IS SCIENCE HISTORY?

By Jeffrey Kluger

If you're a scientist closing in on a major discovery, you may want to slow down some. Bungle an experiment, perhaps; muddy up a study. Tempting as it might be to finish this project and get on to the next one, it's possible there won't be a next one, because science, as we know it, may be through. After centuries of breakthroughs in every field from astronomy to zoology, science may have rendered itself superfluous. Sure, we may have years of work ahead tidying up the details. But while that's important, is it science? Maybe not. Maybe true science--the capital-S science practiced by Galileo and Copernicus--is behind us.

That's the premise behind The End of Science (Addison-Wesley; $24), the controversial new book by John Horgan, a senior writer for Scientific American. While many scientists dismiss his theory as unworthy of discussion, discuss it they have, heatedly challenging Horgan's work and defending their own.

In fact, the book's theory makes a degree of sense. Science is usually an incremental enterprise, with most researchers toiling in the experimental thickets, trying to hack out a little clearing of enlightenment. Occasionally, however, a Darwin or Einstein comes along and with a flash of insight as blinding as a thermonuclear airburst, clears the entire landscape. Down below, ordinary scientists blink disbelievingly at their sudden ability to see from horizon to horizon. But their sense of wonder is tempered by regret. Tending your tiny patch seems like pulling weeds compared with such intellectual clear cutting.

Nevertheless, Horgan argues that this wholesale defoliation is just about complete. His points are well made, but two major counterpoints remain.

The first is that we've heard all this before. In every century, people have concluded that theirs was the most enlightened of all times and that any scientific questions not currently answered might never be. In this century, however, maybe it's finally true. Once you've unleashed the power of the atom in the sands of Alamogordo, the Einsteinian interchangeability of energy and matter becomes a settled question. Big ideas like quantum physics and the structure of DNA have been established just as conclusively.

But simply because science has checked off some of the boxes on its existential-questions list does not mean it has checked them all. What was going on before the Big Bang? Astronomers have some ideas, but little more. What are the most basic subatomic particles? Physicists suggest they're tiny 10-dimensional objects called superstrings, but nobody has shown that these really exist. Horgan claims that such questions are less science than they are philosophy because we can't test them. But that won't necessarily always be so. Aristotle couldn't have conceived of the Hubble Space Telescope; what makes Horgan think we can imagine the scientific equipment of the year 4000?

Meanwhile there are plenty of questions to address right now. Barely 10% of the matter in the universe has ever been found; the rest remains a mystery. Biologists understand the structure of DNA, but that no more reveals how life began than a schematic of a radio reveals the identity of Guglielmo Marconi. These and other big questions may yet be solved.

The other argument against The End of Science is even stronger. Once the answer to a big question is found, Horgan suggests, there's not much left for researchers to do but finesse the data. But here, the author may be confusing the importance of a scientific insight with its eventual impact. In most fields it's what happens after the eurekas that constitutes true genius. We may applaud the people who conceived of weaving, but we rarely think of them when contemplating the artistry of a Persian rug.

Science, too, has to be measured not only by its big discoveries but by what we do with them. Exploring Jupiter's marble bag of moons may not seem like much compared with Newton's laws of gravity, which got us there. But given that one of those moons is Europa, where microbes may thrive in ice-coated seas, the work is meaningful indeed. Studying viral protease inhibitors may seem like scientific pointillism when you've broken the genetic code, but it seems a lot less so to the 21 million people worldwide infected with HIV.

For all we owe the scientific giants, science has never been about simply hammering stakes around your exploratory frontiers. Science is about settling the territory you've claimed. That's the challenge today's scientists face, and, Horgan's gracefully written book notwithstanding, that's not an end. That's a beginning.