medicine, by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, Times Books, New
York, 1994. Williams is one of the underacknowledged deans of modern evolu-
tionary biology. See also his classic paper, “Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the
Evolution of Senescence,” Evolution, vol. 11, 1957, pp. 398–411.
13. Michelson’s remarks have been passed down in several different versions. The one
quoted here was published in Physics Today, April 1968, p. 9.
14. Michelson’s decimal-point comment was erroneously attributed to Kelvin on page
3 of Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? edited by Paul C. Davies and Julian Brown,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 1988. This book is also notable for
revealing that the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman harbored a deep skepticism
toward superstring theory.
15. Stephen Brush offered this analysis of physics at the end of the nineteenth century
in “Romance in Six Figures,” Physics Today, January 1969, p. 9.
16. See, for example, “The Completeness of Nineteenth-Century Science,” by Law-
rence Badash, Isis, vol. 63, 1972, pp. 48–58. Badash, a historian of science at the
University of California at Santa Barbara, concluded (p. 58) that “the malaise of
completeness was far from virulent . . . it was more a ‘low-grade infection,’ but
nevertheless very real” [italics in original].
17. Daniel Koshland’s essay, “The Crystal Ball and the Trumpet Call,” and the special
section on predictions that followed it can be found in Science, March 17, 1995.

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 NOTES • 299

The legend of the nearsighted patent commissioner was reiterated by cybermag-

nate Bill Gates on page xiii of his 1995 bestseller The Road Ahead, cowritten with
Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, Viking, New York.
18. “Nothing Left to Invent,” Eber Jeffery, Journal of the Patent Office Society, July 1940,
pp. 479–481. I am indebted to the historian of science Morgan Sherwood of the
University of California at Davis for locating Jeffery’s article for me.
19. The Idea of Progress, J. B. Bury, Macmillan, New York, 1932. My summary of Bury’s
views is adapted from Stent, Golden Age.
20. The Paradoxes of Progress, Gunther S. Stent, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1978, p.
27. This book contains several chapters from Stent’s earlier book, The Coming of the
Golden Age, plus new discussions of biology, morality, and the cognitive limits of
science.
21. Science: The Endless Frontier, by Vannevar Bush, was reissued by the National Sci-
ence Foundation, Washington, D.C., in 1990.
22. I found this quote from Engels in Scientific Progress, by Nicholas Rescher, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford, U.K., 1978, pp. 123–124. Rescher, a philosopher at the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh, also provided several references to show that Engels’s belief in
the infinite potential of science had persisted among modern Marxists. See also
the prologue to Paradoxes of Progress, in which Stent noted that the most critical
review of The Coming of the Golden Age was that of a Soviet philosopher, V. Kelle,
who argued that science was eternal and that Stent’s end-of-science thesis was a
symptom of the decadence of capitalism.
23. Havel’s remarks can be found in Science and Anti-Science, by Gerald Holton, Har-
vard University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 175–176. Holton is a philosopher at
Harvard University.
24. This view of Spengler’s work is abstracted from Holton, Science and Anti-Science.
In Science and Anti-Science as well as in other publications (including an essay
in Scientific American , October 1995, p. 191), Holton has attempted to repudiate
the notion that science is ending by appealing to the authority of Einstein, who
often suggested that the search for scientific truths is eternal. It seems not to have
occurred to Holton that Einstein’s views reflected wishful thinking rather than a
hard-nosed assessment of science’s prospects. Holton has also suggested that those
who think science is ending are in general opposed to science and rationality. Of
course, modern predictions that science is approaching a culmination have come
for the most part not from antirationalists, such as Havel, but from scientists, such
as Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, and Francis Crick, who believe that sci-
ence is the supreme route to truth.
25. “Science: Endless Horizons or Golden Age?” Bentley Glass, Science, January
8, 1971, pp. 23–29. Glass, the retiring president of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS), had previously delivered this lecture at the
annual meeting of the AAAS in Chicago on December 28, 1970.
26. “Milestones and Rates of Growth in the Development of Biology,” Bentley Glass,
Quarterly Review of Biology, March 1979, pp. 31–53.
27. My telephone interview with Glass took place in June 1994.
28. “Hard Times,” Leo Kadanoff, Physics Today, October 1992, pp. 9–11.

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29. My telephone interview with Kadanoff took place in August 1994.

30. Rescher, Scientific Progress, p. 37.
31. Ibid., p. 207. Although I disagree with Rescher’s analysis of science’s prospects, his
books, Scientific Progress and The Limits of Science, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1984, are unparalleled sources of information for anyone interested in
the limits of science. Both books, unfortunately, are out of print.
32. Bentley Glass’s review of Rescher’s Scientific Progress was published in the Quarterly
Review of Biology, December 1979, pp. 417–419.
33. I have lifted this remark by Kant from Rescher’s Scientific Progress, p. 246.
34. The meaning of Bacon’s phrase plus ultra is discussed in The Limits of Science, by
Peter Medawar, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984. Medawar was a promi-
nent British biologist.
35. Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
New York, 1971, p. 474.

CHAPTER TWO: THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

1. “Where Science Has Gone Wrong,” T. Theocharis and M. Psimopoulos, Nature,
vol. 329, October 15, 1987, pp. 595–598.
2. Peirce’s view of the relationship between science and final truth is discussed in
Rescher’s The Limits of Science (see note 31 to Chapter 1). See also Peirce’s Selected
Writings, edited by Philip Wiener, Dover Publications, New York, 1966.
3. Popper’s major works include The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Springer, Berlin,
1934 (reprinted by Basic Books, New York, 1959); The Open Society and Its Enemies,
Routledge, London, 1945 (reprinted by Princeton University Press, Princeton,
N.J., 1966); and Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge, London, 1963 (reprinted by
Harper and Row, New York, 1968). Popper’s autobiography, Unended Quest, Open
Court, La Salle, Ill., 1985, and Popper Selections, edited by David Miller, Prince-
ton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1985, provide excellent introductions to his
thought.
4. See “Who Killed Logical Positivism?” chapter 17 of Popper’s Unended Quest.
5. Ibid., p. 116.
6. My interview with Popper took place in August 1992.
7. My article on quantum mechanics, “Quantum Philosophy,” was published in Sci-
entific American, July 1992, pp. 94–103.
8. See The Self and Its Brain, by Popper and John C. Eccles, Springer-Verlag, Berlin,
1977. Eccles won a Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work in neural signaling. I discuss
his views in Chapter 7.
9. Günther Wächtershäuser has set forth his theory of the origin of life in the Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 87, 1990, pp. 200–204.
10. Popper discussed his doubts about Darwin’s theory in “Natural Selection and Its
Scientific Status,” chapter 10 of Popper Selections.
11. Mrs. Mew was looking for Popper’s book A World of Propensities, Routledge, Lon-
don, 1990.
12. Nature published an homage to Popper by the physicist Hermann Bondi on July 30,
1992, p. 363. The occasion was the philosopher’s 90th birthday.

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13. The Economist published its obituary of Popper on September 24, 1994, p. 92. Pop-
per had died on September 17.
14. Popper, Unended Quest, p. 105.
15. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1962. (Page numbers refer to the 1970 edition.) My interview with Kuhn
took place in February 1991.
16. Scientific American, May 1964, pp. 142–144.
17. Kuhn’s comparison of scientists to addicts and to the brainwashed characters in
1984 can be found on pages 38 and 167 of Structure.
18. I originally made this snide remark about the Bush administration’s New Para-
digm in a profile of Kuhn in Scientific American, May 1991, pp. 40–49. Later I
received a letter of complaint from James Pinkerton, who was then deputy assis-
tant to President Bush for policy planning and had coined the term New Paradigm.
Pinkerton insisted that the New Paradigm was “not a rehashing of Reaganomics;
instead it is a coherent set of ideas and principles that emphasize choice, empower-
ment, and accomplishing more with less centralized control.”
19. The charge that Kuhn defined paradigm in 21 different ways can be found in
“The Nature of a Paradigm,” by Margaret Masterman, in Criticism and the Growth
of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, Cambridge University
Press, New York, 1970.
20. Against Method, Paul Feyerabend, Verso, London, 1975 (reprinted in 1993).
21. The “positivistic teacup” remark can be found in Farewell to Reason, by Paul Feyer-
abend, Verso, London, 1987, p. 282.
22. Feyerabend’s organized crime analogy can be found in his essay “Consolations for
a Specialist,” in Lakatos and Musgrave, Growth of Knowledge.
23. Feyerabend’s outrageous utterances were recounted in a surprisingly sympathetic
profile by William J. Broad, now a science reporter for the New York Times: “Paul
Feyerabend: Science and the Anarchist,” Science, November 2, 1979, pp. 534–537.
24. Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason, p. 309.
25. Ibid., p. 313.
26. Isis, vol. 2, 1992, p. 368.
27. Feyerabend died on February 11, 1994, in Geneva. The New York Times ran his obit-
uary on March 8.
28. Killing Time, Paul Feyerabend, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995.
29. After Philosophy: End or Transformation? edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman,
and Thomas McCarthy, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1987.
30. Problems in Philosophy, Colin McGinn, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, Mass., 1993.
31. “The Zahir” can be found in A Personal Anthology, by Jorge Luis Borges, Grove
Press, New York, 1967. This collection also contains two other chilling stories
about absolute knowledge: “Funes, the Memorious” and “The Aleph.”
32. Ibid., p. 137.

CHAPTER THREE: THE END OF PHYSICS

1. Einstein’s remark can be found in Theories of Everything, by John Barrow, Claren-
don Press, Oxford, U.K., 1991, p. 88.

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2. Glashow’s full remarks are reprinted in The End of Science? Attack and Defense,
edited by Richard Q. Selve, University Press of America, Lanham, Md., 1992.
3. “Desperately Seeking Superstrings,” Sheldon Glashow and Paul Ginsparg, Physics
Today, May 1986, p. 7.
4. “A Theory of Everything,” K. C. Cole, New York Times Magazine, October 18, 1987,
p. 20. This article provided me with most of the personal information on Witten in
this chapter. I interviewed Witten in August 1991.
5. See Science Watch (published by the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadel-
phia, Pa.), September 1991, p. 4.
6. Barrow, Theories of Everything.
7. The End of Physics, David Lindley, Basic Books, New York, 1993.
8. See “Is the Principia Publishable Now?” by John Maddox, Nature, August 3, 1995, p.
385.
9. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye, HarperCollins, New York, 1992, p. 372.
10. Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg, Pantheon, New York, 1992, p. 18.
11. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg, Basic Books, New York, 1977, p. 154.
12. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 253.
13. Hyperspace, Michio Kaku, Oxford University Press, New York, 1994.
14. The Mind of God, Paul C. Davies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992. The judges
who awarded Davies the Templeton Prize included George Bush and Margaret
Thatcher.
15. Bethe first publicly discussed his fateful calculation in “Ultimate Catastrophe?”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1976, pp. 36–37. The article is reprinted in a col-
lection of Bethe’s papers, The Road from Los Alamos, American Institute of Physics,
New York, 1991. I interviewed Bethe at Cornell in October 1991.
16. “What’s Wrong with Those Epochs?” David Mermin, Physics Today, November
1990, pp. 9–11.
17. Wheeler’s essays and papers have been collected in At Home in the Universe, Amer-
ican Institute of Physics Press, Woodbury, N.Y., 1994. I interviewed Wheeler in
April 1991.
18. See page 5 of Wheeler’s essay “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for
Links,” in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, edited by Wojciech H.
Zurek, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1990.
19. Ibid., p. 18.
20. This quotation, and the preceding story about Wheeler’s appearing with parapsy-
chologists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting,
can be found in “Physicist John Wheeler: Retarded Learner,” by Jeremy Bernstein,
Princeton Alumni Weekly, October 9, 1985, pp. 28–41.
21. For a concise introduction to Bohm’s career, see “Bohm’s Alternative to Quantum
Mechanics,” by David Albert, Scientific American, May 1994, pp. 58–67. Portions
of this section on Bohm appeared in my article “Last Words of a Quantum Here-
tic,” New Scientist, February 27, 1993, pp. 38–42. Bohm set forth his philosophy in
Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, New York, 1983 (first printed in 1980).
22. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, Bohm’s original paper on his alternative inter-
pretation of quantum mechanics, and many other seminal articles on quantum

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 NOTES • 303

mechanics can be found in Quantum Theory and Measurement, edited by John Wheeler
and Wojciech H. Zurek, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1983.
23. Science, Order, and Creativity, David Bohm and F. David Peat, Bantam Books, New
York, 1987.
24. I interviewed Bohm in August 1992. He died on October 27. Before his death he
cowrote another book setting forth his views, which was published two years
later, The Undivided Universe, by Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, Routledge, London, 1994.
25. The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynman, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1967, p.
172. (Feynman’s book was first published in 1965 by the BBC.)
26. Ibid., p. 173.
27. The symposium, “The Interpretation of Quantum Theory: Where Do We Stand?”
took place at Columbia University, April 1-4, 1992.
28. I have seen many versions of this quote from Bohr. Mine comes from an interview
with John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr.
29. For an excellent analysis of the state of physics, see “Physics, Community, and the
Crisis in Physical Theory,” by Silvan S. Schweber, Physics Today, November 1993,
pp. 34–40. Schweber, a distinguished historian of physics at Brandeis University,
suggests that physics will increasingly be directed toward utilitarian goals rather
than toward knowledge for its own sake. I wrote about the difficulties that face
physicists who are trying to achieve a unified theory in “Particle Metaphysics,”
Scientific American, February 1994, pp. 96–105. In an earlier article for Scientific
American, “Quantum Philosophy,” July 1992, pp. 94–103, I reviewed current work
on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

CHAPTER FOUR; THE END OF COSMOLOGY

1. Hawking’s lecture and the other proceedings of the Nobel symposium, which
was held June 11–16, 1990, in Gräftvallen, Sweden, were published as The Birth
and Early Evolution of Our Universe, edited by J. S. Nilsson, B. Gustafsson, and B.-S.
Skagerstam, World Scientific, London, 1991. I also wrote an article based on the
meeting, “Universal Truths,” Scientific American, October 1990, pp. 108–117. I had
a disturbing encounter with Stephen Hawking on my first day at the Nobel sym-
posium, when all the participants of the meeting were herded into the woods for
a cocktail party. We were within sight of the tables bearing food and drink when
Hawking’s wheelchair, which was being pushed by one of his nurses, jammed in a
rut in the path. The nurse asked if I would mind carrying Hawking the rest of the
way to the party. Hawking, when I scooped him up, was disconcertingly light and
stiff, like a bundle of sticks. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and found
him already eyeing me suspiciously. Abruptly, his face twisted into an agonized
grimace; his body shuddered violently, and he emitted a gargling noise. My first
thought was: A man is dying in my arms! How horrible! My second thought was:
Stephen Hawking is dying in my arms! What a story! That thought was surrender-
ing in turn to shame at the depths of my opportunism when the nurse, who had
noticed Hawking’s distress, and mine, hustled up to us. “Don’t worry,” she said,
gathering Hawking gently into her arms. “This happens to him all the time. He’ll
be all right.”

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2. A condensed version of Hawking’s lecture, which he delivered on April 29, 1980,

was published in the British journal Physics Bulletin (now called Physics World), Jan-
uary 1981, pp. 15–17.
3. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, Bantam Books, New York, 1988, p. 175.
4. Ibid., p. 141.
5. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbon, Dutton, New
York, 1992. This book also documents Hawking’s transformation from a physicist
into an international celebrity.
6. See the interview with Hawking in Science Watch, September 1994. Hawking’s
views on the end of physics are discussed in several books cited in Chapter 3,
including The Mind of God, by Paul C. Davies; Theories of Everything, by John Bar-
row; Dreams of a Final Theory, by Steven Weinberg; Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, by
Dennis Overbye; and The End of Physics, by David Lindley. See also Fire in the Mind,
by George Johnson, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995, for a particularly subtle dis-
cussion of whether science can attain absolute truth.
7. Schramm’s mainstream view of cosmology is set forth in The Shadows of Creation,
by Schramm and Michael Riordan, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1991. In 1994,
Schramm’s coauthor, Riordan, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, bet
me a case of California wine that by the end of the century Alan Guth, who is gen-
erally credited with having “discovered” inflation, would win a Nobel Prize for
his work. I mention this bet here only because I am sure that I will win it.
8. Linde set forth his theory in “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Sci-
entific American, November 1994, pp. 48–55. Those who want more on Linde can
sample his books Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology, Harwood Academic
Publishers, New York, 1990; and Inflation and Quantum Cosmology, Academic Press,
San Diego, 1990. Portions of this section on Linde appeared in my article “The
Universal Wizard,” Discover, March 1992, pp. 80–85. My interview with Linde at
Stanford took place in April 1991.
9. I spoke to Schramm by telephone in February 1993.
10. I interviewed Georgi at Harvard in November 1993.
11. Hoyle provided a charming retrospective of his tumultuous career in Home Is
Where the Wind Blows, University Science Books, Mill Valley, Calif., 1994. I inter-
viewed Hoyle at his home in August 1992.
12. See, for example, the review in Nature, May 13, 1993, p. 124, of Our Place in the
Cosmos, J. M. Dent, London, 1993, in which Hoyle and his collaborator, Chandra
Wickramasinghe, argue that the cosmos is teeming with life. Nature’s reviewer,
Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University, asserted that this book and
other recent ones by Hoyle “afford full documentation of the way in which a bril-
liant mind can be turned to the pursuit of bizarre ideas.” When Hoyle’s autobi-
ography was published a year later, the media, which had for years marginalized
Hoyle for his maverick views, showed a sudden fondness for him. See, for example,
“The Space Molecule Man,” Marcus Chown, New Scientist, September 10, 1994, pp.
24-27.
13. “And the Winner Is . . . ,” Sky and Telescope, March 1994, p. 22.
14. See Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos.

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15. See Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, for an excellent account of the debate over
the Hubble constant.
16. “The Scientist as Rebel,” Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995,
p. 32.
17. Cosmic Discovery, Martin Harwit, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 42–43. In 1995,
Harwit resigned from his job as director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National
Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in the midst of a bitter controversy
over an exhibit he had supervised, called “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and
the End of World War II.” Veterans and others had complained that the exhibit was
too critical of the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
18. Ibid., p. 44.
19. I found this quote from Donne at the end of an essay by the biologist Loren Eisley,
“The Cosmic Prison,” Horizon, Autumn 1970, pp. 96–101.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE END OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

1. See the 1964 Harvard University Press edition of On the Origin of Species, with a
foreword by Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of modern evolutionary theory.
2. Stent, Golden Age, p. 19.
3. I found this remark by Bohr in a book review in Nature, August 6, 1992, p. 464. The
exact quote is: “It is the task of science to reduce deep truths to trivialities.”
4. The gathering with Dawkins took place in November 1994 at the office of John
Brockman, a spectacularly successful agent and public relations expert for
scientist-authors.
5. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, W. W. Norton, New York, 1986, p. ix. The
Wallace referred to by Dawkins is Alfred Russell Wallace, who discovered the con-
cept of natural selection independently of Darwin but never approached Darwin’s
depth or breadth of insight.
6. See “Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?” American Journal of Science, vol. 263, 1965,
pp. 223-228.
7. “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” Stephen Jay
Gould and Niles Eldredge, in Models in Paleobiology, edited by T. J. M. Schopf, W. H.
Freeman, San Francisco, 1972.
8. My favorites among Gould’s many books are The Mismeasure of Man, W. W. Nor-
ton, New York, 1981, both a scholarly history of and an impassioned polemic
against intelligence tests, and Wonderful Life, W. W. Norton, New York, 1989, a
masterful exposition of his view of life as the product of contingency. See also
“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” by Gould and
his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin (a geneticist who, like Gould, is often
accused of Marxist leanings), in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), vol.
205, 1979, pp. 581–598. The article was a devastating critique of simplistic Dar-
winian explanations of physiology and behavior. For an equally sharp attack on
Gould’s evolutionary outlook, see the review of Wonderful Life by Robert Wright
in the New Republic, January 29, 1990.
9. “Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age,” Nature, November 18, 1993, pp. 223–227.
I interviewed Gould in New York City in November 1994.

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10. As reprinted in Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, p. 245. The chapter within which this
quotation is embedded, “Puncturing Punctuationism,” delivers on its title.
11. For a no-nonsense treatment of Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiosis, see her book
Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1981.
12. See Margulis’s contributions to Gaia: The Thesis, the Mechanisms, and the Impli-
cations, edited by P. Bunyard and E. Goldsmith, Wadebridge Ecological Center,
Cornwall, UK, 1988.
13. What Is Life?, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Peter Nevraumont, New York,
1995 (distributed by Simon and Schuster). I interviewed Margulis in May 1994.
14. This claim about Lovelock’s crisis of faith can be found in “Gaia, Gaia: Don’t Go
Away,” by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, May 28, 1994, p. 43.
15. This and other patronizing comments about Margulis can be found in “Lynn Margu-
lis: Science’s Unruly Earth Mother,” by Charles Mann, Science, April 19, 1991, p. 378.
16. The works by Kauffman referred to in this section include “Antichaos and Adap-
tation,” Scientific American, August 1991, pp. 78–84; The Origins of Order, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1993; and At Home in the Universe, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1995.
17. See my article “In the Beginning,” Scientific American, February 1991, p. 123.
18. Brian Goodwin set forth his theory in How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1994.
19. John Maynard Smith’s disparaging remarks about the work of Per Bak and Stuart
Kauffman were reported in Nature, February 16, 1995, p. 555. See also the insight-
ful review of Kauffman’s Origins of Order in Nature, October 21, 1993, pp. 704–706.
20. My February 1991 article in Scientific American (see note 17) reviewed the most
prominent theories of the origin of life. I interviewed Stanley Miller at the Uni-
versity of California at San Diego in November 1990 and again by telephone in
September 1995.
21. Stent, Golden Age, p. 71.
22. Crick’s “miracle” comment can be found on page 88 of his book Life Itself, Simon
and Schuster, New York, 1981.

CHAPTER SIX: THE END OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

1. I interviewed Edward Wilson at Harvard in February 1994. The works by Wilson
alluded to this section include Sociobiology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
1975 (my citations refer to the abridged 1980 edition); On Human Nature, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1978; Genes, Mind, and Culture (with Charles Lums-
den), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981; Promethean Fire (with Lumsden),
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Biophilia, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1984; The Diversity of Life, W. W. Norton, New York, 1993; and Natural-
ist, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 1994.
2. See “The Molecular Wars,” chapter 12 of Naturalist, for a detailed account of this
crisis in Wilson’s career.
3. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 300.
4. These travails are recounted in the chapter titled “The Sociobiology Controversy,”
in Wilson’s Promethean Fire, pp. 23–50.

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5. Wilson, Promethean Fire, pp. 48–49.

6. Christopher Wells, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego, made
these remarks about the theories of Wilson and Lumsden in The Sciences, Novem-
ber/December 1993, p. 39.
7. My own view is that scientists have not been nearly as successful at explaining
human behavior in genetic and Darwinian terms as Wilson seemed to believe. See
my Scientific American articles “Eugenics Revisited,” June 1993, pp. 122–131; and
“The New Social Darwinists,” October 1995, pp. 174–181.
8. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 300–301.
9. See One Long Argument, by Ernst Mayr, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
On page 149 Mayr wrote: “The architects of the evolutionary synthesis [of whom
Mayr was one] have been accused by some critics of claiming that they had solved all
the remaining problems of evolution. This accusation is quite absurd; I do not know
of a single evolutionist who would make such a claim. All that was claimed by the
supporters of the synthesis was that they had arrived at an elaboration of the Dar-
winian paradigm sufficiently robust not to be endangered by remaining puzzles.”
“Puzzles,” it should be recalled, is the term that Thomas Kuhn employed to describe
problems that occupy scientists involved in nonrevolutionary, “normal” science.
10. I found this quotation from Darwin’s The Descent of Man in The Moral Animal, by
Robert Wright, Pantheon, New York, 1994, p. 327. (Wright cites the facsimile edi-
tion of Descent, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1981, p. 73.) This book
by Wright, a journalist associated with The New Republic, is by far the best I have
read on recent scientific attempts to explain human nature in Darwinian terms.
11. Ibid., p. 328.
12. I met with Chomsky at MIT in February 1990. The remarks quoted up to this
point came from that meeting. The remarks quoted hereafter stemmed from a
telephone interview in February 1993. Chomsky’s political essays have been col-
lected in The Chomsky Reader, edited by James Peck, Pantheon, New York, 1987.
13. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992 Macropaedia edition, vol. 23, Linguistics, p. 45.
14. Nature, February 19, 1994, p. 521.
15. Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky, Mouton, The Hague, Netherlands, 1957. In
1995, Chomsky issued yet another book on linguistics, The Minimalist Program,
MIT Press, Cambridge, which extended his earlier work on an innate, generative
grammar. Like most of Chomsky’s books on linguistics, this one is not easy to
read. For a readable account of Chomsky’s career in linguistics, see The Linguistics
Wars, by Randy Allen Harris, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.
16. Steven Pinker, who is also a linguist at MIT, nonetheless argued persuasively that
Chomsky’s work is best understood from a Darwinian viewpoint in The Language
Instinct, William Morrow, New York, 1994.
17. Language and the Problems of Knowledge, Noam Chomsky, MIT Press, Cambridge,
1988, p. 159. Chomsky also spelled out his views on cognitive limits in this book.
18. Stent, Golden Age, p. 121.
19. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” can be found in
Geertz’s collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York,
1973.

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20. Ibid., p. 29.

21. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Clifford Geertz, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, 1988, p. 141.
22. “Deep Play” was collected in The Interpretation of Cultures. This quotation is found
on page 412.
23. Ibid., p. 443.
24. I interviewed Geertz in person at the Institute for Advanced Study in May 1989
and again by telephone in August 1994.
25. After the Fact, Clifford Geertz, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp.
167–168.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE END OF NEUROSCIENCE

1. Crick has written an illuminating account of his career: What Mad Pursuit, Basic
Books, New York, 1988. He spelled out his views on consciousness in The Astonish-
ing Hypothesis, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1994.
2. “Toward a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness,” Francis Crick and Christof
Koch, Seminars in the Neurosciences, vol. 2, 1990, pp. 263–275.
3. I interviewed Crick at the Salk Institute in November 1991.
4. The Double Helix, James Watson, Atheneum, New York, 1968.
5. Crick, What Mad Pursuit, p. 9.
6. Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 3.
7. Edelman’s books on the mind, published by Basic Books, New York, include Neural
Darwinism, 1987; Topobiology, 1988; The Remembered Present, 1989; and Bright Air,
Brilliant Fire, 1992. All these books, even the final one, which was intended to set
forth Edelman’s views in a popular format, are extremely difficult to read.
8. “Dr. Edelman’s Brain,” Steven Levy, New Yorker, May 2, 1994, p. 62.
9. “Plotting a Theory of the Brain,” David Hellerstein, New York Times Magazine, May
22, 1988, p. 16.
10. See Crick’s stinging review of Edelman’s book Neural Darwinism: “Neural Edel-
manism,” Trends in Neurosciences, vol. 12, no. 7, 1989, pp. 240–248.
11. Daniel Dennett reviewed Bright Air, Brilliant Fire in New Scientist, June 13, 1992, p. 48.
12. Koch made this remark at “Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness,” a meet-
ing held in Tucson, Arizona, April 12–17, 1994.
13. Eccles has set forth his views in various publications, including The Self and Its
Brain, cowritten with Karl Popper, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1977; How the Self Con-
trols Its Brain, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1994; “Quantum Aspects of Brain Activity
and the Role of Consciousness,” cowritten with Friedrich Beck, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science, vol. 89, December 1992, pp. 11, 357–11, 361. My inter-
view with Eccles took place by telephone in February 1993.
14. I interviewed Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford in August 1992. Penrose’s
two books on consciousness are The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford University Press,
New York, 1989; and Shadows of the Mind, Oxford University Press, New York,
1994.
15. For criticism of The Emperor’s New Mind, see Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 13,
no. 4, December 1990. This issue has multiple reviews of Penrose’s book. For sharp

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 NOTES • 309

critiques of Shadows of the Mind, see “Shadows of Doubt,” by Philip Anderson (a

prominent physicist), Nature, November 17, 1994, pp. 288–289; and “The Best of
All Possible Brains,” by Hilary Putnam (a prominent philosopher), New York Times
Book Review, November 20, 1994, p. 7.
16. The Science of the Mind, Owen Flanagan, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991. Daniel Den-
nett drew my attention to Flanagan’s term.
17. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” by Thomas Nagel, can be found in Mortal Questions,
Cambridge University Press, New York, 1979, a collection of Nagel’s essays. This
quotation is from page 166. In June 1992, I called Nagel to ask whether he thought
science could ever end. Absolutely not, he replied. “The more you discover, the
more questions there will be,” he said. “Shakespearean criticism can never be
complete,” he added, “so why should physics be?”
18. I interviewed McGinn in New York City in August 1994. See McGinn’s book The
Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, for a full
discussion of his mysterian viewpoint.
19. Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, Little, Brown, Boston, 1991. See also
“The Brain and Its Boundaries,” London Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1991, in
which Dennett attacks McGinn’s mysterian position. I spoke to Dennett about the
mysterian viewpoint by telephone in April 1994.
20. “Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness” took place in Tucson, Arizona, April
12-17, 1994. It was organized by Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the Uni-
versity of Arizona whose work on microtubules had influenced Roger Penrose’s
view of the role of quantum effects in consciousness. The meeting was thus dom-
inated by speakers from the quantum-consciousness school of neuroscience. They
included not only Roger Penrose but also Brian Josephson, a Nobel laureate in
physics who has suggested that quantum effects can explain mystical and even
psychic phenomena; Andrew Weil, a physician and authority on psychedelia who
has asserted that a complete theory of the mind must take into account the ability
of South American Indians who have ingested psychotropic drugs to experience
shared hallucinations; and Danah Zohar, a New Age author who has declared that
human thought stems from “quantum fluctuations of the vacuum energy of the
universe,” which “is really God.” I described this meeting in “Can Science Explain
Consciousness?” Scientific American, July 1994, pp. 88–94.
21. David Chalmers set forth his theory of consciousness in Scientific American,
December 1995, pp. 80–86. In an accompanying article, Francis Crick and Christof
Koch offered a rebuttal.
22. I interviewed Minsky at MIT in May 1993. During the interview, Minsky con-
firmed that in 1966 he had told an undergraduate student, Gerald Sussman, to
design, as a summer project, a machine that could recognize objects, or “see.”
Needless to say, Sussman did not succeed (although he did go on to become a pro-
fessor at MIT). Artificial vision remains one of the most profoundly difficult prob-
lems in artificial intelligence. For a critical look at artificial intelligence, see AI: The
Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier, Basic
Books, New York, 1993. See also Jeremy Bernstein’s respectful profile of Minsky in
the New Yorker, December 14, 1981, p. 50.

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 310 • NOTES

23. The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985. The
book is peppered with remarks that reveal Minsky’s ambivalence about the con-
sequences of scientific progress. See, for example, the essay on page 68 titled
“Self-Knowledge Is Dangerous,” in which Minsky declares: “If we could deliber-
ately seize control of our pleasure systems, we could reproduce the pleasure of
success without the need for any actual accomplishment. And that would be the
end of everything.” Gunther Stent predicted that this type of neural stimulation
would be rampant in the new Polynesia.
24. Stent, Golden Age, pp. 73–74.
25. Ibid., p. 74.
26. Gilbert Ryle coined the phrase “ghost in the machine” in his classic attack on dual-
ism, The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, London, 1949.
27. Henry Adams made this reference to Francis Bacon’s materialistic outlook in The
Education of Henry Adams, p. 484 (see note 3 to Chapter 1). According to Adams,
Bacon “urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe from a thought,
and to try evolving thought from the universe.”

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE END OF CHAOPLEXITY

1. The University of Illinois issued this press release on Mayer-Kress in November
1993. My story on Mayer-Kress’s simulation of Star Wars, titled “Nonlinear Think-
ing,” ran in Scientific American, June 1989, pp. 26–28. See also “Chaos in the Inter-
national Arms Race,” by Mayer-Kress and Siegfried Grossman, Nature, February
23, 1989, pp. 701–704.
2. Books that have followed in the wake of James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Sci-
ence, Penguin Books, New York, 1987, and show signs of its influence include Com-
plexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, M. Mitchell Waldrop,
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992; Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, Roger
Lewin, Macmillan, New York, 1992; Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where
Computers Meet Biology, Steven Levy, Vintage, New York, 1992; Complexification:
Explaining a Paradoxical World through the Science of Surprise, John Casti, Harper-
Collins, New York, 1994; The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex
World, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Viking, New York, 1994; and Frontiers of Com-
plexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, Peter Coveny and Roger Highfield,
Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1995. This final book covers much of the material
covered by Gleick in Chaos, corroborating my point that popular treatments of
chaos and complexity have virtually erased the distinction between them.
3. Gleick printed this quote from Poincaré in Chaos, p. 321.
4. The Dreams of Reason, Heinz Pagels, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1988. I quoted
the blurb on the July 1989 paperback edition by Bantam.
5. The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Benoit Mandelbrot, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco,
1977, p. 423. The remark earlier in this paragraph that the Mandelbrot set is “the
most complex object in mathematics” was made by the computer scientist A. K.
Dewdney in Scientific American, August 1985, p. 16.
6. I watched Epstein demonstrate his artificial-society program during a workshop
held at the Santa Fe Institute in May 1994 (which I describe in detail in the next

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 NOTES • 311

chapter). I heard Epstein claim that computer models such as his would revolu-
tionize social science during a one-day symposium at the Santa Fe Institute on
March 11, 1995.
7. Holland made this claim in an unpublished paper that he sent me, titled “Objec-
tives, Rough Definitions, and Speculations for Echo-Class Models.” (The term
echo refers to Holland’s major class of genetic algorithms.) He reiterated the claim
on page 4 of his book, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, Addison-
Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1995. Holland presented a succinct description of genetic
algorithms in Scientific American, July 1992, pp. 66–72.
8. Yorke made this remark during a telephone interview in March 1995. Gleick’s
Chaos credited Yorke with having coined the term chaos in 1975.
9. See note 2.
10. See “Revisiting the Edge of Chaos,” by Melanie Mitchell, James Crutchfield, and
Peter Hraber, Santa Fe working paper 93-03-014. Coveny and Highfield’s Frontiers of
Complexity, cited in note 2, also mentioned the criticism of the edge-of-chaos concept.
11. At this writing, Seth Lloyd still had not published all his definitions of complex-
ity. After I called him to ask about the definitions, he emailed the following list,
which by my count includes not 31 definitions but 45. The names that are used
as modifiers or in parentheses refer to the main originators of the definition. For
what it’s worth, here is Lloyd’s list, only slightly edited: information (Shannon);
entropy (Gibbs, Boltzman); algorithmic complexity; algorithmic information con-
tent (Chaitin, Solomonoff, Kolmogorov); Fisher information; Renyi entropy; self-
delimiting code length (Huffman, Shannon, Fano); error-correcting code length
(Hamming); Chernoff information; minimum description length (Rissanen);
number of parameters, or degrees of freedom, or dimensions; Lempel–Ziv com-
plexity; mutual information, or channel capacity; algorithmic mutual informa-
tion; correlation; stored information (Shaw); conditional information; conditional
algorithmic information content; metric entropy; fractal dimension; self-similar-
ity; stochastic complexity (Rissanen); sophistication (Koppel, Atlan); topological
machine size (Crutchfield); effective or ideal complexity (Gell-Mann); hierarchical
complexity (Simon); tree subgraph diversity (Huberman, Hogg); homogeneous
complexity (Teich, Mahler); time computational complexity; space computational
complexity; information-based complexity (Traub); logical depth (Bennett); ther-
modynamic depth (Lloyd, Pagels); grammatical complexity (position in Chomsky
hierarchy); Kullbach-Liebler information; distinguishability (Wooters, Caves,
Fisher); Fisher distance; discriminability (Zee); information distance (Shannon);
algorithmic information distance (Zurek); Hamming distance; long-range order;
self-organization; complex adaptive systems; edge of chaos.
12. See chapter 3 of The Quark and the Jaguar, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1994, in
which Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics and one of the founders of
the Santa Fe Institute, described Gregory Chaitin’s algorithmic information the-
ory and other approaches to complexity. Gell-Mann acknowledged on page 33 that
“any definition of complexity is necessarily context-dependent, even subjective.”
13. The conference on artificial life held at Los Alamos in 1987 was vividly described
in Steven Levy’s Artificial Life, cited in note 2.

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 312 • NOTES

14. Editor’s introduction, Christopher Langton, Artificial Life, vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, p. vii.
15. See note 2 for full citations.
16. “Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sci-
ences,” by Naomi Oreskes, Kenneth Belitz, and Kristin Shrader Frechette, was
published in Science, February 4, 1994, pp. 641–646. See also the letters reacting to
the article, which were published on April 15, 1994.
17. Ernst Mayr discussed the inevitable imprecision of biology in Toward a New Philos-
ophy of Biology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988. See in particular the
chapter entitled “Cause and Effect in Biology.”
18. I interviewed Bak in New York City in August 1994. For an introduction to Bak’s
work, see “Self-Organized Criticality,” Scientific American, by Bak and Kan Chen,
January 1991, pp. 46-53.
19. Earth in the Balance, Al Gore, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1992, p. 363.
20. See “Instabilities in a Sandpile,” by Sidney R. Nagel, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol.
84, no. 1, January 1992, pp. 321–325.
21. A discussion of Leibniz’s belief in an “irrefutable calculus” that could solve all
problems, even theological ones, can be found in the excellent book Pi in the Sky,
by John Barrow, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, pp. 127–129.
22. Cybernetics, by Norbert Wiener, was published in 1948 by John Wiley and Sons,
New York.
23. John R. Pierce made this comment about cybernetics on page 210 of his book An Intro-
duction to Information Theory, Dover, New York, 1980 (originally published in 1961).
24. Claude Shannon’s paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communications,” was pub-
lished in the Bell System Technical Journal, July and October, 1948.
25. I interviewed Shannon at his home in Winchester, Mass., in November 1989. I also
wrote a profile of him for Scientific American, January 1990, pp. 22–22b.
26. This glowing review of Thom’s book appeared in the London Times Higher Educa-
tion Supplement, November 30, 1973. I found the reference in Searching for Certainty,
by John Casti, William Morrow, New York, 1990, pp. 63–64. Casti, who has writ-
ten a number of excellent books on mathematics-related topics, is associated with
the Santa Fe Institute. The English translation of Thom’s book Structural Stability
and Morphogenesis, originally issued in French in 1972, was published in 1975 by
Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
27. These negative comments about catastrophe theory were reprinted in Casti,
Searching for Certainty, p. 417.
28. Chance and Chaos, David Ruelle, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1991,
p. 72. This book is a quiet but profound meditation on the meaning of chaos by
one of its pioneers.
29. “More Is Different,” Philip Anderson, Science, August 4, 1972, p. 393. This essay
is reprinted in a collection of papers by Anderson, A Career in Theoretical Physics,
World Scientific, River Edge, N.J., 1994. I interviewed Anderson at Princeton in
August 1994.
30. As quoted in “The Man Who Knows Everything,” by David Berreby, New York
Times Magazine, May 8, 1994, p. 26.

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 NOTES • 313

31. I first described my encounter with Gell-Mann in New York City, which took place
in November 1991, in Scientific American, March 1992, pp. 30–32. I interviewed
Gell-Mann at the Santa Fe Institute in March 1995.
32. See note 12.
33. “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture,” Arturo Esco-
bar, Current Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 3, June 1994, p. 222.
34. Order out of Chaos, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Bantam, New York, 1984
(originally published in French in 1979).
35. Ibid., 299-300.
36. Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, p. 67.
37. Feigenbaum’s two papers were “Presentation Functions, Fixed Points, and a The-
ory of Scaling Function Dynamics,” Journal of Statistical Physics, vol. 52, nos. 3/4,
August 1988, pp. 527-569; and “Presentation Functions and Scaling Function The-
ory for Circle Maps,” Nonlinearity, vol. 1, 1988, pp. 577–602.

CHAPTER NINE: THE END OF LIMITOLOGY

1. The meeting titled “The Limits to Scientific Knowledge” was held May 24–26,
1994, at the Santa Fe Institute.
2. See Chaitin’s articles “Randomness in Arithmetic,” Scientific American, July 1988,
pp. 80-85; and “Randomness and Complexity in Pure Mathematics,” International
Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, vol. 4, no. 1, 1994, pp. 3–15. Chaitin has also dis-
tributed a book called The Limits of Mathematics on the Internet. Other relevant
publications by participants at this meeting (listed alphabetically by author, and
not including publications already cited) are W. Brian Arthur, “Positive Feed-
backs in the Economy,” Scientific American, February 1990, pp. 92–99; John Casti,
Complexification, HarperCollins, New York, 1994; Ralph Gomory, “The Known,
the Unknown, and the Unknowable,” Scientific American, June 1995, p. 120; Rolf
Landauer, “Computation: A Fundamental Physical View,” Physica Scripta, vol. 35,
pp. 88–95, and “Information Is Physical,” Physics Today, May 1991, pp. 23–29; Otto
Rössler, “Endophysics,” Real Brains, Artificial Minds, edited by John Casti and A.
Karlqvist, North Holland, New York, 1987, pp. 25–46; Roger Shepard, “Perceptual-
Cognitive Universals as Reflections of the World,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review,
vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, pp. 2–28; Patrick Suppes, “Explaining the Unpredictable,” Erken-
ntis, vol. 22, 1985, pp. 187–195; Joseph Traub, “Breaking Intractability” (cowritten
with Henry Wozniakowski), Scientific American, January 1994, pp. 102–107. I dis-
cussed some of the mathematics-related topics that arose at the Santa Fe meeting
in “The Death of Proof,” Scientific American, October 1993, pp. 92–103. One of the
best books I have read recently on the limits of knowledge is Fire in the Mind, by
George Johnson, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995.
3. I interviewed Chaitin on the Hudson River in September 1994.
4. The End of History and The Last Man, Francis Fukuyama, The Free Press, 1992.
5. I wrote a profile of Brian Josephson for Scientific American, “Josephson’s Inner Junc-
tion,” May 1995, pp. 40–41.

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 314 • NOTES
CHAPTER TEN: SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY, OR THE END OF MACHINE SCIENCE
1. The World, the Flesh and the Devil, J. D. Bernal, Indiana University Press, Blooming-
ton, 1929, p. 47. I am indebted to Robert Jastrow of Dartmouth College for sending
me a copy of Bernal’s essay.
2. Mind Children, Hans Moravec, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988. My
interview with Moravec took place in December 1993.
3. Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, p. 298.
4. Dyson’s romantic view of science brings him to the verge of radical relativism. See
his essay “The Scientist as Rebel,” New York Review of Books, May 25, 1995, p. 31.
5. “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” Freeman Dyson,
Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 51, 1979, pp. 447–460.
6. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, p. 196.
7. Ibid., p. 115.
8. Ibid., pp. 118–119.
9. The fascinating career of Edward Fredkin (as well as those of Edward Wilson and
the late economist Kenneth Boulding) is described in Three Scientists and Their
Gods, by Robert Wright, Pantheon, New York, 1988. I interviewed Fredkin by tele-
phone in May 1993.
10. The Physics of Immortality, Frank Tipler, Doubleday, New York, 1994.
11. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Frank Tipler and John Barrow, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, New York, 1986.
12. Teilhard de Chardin discussed the question of how extraterrestrials might be saved
in the chapter titled “A Sequel to the Problem of Human Origins: The Plurality of
Inhabited Worlds,” in Christianity and Evolution, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New
York, 1969.
13. The Limits of Science, Peter Medawar, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984, p. 90.

EPILOGUE: THE TERROR OF GOD

1. See “The Mystery at the End of the Universe,” chapter 9 of The Mind of God, by
Paul C. Davies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992.
2. See “Borges and I,” A Personal Anthology, by Jorge Luis Borges, Grove Press, New
York, 1967, pp. 200–201.
3. See note 9 of the chapter titled “Mysticism” in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
by William James, Macmillan, New York, 1961 (James’s book was originally pub-
lished in 1902).
4. See The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, Library of
Living Philosophers, La Salle, Ill., 1991. I spoke to Hartshorne in May 1993.
5. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Routledge, New York, 1990
edition, p. 187. Wittgenstein’s cryptic book was originally published in 1922.

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9780465065929-text.indd 318 2/2/15 3:24 PM
 INDEX

Acceleration, Henry Adams’s law Anxiety of influence, 114, 145

of, 2 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 24,
Accelerators. See Particle physics: 51
particle accelerators Aquinas, Thomas, 11
Adams, Douglas, 69 Aristotle, 36
Adams, Henry, 2 Arrow of time, 222, 223–224
After Philosophy: End or Transforma- Art/aesthetics, 4, 13, 30, 65, 66,
tion?, 52 85–86, 102, 138, 156, 213, 226
After the Fact (Geertz), 160 Arthur, Brian, 239
Against Method (Feyerabend), 42, 46 Artificial intelligence, 7, 13, 169, 173,
AIDS, 19, 38, 108–109, 200, 240, 280 177, 180, 184, 187, 192, 202, 205,
Allen, Woody, 169, 265 256, 259, 286. See also Robots
American Association for the Artificial life, 202–206, 232
Advancement of Science, 80, Artificial Life (journal), 202–203
147 Artificial Life (Levy), 203
Anderson, Philip, 13, 214–216, 219, Asimov, Isaac, 188
279 Astonishing Hypothesis, The (Crick),
Angier, Natalie, 276 166–167
Animal-rights activists, 20 Astronomy, 3, 8, 9, 19, 45–46, 77,
Anomalies, 37 91, 94, 103, 110, 112, 207, 238,
Answer, The, 24, 41, 49, 54, 55, 75, 79, 247–248, 278, 290
80, 93, 179, 180, 192, 220, 259, and large-scale structure, 95
268, 269, 274 radio astronomy, 260
Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The See also Big Bang; Cosmology;
(Tipler and Barrow), 264 Galaxies
Anthropic principle, 77, 99, 288 Astrophysics, 59
Anthropology, 156–157, 158, 159 At Home in the Universe (Kauffman),
Ants, 144–145, 146 134, 137
319

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Attractors, 133, 214, 241 Black holes, 76, 77, 79, 110–111, 248
Autocatalysis, 133, 134, 136, 141–142 Bloom, Harold, 24, 51, 108, 114,
131
Baby universes, 90, 99, 103. See also Bohm, David, 81–87, 88, 101, 192,
Universes 229, 267–268, 274
Bacon, Francis, 15, 24, 193–194 Bohr, Niels, 34, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83,
Bak, Per, 135, 137, 208–211, 214, 215, 88, 194, 280
221, 227, 286 and limitations of biology,
Barlow, John Perry, 117 115–116
Barrow, John, 65, 264 Bondi, Hermann, 105
Bateson, William, 136 Borges, Jorge Luis, 54, 182–183,
Beauty, 64, 65, 67 270–271
Beck, Friedrich, 176 Borrini, Grazia, 45, 50–51
Behaviorism, 152, 162 Boscovich, Roger, 241
Belitz, Kenneth, 206 Bragg, Lawrence, 260
Bernal, J. D., 254–255, 261 Brains, 153, 166, 167, 168, 176, 183,
Bethe, Hans, 74–75 185, 188–189, 190, 191, 193, 243,
Bible, 266, 274 246, 284–285
Big Bang, 8, 31, 92, 96, 97, 102, 104, variability of, 169, 170
238, 282 See also Neuroscience
evidence for, 94, 101, 106, 109 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking),
naming of, 106, 107 92
Biodiversity, 148, 149 Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (Edelman),
Biology, 2–3, 8–9, 18, 19, 31, 38, 108, 167, 174
208, 282, 290 Brockman, John, 217
comparative, 249 Brush, Stephen, 12
developmental, 119 Bury, J. B., 14
end of, 149 Bush, George, 15, 39
final theory of, 125 Bush, Vannevar, 15, 17–18
future of, 166 Butterfly effect, 196, 230, 288. See also
holistic approach to, 131, 136 Chaos theory
limitations of, 115–116
molecular, 5, 20, 115, 118–119, 146, Cancer, 19, 142, 189, 247, 277, 283–284
260, 278 Cartwright, Nancy, 207
See also Evolutionary biology; Casti, John, 233, 234, 237
Sociobiology Catastrophe theory, 212, 213
Biophilia, 149–150 Categorization, 169–170
Black Cloud, The (Hoyle), 108 Cellular automatons, 197, 201

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Chaitin, Gregory, 201, 233–234, Complexity: The Emerging Science at

236–237, 238, 242, 245–249, 257 the Edge of Order and Chaos
Chalmers, David, 184–185 (Waldrop), 201, 203
Chance and Chaos (Ruelle), 214 Computers, 7, 9, 13, 15, 21, 23, 37, 173,
Chaoplexity, 195–232, 286–288 177, 191, 193, 196–197, 229–230,
See also Chaos; Complexity 240, 248, 286
Chaos: Making a New Science (Gleick), computer simulations, 133, 135,
196, 197, 208, 227 141, 143, 195, 197, 199, 202, 204,
Chaos theory, 7–8, 20–21, 30, 195, 205, 206–208, 211, 215, 230,
196, 209, 214, 221, 225, 228, 229, 232, 265, 288
231, 232, 269, 287, 288 as conscious, 187, 193
antichaos, 133, 136–137, 138, 234 limits of computation, 239
definition of chaos, 200–201 quantum computers, 178
See also Chaoplexity See also Omega Point theory
Character of Physical Law, The Conformity, 285
(Feynman), 87 Congress (U.S.), 18, 57, 290
Chemistry, 2, 5, 71, 140, 142, 204 Conjectures and Refutations (Popper),
Chomsky, Noam, 53, 151–155, 186, 30
285, 285 Consciousness, 3, 7, 23, 53, 71, 73, 77,
Clark, Xenos, 271 86, 101, 119, 154, 162, 163, 167,
Clinton, Bill, 68 181, 182, 187, 192–194, 220, 221,
Cold war, 6, 16, 53, 76, 284 255, 258
Coleridge, Samuel, 24 how-do-I-know-you’re-conscious
Coming of the Golden Age (Stent), 1–2, problem, 192, 194
5, 6, 7, 115, 141, 156, 193, 247, information-based theory of, 185
249, 251, 278 oscillation theory of, 164, 165
Common sense, 62, 66, 83, 186 See also Mysterians; under Quan-
Competition, 27, 129, 258, 263 tum mechanics
Complexity, 7–8, 21, 133, 137, 184, Consciousness Explained (Dennett),
192, 196, 199–206, 208–211, 182
216, 221, 229, 232, 233, 243, 287 Consensus, 41, 156, 158
complex adaptive systems, Continuum problem, 237–238
199–200, 218 Control and Communication in the
definitions of, 200–201, 244 Animal and the Machine
as plectics, 218 (Wiener), 212
See also Chaoplexity Conway, John, 197
Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos Cooperation, 250, 259, 263
(Lewin), 201, 203 Copernicus, 265

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Cosmic background radiation, 94, Data, 207, 288

101, 106, 107, 109 Davies, Paul, 72–73, 269
Cosmic Discovery (Harwit), 111–112 Dawkins, Richard, 116–119, 120, 127,
Cosmology, 49, 90–113, 161, 238, 265, 128–129, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138,
282 143, 145, 148, 166, 274
end of, 284 Decline of the West, The (Spengler),
golden age of, 95 16–17
as a historical science, 103 Deep Blue, 286
ironic cosmology, 112–113 “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese
Creationism, 42, 48, 93, 116, 121, 139, Cockfight” (Geertz), 157
279 Dennett, Daniel, 174, 182–184, 185,
Creativity, 39 191, 282
Crick, Francis, 5, 7, 9, 115, 118, Descartes, René, 15, 84, 152, 153, 154,
162–167, 175, 180, 186, 193, 274 225
and Gerald Edelman, 173–174 Descent of Man, The (Darwin),
Crutchfield, James, 201 150–151
Cultural issues, 131, 147, 149, 156, Determinism/indeterminism, 7–8,
203, 206, 210, 274, 278, 279 30, 81, 82, 120, 121, 123, 176,
cultural determinism, 285–286 179, 186, 197, 215, 224, 225, 227,
Current Anthropology, 221 239, 269, 287
Cybernetics, 212 cultural determinism, 285–286
Cyberspace, 256–257 Dialectics of Nature (Engels), 15–16
Dicke, Robert, 107
Dante, 266 Dimensions, extra, 56, 57, 66
Dark matter, 95, 96, 106, 281, 283 Dirac, Paul, 104
Darwin, Charles, 3, 6, 9, 15, 19, 76, Disease, 3, 19, 58, 108, 249, 251, 277,
114, 120, 121, 123, 125, 152, 161, 280, 283
285 Dissipative systems, 221–222
as anticipating punctuated equi- Diversity, 144, 170. See also Biodi-
librium, 128 versity; Maximum diversity
challenges to Darwinism, 133, principle
136, 137, 139, 145 DNA, 2, 5, 9, 20, 21, 115, 118–119, 141,
neo-Darwinism, 115, 128, 136, 150 146, 162, 167
neural Darwinism, 171 Dogmatism, 27, 31, 34
See also Evolution; Natural Doria, Francisco Antonio “Chico,”
selection 237, 244
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Dennett), Double Helix, The (Watson), 165
282 Drake, Frank, 290

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Dreams of a Final Theory (Weinberg), Engineering, 210, 229, 230, 232, 265,
67, 70, 73, 218 288. See also Science: applied
Dreams of Reason, The (Pagels), 197 Enlightenment era, 84
Dualism, 175–177, 193 Entropy, 201, 223. See also Ther-
Dyson, Freeman, 68, 110, 259–262, modynamics: second law of
265, 266, 267, 274, 281 thermodynamics
Environmental issues, 6, 16, 20, 132,
Earth in the Balance (Gore), 211 280. See also Pollution
Eccles, John, 176 Enzymes, 141, 142
Economic issues, 18, 21–22, 23, 39, Epstein, Joshua, 199
41, 44, 47, 68, 209, 210, 212, 213, Escobar, Arturo, 221
224, 247, 248, 249, 256, 280, 283 ET (movie), 132
limits of economics, 239, 240 Ethnology, 156
See also Science: funding for Evil, 73, 264, 267
Economist, The 34, 278 Evolution, 9, 10, 19, 42, 47, 48, 52, 145,
Edelman, Gerald, 167–175, 188 159, 166, 194, 218, 243, 281
Einstein, Albert, 9, 10, 11, 55, 56, 60, and cooperation, 259
76, 83, 110, 175, 223, 225, 227, as inevitable, 137
238, 243, 244, 280, 288. See also of intelligence, 255
Relativity theory See also Darwin, Charles; Evolu-
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, 83 tionary biology; Evolutionary
Eldredge, Niles, 120, 121 psychology; Natural selection
Electromagnetism, 8, 55, 87, 112, 260 Evolutionary biology, 6, 11, 103, 111,
Electroweak force, 55, 56, 57, 63 114–143, 201
Elements, abundance of light, 94, 101 challenges to, 133, 136–-137
Ellsworth, Henry, 13–14 and human nature, 282
Emergence, 126, 134, 135, 196, 219, as nearing completion, 130
220 new synthesis, 115, 282 (see
Emperor’s New Mind, The (Penrose), also Darwin, Charles:
177, 178, 179 neo-Darwinism)
Empirical realism, 160 See also Evolution
End of History, The (Fukuyama), Evolutionary psychology, 148, 285
249–250, 277, 278 Expanding universe, 105, 106, 109, 111
End of Nature (McKibben), 277 Extraterrestrial life, 118, 127, 132,
End of Physics, The (Lindley), 65, 284 134, 143, 249, 289, 290
“End of Science, The” (symposium),
1, 5, 57–58 Falsification, 27, 32, 34, 37, 41, 46,
Engels, Friedrich, 15–16 158, 210, 278, 285

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Farewell to Reason (Feyerabend), 43 genetic engineering, 9, 248, 249,

Fascism, 43, 48 254, 278
Feigenbaum, Mitchell, 227–231 genetic networks, 134–135,
Feyerabend, Paul, 25, 26, 41–51, 52, 135–136
54, 70, 152, 192 and human behavior, 145,
Feynman, Richard, 87, 179, 246–247, 147–148, 161 (see also Human
260 nature)
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 67, 216 See also DNA; Sociobiology
Flanagan, Owen, 181 Genius (Gleick), 280
Fractal Geometry of Nature, The Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta,
(Mandelbrot), 198 289
Fractals, 197–198, 214, 230, 242–243, Georgi, Howard, 103
287 Gibbons, Jack, 68
Frechette, Kristin Shrader, 206 Glashow, Sheldon, 57–60, 94, 103
Fredkin, Edward, 263 Glass, Bentley, 17–19, 22
Free will, 154, 163, 176, 180 Gleick, James, 196, 197, 208, 227,
Freud, Sigmund, 189, 284, 285 280
Fukuyama, Francis, 249–251, 258, Global warming, 277
262, 277, 278 God, 9, 10, 49, 55, 67, 72, 73, 92–93,
Functionalism, 169, 204 138, 168, 228, 261, 264, 267,
Fusion reactors, 9 278, 288
as evolving, 272, 273
Gaia, 130, 131–132, 138, 150, 288 terror of God 269–275, 291
Galaxies, 93–94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 105, See also Religion
106, 111, 211, 219, 238, 283, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, 65,
287 80, 93, 177, 178, 180, 220, 233,
brightness/distance of, 110 234, 236, 237, 244, 246, 249,
Galileo, 40, 42, 58 257, 262, 269
Geertz, Clifford, 155–160 Gold, Thomas, 105
Gell-Mann, Murray, 60, 216–221 Gomory, Ralph, 235–236, 240–241,
Genes, Mind, and Culture (Wilson and 245
Lumsden), 147 Goodwin, Brian, 136
Genetic algorithms, 199–200 Gore, Al, 211
Genetics, 51, 55, 99, 115, 119, 130, 159, Gould, Stephen Jay, 103, 120–128,
277, 282 132, 136, 143, 145, 147, 148, 215,
first genetic material, 141 281, 288
genes and culture, 147, 149 and Stuart Kauffman, 137
genetic determinism, 120 Gradualism, 121, 124–125, 128

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 iNDEx • 325

Gravity, 8, 15, 55, 56, 63, 64, 66, 77, Infinite in All Directions (Dyson), 259,
97, 228, 238 261
quantum gravity, 95 Inflation theory, 97–103, 106, 283, 288
Gustavus Adolphus College, 1, 5, 57 Information/information theory, 77,
Guth, Alan, 97, 98, 100 79, 185, 212–213, 245, 256
algorithmic information theory,
Hameroff, Stuart, 179 201–202, 233, 236, 249, 257
“Hard Times” (Kadanoff), 19–20 Initial conditions, 196, 200, 259, 288
Hartshorne, Charles, 172–273 Institute of Astronomy at Cam-
Harwit, Martin, 111–112 bridge, 104, 107
Havel, Václav, 16 Intellectuals, 47, 119, 123, 152, 168,
Hawking, Stephen, 72, 90–93, 95, 281
103, 112, 274, 278 Internet, 183, 248
Hidden variables, 82 Ironic science, 54, 61, 62, 89, 127, 138,
History, definition of, 249–250 165, 193, 199, 252, 254, 263, 267,
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The 291
(Adams), 69 vs. empirical science, 41, 92, 160
Holland, John, 199–200, 214, 286 ironic cosmology, 112–113
Holocaust, 35, 43, 73 ironic neuroscience, 174, 175
Hoyle, Fred, 99, 104–109, 112 and negative capability, 24
Hubble constant, 109–110 types of practitioners of, 155–156
Human condition, 73, 147 Irrationality, 17, 35, 42, 61, 101, 132,
Humanities, 152. See also under 205, 225, 279
Science Isis (journal), 43
Human nature, 147, 148, 149, 153, It from bit, 79, 80, 88, 185, 213
154, 163, 274, 282. See also
Genetics: and human behavior Jackson, E. Atlee, 233
Hut, Piet, 238, 245 James, William, 163, 271
Huxley, Aldous, 225 Jeffrey, Eber, 13–14
Hyperspace (Kaku), 71 Josephson, Brian, 252–253
Journal of the Patent Office Society, 13
Idea of Progress, The (Bury), 14 Joyce, James, 67, 216
Identity theory, 176
IEEE Spectrum, 284 Kadanoff, Leo, 19–21, 22
Imagination, 23–24, 77, 80, 93, 277 Kaku, Michio, 71
Immortality, 10–11, 257, 273, 278, Kallosh, Renata, 98
283, 284 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 37–38, 136, 153,
Immune system, 168, 215, 224 236, 244

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Kasparov, Gary, 286 Locke, John, 152

Kauffman, Stuart, 133–139, 141, 143, Logical positivism, 26, 27, 29, 52, 176
145, 201, 211, 214, 219, 221, 227, London Times Higher Education Supple-
234–235, 235–236, 240, 286 ment, 279
Keats, John, 24 Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (Overbye),
Kelvin (Lord), 12, 246 67
Killing Time (Feyerabend), 51 Lorenz, Edward, 196
Koch, Christof, 162, 175–176, Love, 42, 52, 65
185–186, 193 Lovelock, James, 130, 131–132
Koshland, Daniel, 13, 14 Lumsden, Charles, 147
Krishnamurti, 86
Kuhn, Thomas, 25, 26, 35–41, 41–42, Ma, Yo-Yo, 191
46, 51, 52, 54, 59, 61–62, 121, McGinn, Colin, 52–54, 153, 181–182,
122 184, 186, 193
Kundera, Milan, 225 Machine science, 191, 254–268
McKellar, Andrew, 107
Lakatos, Imre, 25, 26, 46 McKibben, Bill, 277
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 114, 130–131 Maddox, John, 66, 124
Landauer, Rolf, 239, 240, 242, 243, Malcolm, Janet, 5
244 Malthus, Thomas, 114
Langton, Christopher, 201, 202–206, Mandelbrot, Benoit, 7–8, 209
221, 227, 232 Mandelbrot set, 197, 198, 287
Language, 38, 53, 125, 152–153, 206, Margulis, Lynn, 129–133, 136, 138,
216 142, 145, 281
Language and Problems of Knowledge Marxism, 27, 121, 123, 127, 159, 226,
(Chomsky), 154 250
Leibniz, Gottfried, 15, 80, 212 Masson, Jeffrey, 5
Levy, Steven, 203 Materialism, 53, 166, 176, 181, 193,
Lewin, Roger, 201 194, 274
“Life” (cellular automaton), 197 Mathematics, 5, 7, 14, 21, 26, 38, 56,
Life Itself (Crick), 142 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 72, 85, 102,
Limits of Mathematics, The (Chaitin), 110, 134, 136, 137, 138, 147, 159,
248 178–179, 195, 197, 211–212, 232,
Limits of Science, The (Medawar), 267 242, 245
Linde, Andrei, 96–101, 103, 112 axioms in, 177, 189, 206, 248 (see
Lindley, David, 65, 284 also Gödel’s incompleteness
Literature, 156–157, 226, 271 theorem)
Lloyd, Seth, 201, 244 limits of, 246, 248

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 iNDEx • 327

nonlinear, 196, 198, 227 Moravec, Hans, 255–259, 261, 262,

real vs. whole numbers, 237–238 263
truths as discovered vs. invented, “More Is Different” (Anderson),
240, 243 214–215, 219
See also Chaos theory Mysterians, 181–184, 185, 193, 205
Maximum diversity principle, 259, Mysteries, 5, 79, 93 116, 118, 119, 129,
262, 266 153, 154, 168–169, 176, 177, 180,
Maxwell, James Clerk, 244 183, 186, 194, 209, 215, 221, 226
Mayer-Kress, Gottfried, 195 Mysticism, 41, 72, 86, 93, 101, 216,
Maynard Smith, John, 137–138 269, 270, 290, 291
Mayr, Ernst, 115, 128, 150, 208, 290
Meaning/purpose, 23, 31, 43, 50, 55, Nagel, Thomas, 181, 182, 184, 193
65, 68–69, 92, 119, 138, 175, 210, NASA, 143, 276, 289
213, 225, 252, 261, 262, 274, 281, National Science Foundation, 15
282 Natural selection, 9, 10, 31, 99, 108,
Medawar, Peter, 119, 267 109, 111, 114, 115, 149, 150, 151,
Media, 61, 152, 289 153, 186, 196, 199
Memes, 117 challenge to, 133, 136–137
Mendel, Gregor, 19, 115, 118, 162, 282 as cosmic principle, 118, 143
Mermin, David, 75 and problem of mind, 161
Metaphysics, 38, 162, 291 and purpose, 117 (see also
Michelson, Albert, 12 Meaning/purpose)
Microtubules, 179–180 Nature, 25, 34, 66, 121, 124, 213
Microwaves. See Cosmic background Nazism, 43. See also Fascism
radiation Negative capability, 24, 26, 127,
Milky Way galaxy, 93, 111 205
Miller, Stanley, 140–141, 142, 143 Neural Darwinism (Edelman), 167
Mind, theory of the, 183, 186, Neural networks, 171, 174
190–191, 192, 193, 240 Neuroscience, 147, 159, 161–194. See
Mind-body problem, 53, 181–182, also Brains; Ironic science:
185–186. See also Consciousness ironic neuroscience
Mind Children (Moravec), 255–256 New Scientist, 289
Mind of God, The (Davies), 73, 269 Newsweek, 277
Minsky, Marvin, 7, 169, 179, 187–192, Newton, Isaac, 15–16, 60, 66, 84, 92,
259, 261, 262, 263, 270, 274, 275 153, 227, 238
Mitchell, Melanie, 201 New Yorker, 39, 167
Models, numerical, 206, 207, 208 New York Times, 51, 61, 143, 152, 167,
Morality, 7, 80, 150, 204, 250 226, 276

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Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3–4, 54, 151, Paradigm, use of term, 35, 36–37, 38,
250, 254 39–40
Nixon, Richard, 283 Paradoxes of Progress, The (Stent), 15
Nobel Prize, 57, 60, 87, 167, 168, 176, Park, Robert, 291
214, 221, 222, 252, 260, 276, Particle physics, 6, 10, 19, 21, 51,
279, 285 55–60, 68, 82–83, 161, 207, 227,
Nobel symposium in Sweden (1990), 228, 238–239, 247, 279
90, 94, 95, 96 limits of empirical verification
Nonlocality, 83 of, 160
“Nothing Left to Invent” (Anderson), particle accelerators, 16, 18, 47, 67,
13 73, 216, 247, 249 (see also Super-
Nuclear power, 3, 15, 37, 47, 283 conducting supercollider)
Nuclear weapons, 3, 15, 19, 74, 76, problem of particles as points, 56
277, 279, 283 standard model of, 20, 56, 58,
Nucleosynthesis, 109, 110 59–60, 66, 70, 74, 216
success of, 58, 208 (see also Sci-
Occam’s razor, 66, 240 ence: success of)
Omega Point theory, 263–268, 270, unified theory of, 65, 92, 97, 102,
273, 274 103, 200 (see also Physics: unifi-
Open Society and Its Enemies, The cation of)
(Popper), 27 See also Physics; Quarks; Super-
Order out of Chaos (Prigogine and string theory
Stengers), 222–223, 226 Pauling, Linus, 2
Oreskes, Naomi, 206 Peat, F. David, 86
Origin of life, 10, 29, 32, 105, 119, 134, Peirce, Charles Sanders, 26, 40
136, 137, 139–143, 166, 204, 290 Penrose, Roger, 177–181, 186, 188,
Origin of Species, On The (Darwin), 6, 192, 215, 220, 221, 253, 262, 274
15, 114 Penzias, Arno, 107
Origins of Order, The: Self-Organization Period doubling, 227–228
and Selection in Evolution Philosophy, 21, 24, 25–54, 77, 87–88,
(Kauffman), 133, 137 168, 194, 238
Orwell, George, 39, 225 end of, 271
Ostriker, Jeremiah, 281, 282 and mind-body problem, 185
Overbye, Dennis, 67 philosophical problems as
pseudo-problems, 52–53
Packard, Norman, 201 philosophy of science, 70, 156
Pagels, Heinz, 197 Physics, 3, 8, 33, 55–89, 180–181, 222,
Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 264 224

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 iNDEx • 329

condensed-matter/solid-state Predictability/predictions, 11, 13, 20,

physics, 59, 74, 208 25, 27, 30, 33, 64, 66, 74, 81, 94,
end of, 262, 284 95, 101, 102, 107, 110, 125, 135,
at end of nineteenth century, 137, 139, 140, 182, 186, 196, 199,
11–12, 22 200, 210, 211, 215, 226, 239, 240,
final theory of, 67–73, 75, 80, 85, 278, 283, 287–288
93, 177–178, 190, 220, 237, 274 Prigogine, Ilya, 221–227, 288
(see also Answer, The) Problem solving, 39, 52, 59
future of, 19–21, 74, 88 Progress, 1–24, 121, 123, 124, 246
and Gödel’s theory, 262 as aberration, 14
and information theory, 77 antiprogress of Clifford Geertz,
(see also Information theory) 155–160
nuclear physics, 247, 278 belief in eternality of, 277
understanding contemporary, 155 and Darwinian theory, 120
unification of, 55, 58, 59, 65, 92, end of, 4, 17
98, 228, 260 (see also Particle rise and fall of, 14–17
physics: unified theory of) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
See also Particle physics (Kant), 23
Physics (Aristotle), 36 Promethean Fire (Wilson and Lums-
Physics of Immortality, The (Tipler), den), 147
263, 264 Propensities, a World of (Popper), 33
Physics Today, 19, 75 Psimopoulos, M., 25–26, 51–52
Pierce, John R., 212 Psychoanalysis, 34, 284
Planck, Max, 168–169 Ptolemy, 66
Podolsky, Boris, 83 Punctuated equilibrium (punk eek),
Poetry, 132, 206, 221, 232, 247, 256 120, 121, 122, 124, 128, 136,
Poincaré, Henri, 196 138, 211, 288
Pollution, 16, 279, 280
Polynesia, the new, 4, 24. See also Quantum mechanics, 2, 9–10, 11, 20,
Utopia 21, 28, 30, 33, 38, 42, 51, 55, 64,
Popper, Karl, 25, 26, 27–35, 37, 40, 46, 65, 66, 102, 138–139, 210, 215,
51, 52, 54, 176, 177, 225, 267, 220, 222, 238, 243, 247, 253,
278, 288. See also Falsification 269, 281, 288
Postmodernism, 157, 206, 221, 244, basic structure of, 74–75
279, 281, 291 and consciousness, 175–176, 177,
Poverty, 3, 6, 249, 251, 256 180, 186, 192
Power law, 209, 211 Copenhagen interpretation of, 77,
Pragmatism (philosophical), 26 81, 82

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 330 • iNDEx

Quantum mechanics (continued) Relativism, 43, 52, 58, 80, 122, 123,
as final theory of physics, 75 127, 131
as incomplete, 83 Relativity theory, 11, 12, 20, 21, 27,
many-worlds interpretation of, 55, 63, 65, 66, 77, 83, 84, 94, 106,
71–72, 88 138–139, 176, 253, 281, 282
and nuclear fission, 76 Religion, 7, 16–17, 30, 31, 44, 49–50,
paradoxes of, 71, 178 53, 55, 191, 259, 291
philosophical implications of, 77, Eastern, 81, 216
88–89 fundamentalist, 17, 42, 48, 226
pilot-wave interpretation of, 81, See also Bible; God; under Science
83, 86, 88 Remembered Present, The (Edelman),
quantum chromodynamics, 56, 167
63 Rescher, Nicholas, 21–23
quantum cosmology, 90, 103 Reviews of Modern Physics, 260
quantum electrodynamics, 281, RNA, 141–142
282 Robots, 171–172, 173, 174, 188, 256
quantum fluctuations, 90, 91, 97, Rose, Charlie, 68, 281
99, 239 Rosen, Nathan, 83
and two-slit experiment, 78 Rosen, Robert, 245
See also Gravity: quantum grav- Rössler, Otto, 241–245
ity; Uncertainty principle Ruelle, David, 214, 228
Quark and the Jaguar, The (Gell- Russia, 212. See also Soviet Union
Mann), 218 Ryle, Gilbert, 156, 193
Quarks, 10, 19, 23, 56, 208, 216
Quarterly Review of Biology, 18 Sacks, Oliver, 174
Sacramento News, 280
Randomness, 8, 115, 121, 128, 133, Sagan, Dorian, 131
173, 201, 211, 218, 236, 287, Salam, Abdus, 57
288 Santa Fe Institute, 133, 135, 199, 216,
Rasmussen, Steen, 243 218, 220, 224, 245
Rationalism, 48 workshop on limits of scientific
Rational morphology, 136 knowledge at, 233–245
Reagan, Ronald, 195 Sapolsky, Harvey, 284
Red-shift evidence, 94, 106, 109 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 243
Reductionism, 49, 55, 67, 136, 162, Schramm, David, 94–96, 101–102,
166, 192, 196, 199, 218, 219, 224, 109, 110, 111
229, 243 Schrödinger, Irwin, 5
antireductionism, 214, 215 Schwarz, John, 63

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 iNDEx • 331

Science past achievements of, 20

age of The Science Explosion, 22 as political, 38–39, 59
anti-science mood of society, 244, postempirical, 96
279, 281 as provisional, 52
applied, 9, 10, 11, 210–211, 231, pseudo-science, 27, 31, 120, 132
283–284 (see also engineering) pure, 8, 11, 17, 18, 210–211, 252,
and art, 85–86 257, 279
belief in, 1, 58, 226 and religion, 96, 117, 148, 151
careers in, 280 scientific method, 46, 102
conservatism of, 138–139 strong scientists, 24
as cyclic, 16–17 success of, 8, 17, 58, 138, 154, 208
disillusionment with, 16 and theory of the human mind,
end of, 1–8, 23, 24, 26, 40, 54, 168
57–58, 93, 126, 177, 227, 232, See also Astronomy; Biology;
245, 248, 249, 252, 275, 276, 277, Cosmology; Ironic science;
279–281, 289 Physics; Quantum mechan-
as finite/infinite, 174–175, 221, 252 ics; Relativity theory; Social
funding for, 18, 59, 60, 69, 280, sciences
284, 289, 290 Science (journal), 13, 17, 206, 285
future of, 11, 13, 19–21, 191, 206, “Science: Endless Horizons or
209, 221, 222, 232, 233, 240, Golden Age?” (Glass), 17
245, 248, 251, 281, 291 Science, Order, and Creativity (Bohm
hierarchy of, 71, 218 and Peat), 86–87
and history, 127, 250 Science: The Endless Frontier (V. Bush),
and humanities, 53, 222, 224 15, 17–18
as incomprehensible, 3, 240 Scientific American, 28, 36, 61, 134, 285
as infinite/finite, 15, 18, 21, 257 Scientific Progress (Rescher), 21
ironic, 24 (see also Ironic science) Seattle Times, 277
language of, 206 Segel, Lee, 244
limits of, 1, 3, 5, 14, 18, 21, 22, 38, Self and Its Brain, The (Eccles and
53, 126, 155, 177, 203–204, 222, Popper), 176
230, 233, 234, 238–239, 242, Self-organized criticality, 135, 137,
245, 246 208–211
of measurement, 12 SETI program, 143, 290
and mysteries, 194 Sex, 119, 285
and nation-states, 15, 212, 250 Shadows of the Mind (Penrose), 179
vs. opinion, 132 Shannon, Claude, 77, 212
paradox in modern science, 183 Shepard, Roger, 240, 243, 245

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Simon, Herbert, 285 Subjectivism/subjectivity, 28, 29, 30,

Skepticism, 25, 26, 42, 52, 58, 120, 42, 52, 70, 81, 88, 178, 181, 184,
121, 208, 281 185, 186, 205, 239
Skinner, B. F., 163 See also Suffering, 73, 254, 266, 267, 291
Behaviorism Sun principle, 110, 111
Sky and Telescope, 107 Superconducting supercollider, 6, 18,
Social sciences, 41, 144–160, 197, 199, 57, 279
242 death of, 59, 68, 69
Society of Mind, The (Minsky), See also Particle physics: particle
188–189 accelerators
Socinus, 272 Superconductivity, high-tempera-
Sociobiology, 55, 120, 146, 147, 148, ture, 74, 208, 281, 282
159 Superstring theory, 23, 56–57, 59, 60,
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis 61, 63, 65, 66–67, 68, 74, 79, 84,
(Wilson), 146, 149 89, 91, 143, 156, 168, 178, 220,
Solar system, 57, 66, 290 221, 252, 253
Solipsism, 185, 269 empirical testing of, 58, 64, 70,
Soviet Union, 10, 15, 212, 250, 277 103
Space travel, 10, 143, 252, 256, 260 Supersymmetry, 65
Speciation, 120, 128, 130, 150 Suppes, Patrick, 236, 237, 238
Spengler, Oswald, 16–17, 24 Symbiosis, 129–131, 136
Spielberg, Steven, 132 Syntactic Structures (Chomsky), 152
Standard model. See under Particle
physics Technology, 3, 10, 20, 203, 246
Star Wars (defense program), 195 Technology Review, 284
Steady-state theory, 99, 106 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 264, 273
Stengers, Isabelle, 222 Teller, Edward, 74
Stent, Gunther, 1–8, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, Theocharis, T., 25–26, 51–52
24, 57, 115, 116, 118, 125–126, Theories of Everything (Barrow), 65
141, 173, 186, 193, 245, 247, 249, Theory of everything, 23, 49, 65, 84,
251, 278 93, 154, 200, 215, 228
on future of social sciences, 156, Thermodynamics, 201, 210, 212, 219,
197 222, 223
Structural Stability and Morphogenesis second law of thermodynamics,
(Thom), 213 133, 218, 219, 220, 239, 244, 287
Structure of Scientific Revolution, The (see also Entropy)
(Kuhn), 35, 36, 39–40, 41, 122, Thom, René, 213
281 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 136

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Time. See Arrow of time; Time Varieties of Religious Experience, The

travel (James), 271
Time travel, 103, 252, 264 Vitalism, 20, 93, 116, 167, 180, 196
Tipler, Frank, 263–268 Von Neumann, John, 197
Topobiology (Edelman), 167
Topology, 63–64 Wächtershäuser, Günther, 29, 32
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Witt- Waldrop, M. Mitchell, 201
genstein), 274 Washington Post Book World, 291
Traub, Joseph, 233, 234, 240, 241, 242 Watson, James, 5, 9, 115, 118, 146,
Truth, 3, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 37, 162, 165
39, 40–41, 43, 49, 52, 54, 61, 62, Weather forecasting, 196, 232, 241,
68, 71, 80, 87, 89, 96, 122, 126, 288
131, 139, 155–156, 158, 160, 175, Weinberg, Steven, 57, 60, 67–73, 75,
200, 229, 265, 268, 281, 291 93, 181, 217–218, 224, 252, 261
mathematical, 240 “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
philosophical difficulties concern- (Nagel), 181, 182
ing, 69–70, 238 What Is Life? (Margulis and Sagan), 131
reasons for, 236–237 Wheeler, John, 75–81, 88, 99, 101,
as rhetorical term, 46 110, 112, 185, 213
value judgments vs. truth judg- “Where Science Has Gone Wrong”
ments, 72 (Theocharis and Psimopou-
Turing, Alan, 234 los), 25, 51
Turok, Neil, 96 Wiener, Norbert, 212
Will to power, 4, 250, 251
Uncertainty principle, 83, 90, 99, 186 Wilson, Edward O., 6, 144–150,
Unended Quest (Popper), 30 158–159, 161, 274
Unified theory, 21, 58, 178, 202, 253. Wilson, Robert, 107
See also Physics: unification of; Witten, Edward, 60–65, 67, 68, 74,
under Particle physics 156, 228
Uniformitarianism, 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 52, 54, 169,
Universe, expansion of, 9, 17. See also 170, 235–236, 274
Inflation theory World, the Flesh and the Devil, The
Universes, 98, 99, 100, 287. See also (Bernal), 254
Baby universes Wormholes, 90, 103
Utopia, 6, 15, 27, 225. See also Polyne-
sia: the new Yorke, James, 200, 208, 214

Value(s), 172, 175 “Zahir, The” (Borges), 54

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