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• Thursday, November 10, 2005 07:34 AM

  John Horgan's "The big idea: No more breakthroughs

  I make no claims about the accuracy of the following, other than that it is my opinion.

  This author makes many huge mistakes in his article claiming that the end of scientific progress is nigh.

  He may be absolutely right about certain limits beyond which science can't go. (E.g., we might never be able to prove anything about conscious awareness, or the flow of time, or determinism vs. free will.) Although he probably believes this for the wrong reasons.

  But that is very different from his claims that science as a whole will more or less slow down to a crawl and stop.

  He complains about the dearth of articles written about the absence of progress in certain fields of science. Right. Let's have more articles that take 20 paragraphs to say No Important New Developments Occurred in Oceanography in the Last Four Months . (And why not a NY Times headline: Nothing Significant Happened in Zambia Yesterday ?) Sure, John.

  The biggest mistake by this scam artist is his claim that he is a science journalist. After his "The death of proof" article in Scientific American (October, 1993) and his book "The End of Science" (1996) -- not to mention an August 12, 2005 NY times op-ed piece, "In Defense of Common Sense", and this article in Salon -- he is undeterred by the absence of any evidence that any portion of his predictions has occurred. In these writings he also shows, beyond a scintilla of doubt, that his understanding of how science works is nonexistent.

  At all times since the dawn of science, there has been a great deal of science that was not known then but was discovered later. There is more scientific research being published now than at any time in the past.

  The rhythm of scientific progress is not steady; rather it is punctuated by spates of discovery when a valuable new viewpoint is put forth. (Cf. H. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".)

  This bloke has definitively proven himself a crackpot of the first water.

  —xylu Read xylu's other letters
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