Natalie Angier, the sharp-witted science reporter for The New York Times, reviews "The End of Science," by John Horgan, a senior writer at Scientific American, in the June 30 NYT Book Review. She writes: In this intellectually bracing, sweepingly reported, often brilliant and sometimes bullying book, John Horgan makes the powerful case that the best and most exciting scientific discoveries are behind us. He argues that many scientists today, particularly those he interviewed for this book, are "gripped by a profound unease." Part of that malaise results from all the sociopolitical irritants we've heard about: the dwindling financial resources, the vicious competition, the strident antipathy of animal rights activists, religious fundamentalists, technophobes and the like. But a far more important source of despair, Mr. Horgan insists, is that scientists are beginning to sense that "the great era of scientific discovery is over." The big truths, the primordial truths, the pure truths about "the universe and our place in it" have already been mapped out. Science has been so spectacularly successful at describing the principal features of the universe, on a scale from quarks to the superstructure of galaxies, that the entire enterprise may well end up the paradoxical victim of its own prosperity. "Further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions," he writes, "but only incremental, diminishing returns." While Angier does not agree with his thesis that the major problems of science have been solved, she commends his incisive critique of scientists who cannot give up the dream of omniscience, many of whom he has interviewed for the book -- Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose, Steven Weinberg, Daniel Dennett, Stuart Kauffman, Marvin Minsky, John Wheeler, Frank Tipler and others. She summarizes Horgan's view of detumescent science: Where does that leave contemporary scientists? They can either pursue small, manageable and vaguely boring science (sequencing the complete complement of human DNA may fall into this category), or they can turn to what Mr. Horgan calls "ironic science." Such science is "speculative, postempirical," resembling literary criticism "in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting." Ironic science is provocative, he says, but it fails to converge on the truth. " It cannot achieve empirically verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in their basic description of reality," he writes. ---------- For those without access to NYT, the full review is available at: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/theend.txt (11 kb) Or, we will E-mail a copy. Send a blank message to <jya@pipeline.com> with the subject THE_end