The Joe Walker Podcast - Is Science Reaching Its Limits? — John Horgan

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

John Horgan is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. He was senior writer at Scientific American from 1986-1997 and is the author of the bestselling book The End of Science.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/horganSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ladies and gentlemen, this episode is brought to you by none other than my weekend email. Every weekend I send out a few interesting links, articles and sources that I've been reading. Last weekend, for example, I shared five links including a list of questions that Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, finds interesting, and Air Crow's 1907 memorandum. Here's how Harvard professor and international relations legend Graham Allison describes the memo, quote, eight years before the outbreak of world war in Europe, Britain's King Edward VII asked his prime minister why the British government was becoming so unfriendly to his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II's Germany, rather than keeping its eye on America,

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So don't miss out. To join my mailing list and get access to my weekend emails, head to thejspod.com. That's all. Back to the show. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show.

It is great to have you back and what a fun conversation we have in store. Our guest is John Horgan. John is a science journalist and director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. John was senior writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997, and he's written for a slew of other publications, including the New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Slate. John is best known for his 1996 book, The End of Science, which became a bestseller and was republished in 2015. I read The End of Science recently, and it forms the basis for this conversation.

Now, to read the science media today is to drown in news about science's great achievements and how the frequency of new discoveries is increasing relentlessly. But John became a gadfly to this triumphalist narrative and for that reason he piqued my interest. Here's the crux of his book's argument in John's words. 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, end quote. I think John's thesis is probably wrong, but it is thought-provoking and I was very interested to talk with him to see whether he's changed his mind after all these years. Ladies and gentlemen, without much further ado, please welcome the great John Horgan. John Horgan, welcome to the Jolly Swagman podcast.

Great to be here. John, so great to speak with you. Big fan. I really enjoyed your book, The End of Science. And as I mentioned to you before we started recording, I became interested in it because I was interested in the idea of the great stagnation. The great stagnation, I think, explains to me a lot of what was interested in the idea of the great stagnation. The great stagnation I think explains to me a lot of what's happening in the world and the great stagnation may be occurring or one of the principal reasons may be occurring is that science is kind of running out of room. New ideas are getting harder to find and that's how I came to your book. First, I wanted to ask you a somewhat oblique question, and that is, why do you think that Francis Crick is the greatest scientist to

ever have lived? Oh, that's a good question. Well, I've met, I've been lucky to meet a lot of the greatest scientists of the latter part of the 20th century. And so, of course, I ended up making a lot of comparisons between them. And what struck me as remarkable about Crick, and I spent a whole day with him when I went to interview him back in early 90s. And then I saw him a couple of times after that and also got to see him interact with other people. He's got an enormous ego. He's obviously brilliant. He's really smart. But what makes him special is that his ego, it gives him the ambition and the drive to solve big problems, to take on big problems and then to work his ass off to try to solve them. But his ego doesn't get in the way of his science. A lot of great scientists become emotionally committed to their own ideas, to their own theories, to the extent that they stop seeing things clearly. And I think

that Crick just had this personality that made him able to see ideas and new evidence related to those ideas with complete rationality. And if you could give him evidence that his big theory was wrong, so that, you know, the 40 hertz oscillation theory of consciousness, for example, he'd get rid of it. Your evidence better be good. And Francis Crick did not suffer fools. But this is what distinguished him from, for example, another great neuroscientist who tried to solve the problem of consciousness after already being a big shot in immunology, this is a guy named Gerald Edelman. I also profiled him in the end of science as well as Crick.

The two were really different in this regard of viewing the science dispassionately. Edelman had an enormous ego, but he had to be right. He had to be smarter than everybody else. A lot of his scientific ambition, I think, was about proving that he was smarter than everybody else, whereas that was not how Crick operated. I think that's what made Crick such a, not just a brilliant scientist, but a really effective scientist, a great problem solver. Did you meet many scientists who agreed with the thesis in The End of Science? No, very few uh although i think my feeling was that some grudgingly agreed with me um with the sort of you know the basic structure of my argument that science is bumping up

into limits but they hated the way that i that i framed it or they they hated the attitude with which I presented it, which was kind of snarky and dismissive of certain theories that were supposedly revolutionary. Some of them actually privately would tell me, you know, I think you're onto something here. But, you know, this is an idea that might discourage young people from wanting to go into science. And it's bad for the funding agencies to hear this kind of thing. So they were sort of saying that the idea was dangerous. And I get that. I recognize that the idea is a little bit insidious.

But just as an example of this kind of thing, in 1996, after my book had come out and it had been generating all this debate for about six months, I got invited to go to the Nobel Prize ceremony. And one of the guys who'd won in physics was named Lee. I can't remember what his first name is. He'd won for something to do with liquid helium, which was actually evidence for my end of science thesis because liquid helium, it was like the third Nobel Prize given for liquid helium.

So I felt like they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. And there was this giant banquet. The king and queen of Sweden were there. There were, I'm guessing, like 2,000 or 3,000 people in this huge hall. And everybody was in formal attire. I had to rent a tuxedo. So it was this incredibly grand event. And the Nobel Prize winners all had to get up and give a little talk. And so this guy, Lee, gave a talk. And at one point, he said, there are those who say that we are reaching the end of science and that could not be more wrong you know

so he's sort of denouncing my thesis and i'm going like yeah that's me man that's i'm the end of science guy and uh so i was really excited even though he was saying i was full of shit uh so afterwards you, there's this, we'd finished dinner and then there was this dance. And I saw Lee just kind of sitting along the side watching people dance. So I went up to him and said, hey, I'm John Horgan.

I'm the guy who wrote The End of Science. And he goes, oh my God. He said, I had no idea you were in the audience. He said, I hope you realize that, you know, it's sort of the occasion where I have to denounce your book, The End of Science. I think I don't agree with everything in it, but actually I agree with a lot of it. I think, you know, certain areas of science are getting more difficult these days. So that was kind of typical of the reaction that I got from some scientists. So privately, they thought that there was some merit or a lot of merit to the thesis,

but they thought that announcing that publicly would be dangerous. It might jeopardize their funding, jeopardize the public perception of science. Yeah. I mean, some scientists, I gave a talk at the, I forget what it's called, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, this big federal facility near Washington, D.C., with lots of physicists and material scientists and people like that. So this is right after my book came out. And it was packed house, and I kind of was gleefully rubbing their faces in the limits of science.

And I realized I was a little too gleeful because some of these people were angry, like not kidding around, angry because they said, they made it clear to me, this is when we're talking afterwards, that I'm endangering their livelihood by saying that physics is bumping into these walls. I mean, I really was just talking about a certain kind of theoretical physics and particle physics and cosmology, not material science and things like that. They thought that the message that most people were taking away was just, physics is over, period. I was possibly preventing them from supporting their families.

And after that, I actually tried to be a little bit more, you know, not such a smartass in the way I talked about the end of science, at least at places like that. I don't know how much I've succeeded. What do you think the optimal amount of scientific research is? Or the optimal amount of scientific funding is? Because I assume that you don't have complete confidence in your thesis. So say you're pretty sure it's right, but you're not 100% certain. You'd still probably want there to be a lot of funding going towards

science and a lot of research activity in the off chance that your thesis was wrong. That's a really good question, a really tough question. First of all, another one of my books is called The End of War. So I'm an old hippie dove. I've always thought war is not just immoral, but just so stupid. It's not even wrong. And the United States, when you put all the interest and other expenditures together, we spend about a trillion dollars every year on defense.

When questions about funding come up, the first thing I say is, let's cut the defense budget by two-thirds just to start. We cut it by two-thirds. It's still bigger than any other defense budget in the world. The second biggest is China. Then let's talk about science priorities. I became a science journalist because I love science. I love the big particle accelerators, the orbiting telescopes, spacecraft going to other planets and things like that. On the other hand, the older I've gotten, the more sensitive I've become to spending on pure science when, at least here in the United States, social programs are really underfunded and some people don't have adequate

health care and education. There's this phrase that goes back to the 70s, I think. There was this kind of proto-rapper named Gil Scott Heron who wrote a song inspired by the moon landing called Whitey on the Moon. And the the song the first line is something like a rat bit my sister nell last night but whitey's on the moon and it kind of goes on like that it's like yeah okay far out we landed on the moon but, there is still horrific poverty in this country. And I've become a little more worried as I've gotten older about that moral dilemma. But I think it can be solved to an extent if we figure out how to cut back our enormously wasteful and immoral defense spending. What do you make of the argument put by folks like E.O. Wilson that the logic of group selection dictates that war and tribalism and violence are deeply imprinted into the evolutionary

psychology of our species? And so while we might hate war, while we might try to avoid it at all costs, while we might view it as immoral, we should get used to the fact that it's probably here to stay. Yeah, I hate that theory. I call it the deep roots theory. I devoted a big part of my book, The End of War, to debunking it. I think it's almost at the level of pseudoscience. I have great admiration for E.O. Wilson, as I do for Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker. All of them have promoted this idea that war is something that was favored by natural selection. It goes back all the way possibly to our common ancestor with chimpanzees. It's astonishing how flimsy the evidence for this theory is.

All the evidence points to war being a relatively recent cultural invention, as Margaret Mead would put it, that doesn't mean it will be easy to get rid of. Militarism, especially in my country, permeates our culture, pop culture, and our institutions, the institution of government. And it's hard for me even to get people to take seriously the idea that we could move past this era of militarism and warfare. But I keep writing about it. I keep trying to figure out ways to make people recognize that this is both a practical and a moral imperative that we stop

fighting war. I've got a column coming out to sound scientific American on this soon. You know, we're getting out of Afghanistan, but so what? We still maintain this gigantic military machine, and we still threaten other countries. We're still sort of saber rattling with China right now and with Russia. And I actually have, I believe in basic human intelligence and decency, maybe in spite of some of the counter evidence, especially recently. And I think we're going to get past war at some point.

I hope I live long enough to see that beginning. But anyway, that theory, the deep roots theory that war is in our genes, it's part of our nature, is a, it's, first of all, it's not based on good evidence, and also it's insidious because it feeds into people's fatalism about war. I guess it depends how you define warfare. If war is something that happens between nation states, then by definition it's a recent invention. But if war is something that can happen between smaller groups like tribes, my understanding was that the documentary evidence or sorry, the archaeological record was actually quite dispositive in terms of favoring the Deep Roots thesis.

It really doesn't. So the oldest good evidence for group fighting is about 13,000 years old. And it's from somewhere in the Middle East. And that's kind of an outlier. You start getting a lot of evidence when the Neolithic is well underway and there are settlements and there's agriculture and people have something worth defending, nomadic hunter-gatherers, and that's how we live for most of our human prehistory, there was no incentive to fight. And there's very little evidence. There's evidence of isolated cases of violence, one person attacking another. But both in the archaeological and fossil record and as far as observations of modern hunter-gatherers go, the evidence is pretty slim. The fact that you think that the evidence is conclusive in the other direction just shows that the Deep Roots proponents have done a better job of marketing

their idea than the critics of the idea. And again, these are some of the most powerful influential intellectuals on the planet. So it's not surprising that their views should be so popular. But I think also these views are popular, at least in the United States, because we are so militaristic and it sort of lets us off the hook morally if we think that, well, humans are just warlike. And if that's so, then we should be prepared to beat the shit out of anybody that dares to oppose us. We should have the biggest, baddest military on the planet. this scientific theory is so pervasive when there are all these cultural forces that make war seem natural and inevitable and in our case at least righteous does science reaching its limits have implications for economic growth? Yeah, that's a good one. You know, the end of science was really about pure science. I became a science journalist because I have this kind of romantic view of science as our best means of understanding the universe and ourselves.

I've never really been that interested in applied science and technology, or at least I wasn't going back 20, 25 years ago when I wrote The End of Science. But I've become more interested in technology and medicine, applied science, over the past 10 or 20 years. And I've begun to think that some limits of applied science might be coming into sight. Although I'm much more cautious about making predictions. Technology has grown so rapidly and gone in such amazing directions in my life that I've got to be really cautious in saying what's going to happen in the future.

But there are certain things that we would like to do that science can help us with that right now look extremely hard. This isn't really about economic growth. This is just sort of about the power of applied science. So one area is psychiatry. Mental illness is a terrible problem, and science has done a really bad job at helping us understand it and coming up with good treatments for it.

Another huge problem is cancer, which I've written a lot about over the last 10 years. I wrote a big piece for Scientific American a year ago that looked at the difference, the gap between the hype that comes out of the cancer industry, and it really is an industry, it's like the equivalent of the military industrial complex, except dedicated to cancer and enormous money involved. And we have made, in spite of what you might think, reading a lot of the claims coming from some of the big cancer centers

and the National Cancer Institute, we've made very little, depressingly little progress against cancer. And the treatments that we do have are extremely expensive. They bankrupt people who get cancer. The testing for cancer actually is making a bad problem worse. Energy. You know, when I was Just starting out in science writing In the early 80s

I was all excited about fusion energy And fusion energy is I mean, nobody even takes it seriously anymore On the other hand Digital technologies are phenomenal And I'm suspicious of the hype about artificial intelligence, but I've gotten interested in quantum computers lately. Again, there's so much hype clouding quantum computers. But I think that they have a chance of living up to their hype eventually.

I know some really smart people who believe that that's going to happen. They're not sure when it will happen. But I'm hoping that maybe within the next 10 years, quantum computing will start fulfilling some of its early promise and might break science wide open. It's actually made me temper some of my predictions about science bumping into limits. Whether that will have tremendous economic consequences, I don't know. We've also got to deal with climate change

and things like that. But quantum computing is like a real wild card now that I'm watching with great interest. What did you make of the Pentagon declassifying videos of unidentified aerial phenomena well i think um if there's say there's like a 10 chance that those have extraterrestrial origin um that would blow open the field right that would imply that there are you know new new um discoveries to be made in physics absolutely you know i'm i'm a little i'm a little i have kind of a split personality in some ways as a science journalist. I'm always attracted to wild and crazy ideas.

And I know some people, I met a journalist about a year and a half ago who had contributed some of these front page stories to the New York Times on UFOs. And I really liked her. She's really smart. She's a real professional. So I take her reporting very seriously.

I also have become sort of friendly with Rupert Sheldrake, who promotes paranormal science. But, and I, you know, I wish those things were true. I wish the evidence were better. But another part of me, probably the more fundamental part, is this stuffy, conservative, scientific American skeptic that just can't buy those things. I think if UFOs were real, we'd just have definitive evidence of them by now.

I think if extrasensory perception were real, again, we'd have really good evidence. But one of the greatest scientists I ever met and interviewed, Freeman Dyson, who just died last year, he thought ESP was real. So I try not to be absolute when it comes to these sorts of things. I like to talk to people who believe in UFOs, who believe in ESP, who believe in God, who believe in heaven. I'm fascinated by all forms of human belief, but I have this big skeptical filter when it comes to what I believe personally. I didn't realize Freeman Dyson believed in ESP. Do you know why he believed in it?

Apparently, his family, he had people, he had ancestors who were deeply involved in the founding of the, I forget what it was called, like the Psychical Society or something like that in England, which was very influential. If you go to the late 19th century, early 20th century, a lot of prominent intellectuals just assumed that ESP was real, and there would be evidence for it eventually and uh i guess dyson inherited that uh and uh but on the other hand dyson was he also you know up there he's up there with francis crick um i loved freeman dyson one of the greatest combinations of just sheer raw intelligence and great imaginative power of anyone I know,

anyone I've ever met. But he was a real maverick. He was a contrarian. So you could never be sure if he was saying something because he really believed it or if he just wanted to piss off his colleagues. I know a few people like that i realize i'm jumping all over the place here john but i'm just enjoying shooting the shit so there won't necessarily be a structure to this conversation hey man that's great

great great i'm glad you're on board well i questions. Well, I was hoping you could, thank you. I was hoping you could take me back to the 80s when you started as a science journo and just describe the prevailing sentiment or atmosphere sense of enormous excitement in the air of technology and medicine applications and in understanding the universe. So there were physicists especially, like John Wheeler and Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg, who were basically saying that we could solve the riddle of the universe. We could have a theory so powerful that it would tell us

how the universe created and why the universe is this way rather than some other way. It would make the universe seem inevitable. There would be some kind of logical necessity to the reality in which we find ourselves. We could also understand ourselves as well as the physical world. And that was just like so far out to me. I wanted to be part of it. I had been a hippie acid kid, acid head as a kid, and had looked to mysticism, psychedelics, and meditation

as a way of understanding everything. And then I became sort of disillusioned with that, and I thought, you know, we don't need LSD, we don't need yoga and meditation. Theoretical physics is our root to ultimate truth. So that, at least from my perspective, that was what was happening in the 80s. And it was really thrilling.

I reckon one of the most penetrating insights in the end of science is that science reaching its limits is going to start to distort and derange the ethics and the politics in the scientific profession because people are going to realize that ideas are getting harder to find and that scarcity is going to cause more intense conflict among scientists scientists who are you know they realize the overall pie isn't growing so they're fighting for their slice whether that's funding or accolades or public recognition.

When do you feel like that phenomenon really kicked off? Well, I mean, there's always been that kind of competition for money and recognition. It's just gotten more and more intense over the decades that I've been a science journalist. And it's actually worse now than I thought it would be when I wrote The End of Science. So you're right. I predicted in The End of Science that scientists would become more desperate as they're bumping up against these limits. And would start making more exaggerated

claims. But what we've got now is the replication crisis, which is this growing recognition majority of claims that are made in peer-reviewed journals can't be corroborated, are false, are wrong. There are more cases of fraud that are coming to light. This is true, especially in fields where the financial stakes are high, especially in biomedicine. On the other hand, so I think that's really distressing. I think the integrity of science is sort of in question now. I actually wrote a piece for Scientific American asking if science has entered its decadent phase.

And I even brought up the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who was palling around with some of the greatest scientists in the world, basically by letting them fly around on his jets and giving them lots of money and, you know, in some cases, apparently giving them access to nubile young women. And, you know, that's really sorted. On the other hand, I've become excited, I've got to say, by the proliferation of wild theories in particle physics or theoretical physics and in what you might call mind-body studies, so neuroscience and psychology and even philosophy of mind. There is this wild abundance of theories about how matter produces consciousness.

And 20 years ago, I would have mocked that and presented it as evidence that the mind-body problem is unsolvable. And in one sense, I still think that. I think that mind-body problem is unsolvable in the sense that I don't think it's going to yield a single solution that's just so compelling that everybody has got to agree with it. But all the different theories, you know, integrated, uh, information theory, which suggests this kind of, it's a kind of panpsychic, uh, picture of, uh, consciousness in the universe pervading the entire universe. Um, there are all these quantum theories of consciousness. It's this kind of paradigm explosion that's going on now in the whole realm of mind and body. And it's, you know, Buddhism is part of the mix.

Psychedelic research has really taken off. And instead of looking at it in this mean-spirited way, I'm thinking, this is great. It's actually what I imagined science was like back in the 60s, when a lot of scientists were taking drugs and influenced by the counterculture. And I think it's healthy. This is what I would disparage in the end of science as ironic science, which never really gets a grip on reality. But if only for its sheer entertainment value, I love it. It's fun being a science journalist right now.

How do you grapple with the measurement problem? By which I mean, science has become so specialized, like you need years, if not decades of training to become sufficiently knowledgeable in any one area of science, that to take stock of science overall and say that it's bumping up against limits you need an impossible bundle of specialist knowledge across so many disparate areas which is not possible for any one human as far as we're aware so how do you how do you deal with that measurement problem? Well, I mean, it's definitely a problem for scientists. It takes longer and longer to get to the frontier of your field.

And there's more and more specialization that's required. This is true, certainly, of physics. It's true of mathematics. I guess it's true of all the different fields. Thomas Kuhn warned about this. Kuhn warned that science would start fracturing into smaller and smaller sub-disciplines, each of which had its own little private paradigm and language, jargon, and there would be increasingly difficult communication across disciplines.

On the other hand, for an outsider like myself, I mean, I've always been a generalist as a science writer. And I think it's possible if you're curious and you do a lot of reading find connections between what they do and what other people do that lead to some novel idea. So I think this has always been a problem in science. Maybe it's become more severe than it used to be. But it's not, I don't see this as an insurmountable barrier. And even in, you know, I thought you were gonna say measurement problem

related to quantum mechanics. I think quantum mechanics is a good example of a field where there are all these tendrils going out into other fields, into biology and medicine and obviously now computer science. cross-disciplinary stuff, I'm hoping it will have really surprising, interesting consequences. Maybe even enough to make my end of science thesis look really stupid. Because I guess the criticism is you can't have specialized knowledge in all of these different fields such that you would be able to objectively determine

the rate of progress in those fields. So all you can do is ask the practitioners and get their opinions and then aggregate those opinions. And you might cherry pick, like in any given field there'll be a diversity of opinions maybe there'll be some disgruntled folks and you can just cherry pick all of the disgruntled opinions in each field and then aggregate those to a very pessimistic gloomy view of science that would be like the that would be the criticism but i um i think there are ways of objectively measuring scientific progress in aggregate and um let me let me rattle off a couple of them and then i i'll get your reaction john have you heard of this have you heard of this

study by benjamin jones and bruce weinberg where they studied how old scientists are when they make their great discoveries i is are they economists at uh i think so all right so are these the guys who've been sort of writing about the decreasing productivity of science for a while? I think you might be thinking of Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, Michael Webb, John Van Rienen, the Stanford guys who, so they wrote that paper, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? That's it. Yeah, that's who i'm thinking yeah which is another great example i was going to raise that but that's one of them and in that paper they they take um well they look at a lot of different research efforts but a good example they say is moore's law the famous doubling of computer chip density um but they find that the number of researchers required to achieve that doubling of computer

chip density is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. And so, sure, we might be getting the same in terms of the output, but the inputs are increasing. So, we're becoming less productive. But the other paper, which I'll send to you, I think you'll find it super interesting. Maybe you have heard of it, but they study how old scientists are when they make their great discoveries. And they find in the early days of the Nobel Prize, so early 20th century, future Nobel scientists were 37 years old on average when they made their prize-winning discovery. But in recent decades, that average has risen to 47 years.

Wow. So future Nobel Prize winners are older when they make their prize-winning discovery than they were in the past. That's one that's interesting. And then I guess the other is just stagnating total factor productivity growth. And I think that's pretty interesting because it would be strange if it was only the commercially relevant parts of science that were stagnating as opposed to just science in general like there i can't see a good reason to think a priori that only the commercially relevant parts of science would be stagnating i.e the parts of science that

show up in productivity growth so anyway all that is to kind of rebut the criticism I raised, which makes it look like I'm sort of having a conversation with myself. So I'll throw back to you if you have any comments or reactions. First of all, what you said initially about what the science journalist does and what I definitely did do, sort of, I'm not an expert in anything, but I'm going around and talking to the experts. And yeah, you could argue that I cherry picked and found disgruntled folks in each field to disparage the direction of the field and to say that maybe some of the central problems were insoluble. I tried then to back up what I was saying with some empirical evidence. For example,

in the realm of particle physics, I beat up on string theory a lot. And I don't know what the hell string theory is really about. I'm just an outsider. I can't solve differential equations or whatever the math of string theory is. But string theory postulates things that can never be experimentally accessed, observed, tested. And once I discovered that sometime in the late 1980s, I've never let it go. In every case, I try to find some central problem in the field that is not generally recognized by the optimist in the field. So when it comes to consciousness studies, there's no way of measuring consciousness. So you have all these theories that circle around something that cannot be put into the

realm of objective, measurable, empirical science. Anyway, coming back to the second part of what you said about efforts to quantify scientific productivity, it's fascinating to me. I actually went to a little private meeting a few years ago where those economists from Stanford were there. They gave a presentation. The guy who wrote The Great Stagnation was there. There were a bunch of people, John Ioannidis, there were a bunch of people who thought about the limits of science. But the whole thing was, how do we get past the limits of science?

Somebody there had read my book, read The End of Science, and thought, oh, let's invite Horgan there, too. And it was weird, because I felt like I should be supporting the overall optimistic outlook on how to increase science's productivity, but I felt like most of what was said at the meeting was reinforcing the idea of stagnation and running into limits. So it was very puzzling to me. On the other hand, I think that it's harder to measure pure science because how do you quantify the value? I actually wrote a piece for Scientific American about this. How do you quantify the value of the Big Bang Theory? How do you quantify the value of discovering in the late 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which is, to me, the single most profound scientific discovery since the end of science was published?

It hasn't led to any radical revisions of Big Bang Theory, but it could have. It's kind of been disappointing that its theoretical consequences are so minimal. So that, I think they're, you know, the analysis of, the quantitative analysis of scientific productivity is really interesting and important, but it's limited when it's applied to the kind of science that I'm really interested in.

You know, which addresses big philosophical questions and it's just kind of increasing our awe and wonder at the spectacle of nature, that kind of thing. Got it. If Ed Witten was here and we said to him string theory isn't testable do you think his rebuttal would be well actually gravity is an important consequence of string theory and sure that's a post prediction like we already knew gravity existed. But the fact that string theory predicts gravity and gravity is also observable in the real world

means that we haven't falsified string theory on those grounds. And that's a really important consequence of string theory. Would that be the first thing he would say? Or what's your sense? You've met him, right? I've met him. And I even, for some reason, he was really upset by my book. And I made him look kind of like an oddball.

And he's an odd person. I mean, he's one of the smartest people who ever lived, one of the greatest mathematical minds ever. And he didn't invent string theory, but he popularized it. He's Mr. String. It's hard to know how he would defend it now because the situation with string theory has just gotten worse and worse. So yeah, back in the 90s, Witten was saying string theory

describes all the forces of nature in this kind of natural, really beautiful, elegant way. And even back then, some people, some Nobel Prize winners like Sheldon Glashow were saying bullshit and doesn't do any of those things from my perspective. The problem with string theory today, and string theory, for those of your listeners who don't know, is the leading candidate and has been for about 40 years now for a unified theory of nature, which can wrap all the forces into one tidy mathematical package, where now you have general relativity which describes gravity and standard model called particle physics which describes all the other forces over here and string theory purports

to um unify all the forces mathematically now and this has been discovered over the last 15 or 20 years there's not one string theory, there are basically an infinite number of string theories. It's like 10 to the 500 or something like that, which is basically infinite. And each one of those corresponds to, according to the proponents again, to a different universe with different laws and features. And so anything that you observe can be predicted by a string theory. So the theory is not falsifiable. This is sometimes called the Alice's restaurant problem. There was this famous song in the 60s called Alice's Restaurant. One of the refrains

was, you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant. Well, you can get anything you want from string theory, but that's not a good thing. People use the phrase theory of everything. String theory is like a theory of anything, which means it's not really a theory of anything. If a theory predicts everything, it really has no value. You could say the same thing about Freudian psychoanalysis, which Karl Popper held up as a model of pseudoscience. String theory, I know, has been very productive, inspired lots uh very deep mathematics so i'm told uh ed witton is revered i revere him he's like this freakishly smart uh interesting person but i i think it's pretty obvious that string theory is a dead end i was so impressed that you

you got to interview kyle pop. Can you tell me what it was like meeting him? He was 90 years, so I think this was 1990. I was a full-time staff writer at Scientific American. And I was allowed, I went through this period when I just thought, I'm just going to track down famous old people and see if they'll talk to me. And so I thought, Karl Popper, I wonder if he's still alive. I found out that he was, living outside of London. And I convinced him to let me come to his house and interview him. And, you know, he was 90.

I expected him to be really frail and doddering. And he was like a force of nature. He was this, like, feisty, belligerent guy. And it was almost comical because his big idea is you can't be certain of anything. His philosophy is anti-dogmatism, anti-certitude, both in the realm of science and even more so in the social and political realm. And yet, Popper was so dogmatic and arrogant and sure he was right about everything. And he was even pounding the table at various times

in our conversation. And he just had this kind of ferocity that was really great. For a journalist, you want these big personalities. They're much easier to describe. When I meet great intellectuals, I'm always looking for contradictions or paradoxes in them. I find those interesting. Not always just to belittle them, to say that they're contradicting themselves, but just to provide insight into them and insights into human nature we're all contradictory but popper was just so uh such a spectacular case of self-contradiction that i loved it you know the the anti-dogmatist

uh who was dogmatic the skeptic who was so sure that he was right. And I've never stopped thinking about Popper because he presents, you know, I consider myself a skeptic and somebody who doesn't like dogmatism. And yet, how do you, it's a dilemma. How do you fight against dogmatism, and yet how do you, it's a dilemma. How do you fight against dogmatism? How do you defend skepticism without becoming dogmatic or self-righteous and filled with certitude yourself? To me, it's like a, it's a deep philosophical riddle

and I don't know if there's an answer I feel like it's almost good old like and the paradox that it poses but anyway yeah Karl Popper was one of the great

encounters I've ever had with a great mind. Isn't there a distinction between being dogmatic in one's demeanor and dogmatic in one's beliefs? And Papa might have been dogmatic in his demeanor, but maybe he was doing that to prompt people to challenge him, to push back harder. And if he was persuaded by you,

then he would happily change his beliefs. This is what I said earlier about Francis Crick, that if you could convince him he was wrong, he would be the first to congratulate you. Before I spoke to Popper, I talked to people who had known him When he was much younger Who had been his student or had been his colleague

And they were all pretty much in agreement That he had always been a bully And very dogmatic And self-righteous And arrogant And very dogmatic. And self-righteous. And arrogant. And I do think that this, I don't think it's just sort of a matter of style versus substance. I think it's, I mean, this is something that I struggle with in my own journalism when I'm trying to promote a skeptical attitude. How do you do it, first of all, without being an asshole,

but second, by recognizing that you've got to apply these principles to yourself. Not in a way that means you're so humble that you're never going to say anything. Some ideas need to be criticized and, you know, you need to present yourself fairly in the war of ideas. But still, it's, I don't know if there's an easy solution to this problem

of being against dogmatism without being dogmatic. Maybe some of your listeners will suggest solutions. A lot of people have written to me about this, and they think that they've figured it out but um i don't think it's it's solvable certainly not in any easy way what's the best suggestion you've heard oh god i can't remember well what's what popper himself said um you know so i there's this point in my interview with him where I said, you know, there's kind of a pause. And I said, so we're talking about falsifiability, you know, which is his great philosophical principle that good ideas have to be testable and falsifiable. And so I said,

is your falsifiability principle falsifiable? And he kind of, you know, glared at me for a moment. And then we're sitting right next to each other. And he put his hand on my hand. He rested it gently on my hand, and he looked into my eyes and said, I'm hoping I'm getting this right, something very close to this.

I don't want to hurt you, but this is a silly question. And then he said, he said, did my enemies ask you to ask this question? And I said, yes, even though I was lying. Actually, I thought of the question myself. And by the way, I put all this in the end of science. I had all this in my portrait of Popper. Then he went on to say that his falsifiability principle,

which is at the heart of his anti-dogmatism and skepticism, is a philosophical principle. It's not a scientific principle, which is the kind of thing that needs to be tested. So that's actually, that's a pretty good way to finesse the situation, but I don't think it eliminates it. At least it doesn't for me.

When I'm trying to figure out how to be a consistent skeptic and and sort of an agnostic who doesn't kind of lapse into certain kinds of certitude if that makes sense. Yeah. Could science go on ad infinitum? Or like, what are the reasons a priori for thinking that science has limits? Well, it's funny you ask this because I'm working on a column right now

for Scientific American about whether science could be infinite. And I mean really infinite. Like we continue doing science in the face of the heat death of the universe. You know, we're talking about 10 to the Google, no, what is it? Like 10 to the 100 years in the future. So that's like a, that's a Google, a Google of years. And because I just have been thinking a lot about human progress.

I just read Steven Pinker's recent book on how things are getting better and better. I had him speak to my school by Zoom, and I believe in progress. A lot of my intellectual friends think progress is nonexistent, and I think that's foolish. There's a lot of progress in knowledge and Morality all across the board question is how long can progress? Continue and some of my friends were saying, you know, well even if there is progress climate change it's gonna destroy civilization and all this pessimism and so I Guess I am contrarian because then I started thinking, well, maybe not.

And I went back to the work of Freeman Dyson, and I also looked at some and the memory of what we've learned can endure, even in the face of the universe going toward total heat death, absolute zero, absolute darkness. And this means, of course, that the end of science would be wrong but for the purposes of this column I'm just saying maybe I am wrong let's play with this idea because it's the knowledge-seeking, the sentience, the intelligence that makes the universe interesting. And it would be really nice if we can figure out how that can continue, I mean, even past the destruction of the solar system,

the destruction of Earth, going way into the future. So this isn't science. This is science fiction. I actually call it science theology in The End of Science. But it's profound, and it's stimulating, and it's kind of beautiful. So when I think about that, I don't really think about, you know, end of science is more of a near-term thing. On the other hand, I still think, Freeman Dyson has this, there are a few scientists who have this idea that at the end of time, our descendants will have turned the entire universe into a gigantic cosmic computer.

It'll be one huge connected brain, probably a quantum computer. And it will, you know, what will it think about? I think it will be trying to solve the riddle of its own existence. And I actually wrote about this in The End of Science. And I've got to admit, this was inspired in part by a big acid trip that I had back in 1981. I actually became a cosmic computer at the end of time. And in that trip... I realized that there's no answer. There's no answer to the question of how we came to be.

That even if we become a godlike entity, this cosmic brain at the end of time, we still won't really know what the hell is going on. That the universe will still be a mystery. I suspect you're right, because even a theory of everything purports I mean it doesn't theories of everything don't purport to tell us why there's something rather than nothing right well some of them do and there are certain some of them well there there's certainly some scientists who hope that a theory of everything will do that so steven weinberg has talked really eloquently about this uh this is related to something i said earlier he said that what he wants from a final theory is a kind of logical

um perfection or inevitability so if you change any one aspect of it, the whole thing will fall apart. And it tells us why we live in this universe and why the universe is this way rather than some other way. And this would eliminate the need for the ridiculous anthropic principle, which basically says that the universe is this way because if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to observe it, which is just like it's a completely vacuous statement. I've never really understood why physicists took it seriously.

But that's been the hope. I think that was the hope going back to the 80s and 90s. I don't know if anybody really believes that anymore. I think that's one reason why we have so many multiverse theories, which kind of make the arbitrariness problem, you know, why do we live in this universe, even worse. But if you have the multiverse and then you add the anthropic principle,

for some people that suffices as an explanation of why we live in this universe. To me, it's completely unsatisfying. And I suspect to most physicists, to Steve Weinberg and others, who really care about this problem. What did you learn when you met Noam Chomsky? Noam Chomsky, he's definitely one of the most, I mean, there's certain people, you know, I've met all these brilliant, brilliant people among the smartest people who ever lived. But you can still rank them. And there's some people who are so intelligent, they seem like

they're not entirely human. They seem like a different species. So Ed Witten is that way a little bit. Francis Crick was brilliant, but he was kind of like a good guy at the same time. Just incredibly smart. But Noam Chomsky, there's something weird about him. I mean, I have enormous admiration for him. I interviewed him, I think it was in 89 or so, and he's still pretty young at MIT. And I spent

almost a whole day with him and into the evening. And again, I saw him interact with all these other people. I saw him give a talk. We hung around with some of his graduate students. And I also had a lot of time with just the two of us. And I felt like I could ask him any question about anything. And he would have a perfectly composed little essay ready for me that would be just crystal clear and brilliant and provocative. And it was just, but there's a kind of coldness to him that was almost eerie. But anyway, I feel very lucky to have met him.

And I admire him more today than I did back then, and I'm glad that so many young people have discovered him and have realized what a phenomenal person he is. I mean, there's nobody else like Noam Chomsky. It's kind of distressing. We don't have a great moral leader coming out of science now comparable to Noam Chomsky. And I think that's really unfortunate. I had him on the podcast a couple of months ago.

Really? Yeah, yeah. He's 92 years of age now and still sharp as a tack. Yeah. Did you have this feeling that I was just describing that you could, he's got this kind of dispassionate quality, even though there can be sort of a sense of anger behind some of the things that he says, but he doesn't raise his voice. He's just very, almost eerily calm and clinical in the way that he talks about things. Yeah, I absolutely had that sense. I think for a couple of reasons. One is that he is very rational, and the other is that he speaks in a very monotone voice. Yeah. You detect his passion through the word choices, not through his tone well i i um i think i had this in the end of science there was only one

moment in my the day i spent with him in our conversations where he lost his temper where he sort of showed some emotion and uh it was when i i asked him I was trying to pin him down on what exactly his ideology was. You know, was he anarchist or libertarian or far left or what? And he said, I'm an anti-authoritarian. Whatever the authority is, I'm against it. And so I said, remember,

I'm always looking for the contradiction. So I said, oh, isn't that interesting? Because in linguistics, you are the authority. And his eyes kind of bugged out. And there was this sort of, his face transformed and he looked angry for a second, and he said, no, I'm not. I'm actually not even that important a figure in linguistics, and I hardly know any languages other than English, and he basically started trying to convince me that he wasn't that big a deal in linguistics, which is like nuts. There's Noam Chomsky in linguistics way up here, and then everybody else way down here. No scientist has ever dominated a field the way Noam Chomsky has, except maybe Charles Darwin in biology or something like that and so that was fascinating because i realized that you know it was a little bit it was like a pauper-esque moment i thought of that as like i found this weird

little twisty paradox in his worldview um and which was tied to his view of himself. So of course I made that when I wrote about him for Scientific American, I made that beginning of my piece. So it sounds like in the, what is it now, 25 years since The End of Science was first published, you've softened on your thesis somewhat? A little bit. Part of this comes from over the last year, I've been, as a kind of of pandemic something to keep me busy all my summer plans were cancelled in 2020 and I was trying to figure out what I should do with myself

over the summer because I teach so I have summer vacation and I decided to try to learn quantum mechanics with mathematics. So I've been doing that over the last year. And this is because I've always felt a little insecure about being a former literature major, passing judgment on people like Ed Witten and Steven Weinberg. And, you know, I took a couple of calculus classes back in like 1980, and that's it.

I never took linear algebra. I had trigonometry and logarithms when I was in high school. So I've really immersed myself in quantum mechanics. I've really struggled with the math, but I've learned enough to have developed these opinions about quantum mechanics. And it feels like, well, in the end of science, I had a phrase talking about, when I'm talking about the end of physics and saying that quantum mechanics, or physics rests on the firm kinds of wonderful applications. But in terms of what it tells us about the world and about ourselves, about the relationship between matter and mind,

or what matter even is, it's totally up for grabs. And so it reinforces my feeling… Part of my prediction in the end of science was that science, the core of it was really stable and was not going to be subject to any more great revolutions. And now I feel like physics is a house of cards because quantum mechanics is so crazy. And there's so much, there's virtually no agreement on what it actually means. It leads to all these contradictory interpretations.

And so that actually has made me rethink my end-of-science thesis a little bit. And as I said, I'm excited by quantum computers. And I think quantum computers might not only turn out to be these really powerful tools for simulating certain things, especially things involving quantum processes, but it might illuminate some of the quantum mysteries and lead to new productive theories in physics. I hope that happens. We'll see. Yeah, we shall see.

I also hope that it happens, but John, I might leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation. Me too, man. I'm glad that your questions were so diverse. It's fun for me. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.

Two things before you go. One, if you want to read the transcript or the show notes for this episode, you'll find them on my website, thejspod.com. Number two, please subscribe to the show. It means that you won't miss new episodes like this one, and it also makes it easier for other people to find us, and I would appreciate your help. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield.

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