By Robert Hazen, George Mason University
Can science be an endless frontier? Some of us may have read the shocking and sad news that today’s scientists might be the last of a dying breed. Science, we are told, is nearing its twilight, the victim of its own success. But come to think of it, is there really an end to science?
Claims of John Horgan
There’s an eager pack of science watchers, led by science journalist John Horgan, who would have us believe that the end of science is at hand. We are nearing a time, he says, when all the great laws of nature will have been deduced. Everything of significance that can be learned about the natural world will have been learned.
The gist of Horgan’s claim is this: there are only so many things to know in the universe, he says. Some of the great mysteries, such as the nature of consciousness, the ultimate structure of matter, the extent of the universe, can never be solved by observational science, he claims.
Scientists may engage in a fruitless pursuit of these problems, but their work is going to be more of a untestable philosophical speculation than science. As for the rest of what we don’t know, each discovery brings us closer to closure.
JJ Thompson discovered the electron, so we can check that off the list. Evolution by natural selection, earthquakes by plate tectonics, nuclear reactions, electromagnetic radiation, DNA—everything has been discovered and studied and soon, we’re going to know it all.
Science: An Endless Journey into the Unknown?
By casting doubt on the future vitality of science in stylish prose, Horgan runs the risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, why should the public support science? Why should they pay tax dollars for research if nothing of interest is left to discover? Of course, “the end of science” makes a great sound byte.
William Harvey, the 17th century English physician who discovered the nature of blood circulation, spoke for today’s researchers and scientists when he said, “All that we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.”
The key to understanding why science is an endless frontier lies not in cataloguing all the things we know, but rather in recognizing the vast amount of what remains unknown: the unanswered questions of science.
This is a transcript from the video series The Joy of Science. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Unanswered Questions
In a survey of scientists for MIT’s Technology Review, they were asked to identify the biggest unanswered questions in their own fields.
By far, the largest group placed questions about the mind at the top of their list. Some of them—like “What is a memory?”—are at the easier end of the questions, and actually amenable to scientific research. But the question, “What is consciousness?”, is probably right now beyond science. It’s hard even to come up with an operational definition of consciousness, much less figure out a way to study it as a physical phenomenon.
Physical scientists counted scientific mysteries about the nature of gravity at the top of their list. What is gravity? Where does it come from? What is the underlying physical principle that causes gravity to happen?
Pressing Questions
They also were very interested in the nature of time. What is this strange dimension of time, in which we experience one direction only, from the past to the future—never the other way? Where does time come from? How does it fit into the context of physical laws?
Then there were the social sciences. There are many important questions about the social sciences—the inevitability of war, for example; the rules of economics; the best way to raise a child. Most of their questions are steeped in moral and ethical considerations that are beyond the natural sciences and the scientific method. Then there are pressing questions related to human needs—increasing food production, understanding Earth’s global climate, curing disease.
The Greatest Unanswered Questions Ever
Speaking of unanswered questions, there are two of them that outdo every mystery. One of the greatest mysteries of life is how the fertilized egg—a single cell, a microscopic object—can become a complete human being. How does this developmental process occur? From that single first cell, you get a wide variety of specialized structures, composed of many different kinds of cells—hundreds of different kinds of cells, in the human body.
There is another, very different, unanswered question: Are we alone? This remains one of the most profound unanswered questions in science: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; this is also known as SETI.
Science: An Endless Frontier
The frontier of science is endless. Even after centuries of labor, by most estimates we’ve only identified one or two percent of all the living species on Earth today. We’ve sampled only the thinnest outer skin of our planet. We have yet to answer mysteries like the dark matter question, the astonishing origin of life, the unimaginably complex development of you and me from a single cell.
The more our knowledge grows, the more we realize how much we don’t know. We almost certainly have yet to ask, and recognize, many of the most profound questions that we could ask about the universe. The true measure of scientific progress is thus not so much a catalogue of the questions that we can answer, as it is a list of the questions that we’ve learned to ask. For as far ahead as anyone can foresee, there will be no end to those questions.
Common Questions about Science
The gist of John Horgan’s claim is this: there are only so many things to know in the universe, he says. Some of the great mysteries, such as the nature of consciousness, the ultimate structure of matter, the extent of the universe, can never be solved by observational science, he claims.
William Harvey spoke for today’s researchers and scientists when he said, “All that we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.”
The key to understanding why science is an endless frontier lies not in cataloguing all the things we know, but rather in recognizing the vast amount of what remains unknown: the unanswered questions of science.
