Tag Archives: Philosophy of science

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

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This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops.

The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next.

Take this lovely quote: ‘Working scientists don’t get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don’t care all that much for facts. It’s not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that they don’t see them as an end in themselves. They don’t stop at the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out.’

When I give my talk based on my book Before the Big Bang, I end by talking about dark matter and dark energy, and how our lack of any real idea of what these are means we know very little about the majority of what makes up the universe. And, I stress, this isn’t a bad thing – this is what makes science interesting. Stuart Firestein takes this viewpoint and puts it at the heart of science.

If I have any moan, the introductory section is just a touch repetitive on the central role of ignorance in science, but I think it’s such an important aspect that so few people recognise that it’s well worth hammering home. I also, despite the case histories he gives, find it difficult to follow his explanation for the process of selecting the right bits of ignorance to work on. But overall this is a great book and recommended reading for both scientists and anyone with an interest in science.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Science Delusion – Rupert Sheldrake ***

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Half of what’s in this quite chunky tome is excellent – the trouble is that I suspect the other bits, which aren’t so good, will put off those that really should be reading it.

The fundamental message Rupert Sheldrake is trying to get across is that science typically operates in a very blinkered, limited way. And he’s right. He shows very convincingly the way that time and again scientists refuse to look at anything outside of a very limited set of possibilities, not because there is good evidence that these particular avenues should be ignored, but simply because of kneejerk reactions and belief systems.

Of course science can’t examine every silly idea, fruitcake theory and dead-end observation, but the closed-mindedness of many scientists is quite extraordinary, and certainly not scientific. And in bringing this out, Sheldrake has a lot to offer in this book. He examines a whole range of assumptions that are generally made in science and never questioned – and this is a brilliant thing. We’re talking basic things like universal constants staying constant, energy being conserved, whether consciousness is purely a product of the matter in the brain and so on. I’m not saying these are assumptions are necessarily wrong, but it’s too easy to get into the habit of thinking that they shouldn’t be questioned. We quickly forget that they are assumptions.

Sheldrake also shows powerfully how some professional skeptics simply have no interest in looking into claims for anything outside of our current scientific understanding (telepathy, for example). He cites a wonderful example where he was brought into a TV programme with Richard Dawkins. He did this on the assurance that this would would involve the discussion of the evidence for and against telepathy. ‘I suggested that we actually discuss the evidence,’ says Sheldrake. ‘[Dawkins] looked uneasy and said “I don’t want to discuss evidence.”… The director confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence.’ Debunking without evidence isn’t science, it is little more than name calling, and assuming it’s true, Richard Dawkins ought to be ashamed.

Another great example is pointing out how little science, outside of medicine (and parapsychology) makes use of blind experiments. It has been demonstrated time and again that if experimenters have an expected outcome, they will influence the results of the experiment. A good example was an experiment using rats in a maze. The experimenters were split into two, one set given highly intelligent rats, the other given slow rats. Not surprisingly, the intelligent rats completed the mazes very significantly faster. Only they were both the same type of rats. The only difference was the experimenters’ expectations. When physicists undertake an experiment (the hunt for a Higgs boson, say), they are not usually open minded, they are looking for a specific outcome. It’s rather scary to think just how much they may be biasing the experimental outcome (and what’s published – at least 90 percent of data isn’t) towards the results they expect.

So there’s good stuff in here that everyone working in science, or thinking about science, ought to consider. But then there’s the downside. We’ve all got friends who are obsessed with their hobbies. And whatever you are talking about, they will bring in their pet topic. So you might be discussing the banking crisis and your friend who is a bus enthusiast pipes up, ‘Yes, and it’s amazing what an effect it has had on bus timetables.’ Reading a Rupert Sheldrake book, you are always thinking, ‘Please don’t do it, Rupert. Don’t mention it, Rupert. Please!’ But inevitably along comes morphic resonance and morphic fields.

The thing is, Sheldrake is a legitimate scientist who came up with an idea that has been largely ignored or ridiculed. Morphic resonance (apart from sounding far too much like a weapon the Borg would use) is actually not a bad idea and deserves further investigation. But as soon as you bring your pet unsupported scientific theories into a book it degrades the rest of it. Morphic fields might illustrate well the kind of problem with assumptions and conventions that Sheldrake is trying to highlight, but because they are so speculative, they simply get in the way. He should have left them out.

Similarly there is quite a lot here that will put the backs up of many readers. Material that seems supportive of anything from homeopathy to the concept of chi (qi) in ancient Chinese medicine. The trouble here is that Sheldrake seems to be confusing two things. It is perfectly possible that there are phenomena like telepathy that exist (at least in perception) but aren’t well explained by current scientific theories. But this doesn’t mean that you should give any support to totally fictional theories that have no basis in observation and what we do know about science. We may well need new ideas, new mechanisms – but not hauling out hoary old ideas that are long past their sell-by date. He should have trimmed this guff out, which would not in any way have weakened the main thrust of the book.

Overall, then, a valuable and powerful message, but one that is almost certainly going to be lost to those who most need to hear of it because of the unfortunate trappings that have also been included.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Galloping with Light – Felix Alba-Juez ***

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I’m more than a little wary of self-published books, especially ones with subtitles like ‘Einstein, relativity and folklore’, but this looked like a book that would be different from the masses – and it is. It’s not one of the interminable ‘Einstein was wrong’ books, but rather one that tries to really give an in-depth understanding of Einstein’s ideas to the general reader.

Unfortunately, Felix Alba-Juez seemed far too obsessed with the definitions of words to give us useful insights into what is going on. In the first chapter he bangs on and on about nuclear power not being based on E=mc2. It’s certainly true that, contrary to popular belief, the equation isn’t a central part of the effort to make a nuclear bomb. But his repeated assertion that the idea of converting mass to energy is folklore totally misses the point, probably because of his obsessive pursuit of the term inertia, something that in some senses doesn’t exist but is merely a reflection of Newton’s second law. There is conversion between different forms of mass-energy in nuclear reactions, and for convenience we conventionally label some aspects of this as matter and some as energy. It’s not folklore, it’s scientific convention. It’s hard not to think ‘get a life.’

Similarly in the second chapter, Alba-Juez gets all heated about the famous Einstein quote about time passing quicker with a pretty girl than sitting on a stove, suggesting that this throw-away line is generally considered an attempt to explain relativity to the common man. But it’s obviously not that. Come on, the acronym of the supposed journal is JEST. It was always supposed to be a joke – has the author no sense of humour?

And so it goes on. While the philosophical musings about the words used in relativity are mildly interesting to those who already know the area quite well, and there is a lot of good basic science in here, I can’t recommend this as a science book for the general reader. Perhaps because it’s a translation, it is just too turgid and heavy handed. Although a lot of relativity is explained, the approach is often through extremely wordy and impenetrable prose. My undergrad textbook on relativity, which I still have (A. P. French) is often more readable.

The book, with its densely packed text (the layout has too little white space), doesn’t fill the reader with the delight of science but instead is like sitting through a rather dull and decidedly nit-picking science lesson. It’s an interesting idea, but the execution disappoints.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Quantum Enigma – Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner ***

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Of all the wonders of physics, none is more fascinating and mind-bending than quantum theory. But there is one aspect of it that, frankly, I find tedious – and as this book is dedicated to that aspect, I wasn’t hugely looking forward to reading it. The aspect in question is interpretations of quantum theory. Such is my distaste for these speculations that my book on quantum entanglement, The God Effect, only makes passing reference to them.

Quantum theory itself describes how very small particles – both matter and less substantial, like photons of light – behave. It’s a weird world, but a consistent one. The trouble comes when you try to make the bridge between that world and the ‘normal’ world we experience. For example, unless they are observed, quantum particles don’t have a precise location. Instead there is a range of possibilities, each with it’s probability predicted precisely by an equation. But until you check where a particle is, it isn’t in a single place. This is fine and all works well. But the ‘enigma’ of the title is how it works. How a particle (say) goes from being a range of possibilities to an actual location.

We usually loosely ascribe this fixing of the state of a particle to a measurement or an observation – but does that imply it requires conscious attention? (Which is why this book also considers consciousness.) This led Einstein to wryly ask if the moon is still there if no one is looking at it. In practice it seems obvious consciousness is not involved. A detector like a Geiger counter is enough to fix a location. But those who have agonized about this for years think that a totally isolated Geiger counter that had no contact with anything else whatsoever would not make an observation, but would go into an entangled state with the particle.

So apart from the original Copenhagen interpretation, which simply describes the probability wave function collapsing on contact with a macro object and doesn’t fuss too much about the detail, there are now a whole range of interpretations from the many worlds idea to Bohm’s transformation of reality that works on the whole universe all at once.

The trouble I have with all this is that it isn’t really science. It’s more metaphysics than physics. The interpretations all predict the same thing – quantum physics happening the way it does – but don’t really add anything because they remain speculation. If at some point we get a clear indication of an interpretation that can have our support as being distinguished by data as the best one, I’d be happy to think about it, but for the moment I can’t help but feel it’s a waste of time. I’m quite happy to say that quantum physics works the way it does and I don’t really care how it is interpreted. Just enjoy the science!

As it happens, it wasn’t as bad an experience reading the book as I thought. Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner make the various interpretations and the way this whole business strays into the nature of consciousness quite approachable, and they get the message across without resorting to too much painful philosophy. I would say, though, that they tend to labour the point. There’s a long and rather boring section with a story about someone visiting a world where macro objects behave like quantum particles that is entirely unnecessary, especially as all the same examples are gone through again later using an actual quantum particle. I really can’t see the point of this.

There are also a few not-quite-right moments when the pair stray from science to history of science (they are scientists, not writers, which perhaps explains this). One example that jumped out at me was the comment about philosopher George Berkeley that Berkeley was a bishop, going on to say ‘It was common in those days for English academics to be ordained as Anglican priests, though the celibacy of Newton’s day was no longer required. Berkeley married.’ The big problem here is that Berkeley and Newton were contemporaries. Admittedly Berkeley was younger, but their working lives overlapped in a big way (in fact Berkeley’s most famous contribution to science was his attack on Newton’s ‘method of fluxions). The point they seem to have missed is that Berkeley wasn’t a priest because he was an academic. He was a bishop first, and a philosopher in his spare time. He wasn’t a professional academic at all.

Overall, an interesting contribution to books on quantum theory if you want to know more about interpretations, but because of the topic, not one I can get too excited about.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Free Radicals – Michael Brooks ***

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This is one of those books that is very well done – but it’s difficult to like the outcome. Michael Brooks sets out to show that real scientists are not at all like the hyper-rational, logical, conformist Mr Spock caricatures we know and love. This is fine, as long as he doesn’t also demolish scientific heroes along the way – we all need heroes.

Whether it’s using drugs to stimulate ideas, or being selective results, it seems many a scientist has been prepared to stray from the straight and narrow in order to get to their desired ends. We see how dog eat dog the battle to publish can be, but also how a kind of ‘acceptable fraud’ is all too common – not the outright making up of results, but rather going all out to pursue an idea, possibly a spark of genius, even if it means temporarily ignoring an experimental result or interpreting the data in a slightly selective fashion.

Parts of the book feel a bit forced. The suggestion that many (or even any) great scientific ideas were the result of being on LSD or other drugs seems a little unlikely. Apart from anything else there is reasonable evidence that effective creative thinking is suppressed by drug use – users may well think they are being creative while high, but in reality aren’t. The capability to come up with new directions and see things in different ways seem to be better served by going for a walk or sleeping on a problem, rather than tripping – it’s difficult not to get the sense that Brooks is just out to shock the reader here.

There is also rather too much emphasis put on the tedious postmodernist views of Paul Feyerabend and his ilk. I thought that Alan Sokal’s brilliant hoax had put paid to all that rubbish, but Brooks was prepared to drag it into the argument. However there is no doubt that scientists’ tendency to take risks (whether with themselves and other people or with their theories), to support a theory far outside what is suggested by experiment and to be harsh to opposing theories are real and often hidden behind the ‘rational people of science’ facade. Brooks makes clear that sometimes a scientist will be so convinced with a theory that they keep on ignoring the evidence for years… and they are eventually proved right. How often this happens compared with occasions when they don’t get it right he doesn’t say.

Perhaps the most important message is the need for mavericks in science, not just conformists. All too often modern academic science is far too rigidly bound to make big progress. If we are to make real breakthroughs again, perhaps there needs to be more opportunity to go out on a limb. At the same time, and this is something Brooks doesn’t really pick up on, we need a lot more education of the public (and of journalists and politicians) in the realities of science – an understanding that it is very rarely about certainty, and is all about probabilities – and that it is much easier to disprove something than to prove it. The public expects science to be black and white, where it is really shades of grey. We just need education to understand that this doesn’t discredit it. They are by far the best shades of grey available. But we shouldn’t expect certainty.

In the end the advice I would have given to Michael Brooks if asked before he wrote the book would be ‘Tread lightly for you tread on my dreams.’ There is no doubt that this is an interesting subject, and it’s important that we understand that scientists are human. But you don’t improve matters by simply pushing them off a pedestal. They still have the best view around.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Blind Spot – William Byers ***

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If you decide to read this book, and you’re not a professional philosopher, you’d be advised to first find a quiet place where you won’t easily be disturbed, and proceed slowly. This is seriously difficult stuff.

Or at least I found it so in parts. This is because William Byers’s aim is nothing less than to develop the foundations of a whole new philosophy of science, based on the ideas of ambiguity and uncertainty in science, and it’s very much written along the lines of’ ‘Now I will introduce the idea of…’ etc. I’ll give a sketch of what Byers’s way of thinking about science actually is – some elements of it are familiar and easily comprehensible, some less so.

The general idea is that, whilst science has traditionally been seen as something which can provide certainty and which can give us a completely objective view of reality, there is an inherent uncertainty built into scientific ideas and a limit to what it can shed light on. Science can’t solve every problem, as we might be tempted to believe, due to its ‘blind spots’, and it’s important that we recognise this fact, Byers say. I think Byers overestimates the extent to which scientists (and the public) believe science can, in fact, solve every problem, but this is a relatively minor point.

Going a little deeper into Byers’s philosophy of science, we have talk of the self-referential nature of science, and the notion of the subjectivity of logical reasoning. We’re also invited to think of scientific concepts as ‘protoconcepts’ that are fluid and not static – they are approximations and there’s nothing concrete about them. Nothing overly challenging here – this is comprehensible stuff, and these ideas will be relatively familiar to some.

Going deeper still, though, things become quite tough. There is Byers’s idea of ‘The One’, which is a kind of unity of the universe and consciousness. This unity, it is explained, is connected to what he calls the fundamental ambiguity in science. The fundamental ambiguity is the idea that science is partly ambiguous, and partly unambiguous, with the unambiguous aspects of science also being ambiguous. Did you get that?

I wish I could say that this point becomes clearer when you read the whole book, but I’m not sure it does. I was always waiting for the point where I would go ‘Ah, yes, now I see what he means’, but this moment never came, and I was often left in a state of confusion. I was also waiting for an example of a specific scientific idea that was going to illustrate the abstract point being made – but one was never forthcoming. The idea of ambiguity in science isn’t a problem – think of an electron, for instance, which is inherently ambiguous, not being wholly a wave nor a particle. But the discussion of ‘ambiguous ambiguities’ and so on is taken to a level where it’s sometimes hard to get a real hold on what’s being talked about.

I should say a couple of things. First of all, despite the above, the general argument that we need to re-evaluate exactly what science can do for us, and what its limits are, remains clear and convincing. Secondly, what’s good is that the author is aware that parts of the book are difficult to get your head round, and is sympathetic to the fact that we’re likely to struggle with it.

It’s certainly a challenge, then (although which of us with an interest in science hasn’t come across challenging and difficult ideas before?). I would recommend that any students of philosophy of science take a look at this. As for anyone with a general interest in science and philosophy, just be aware that you’ll be encountering some pretty obscure ideas and might, at points, struggle with it.

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Review by Matt Chorley

The Most Human Human – Brian Christian ****

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This is a brilliant concept well executed, if occasionally missing perfection due to a bit of pretentious twaddle. Of course I am well aware that one man’s pretentious twaddle is another person’s insightful and soul-searching philosophy, so you may appreciate Brian Christian’s musings, but I’d rather he stuck to the meat of the story.

And what a wonderful story it is. Firstly, don’t be put off by the subtitle, A Defence of Humanity in the Age of the Computer – this makes it sound like a Bill McKibben style moan about how it’s time to stop with the technology and get back to nature. This isn’t what it’s about at all. Christian’s central theme is the Turing test – Alan Turing’s idea of seeing how far computers have advanced by asking a human to judge whether there is a computer or a person on the other end of a text message. In particular, Christian introduces us to the Loebner Prize which annually pits the world’s best chatbots against human beings for judges to distinguish in a 5 minute chat.

The story of this challenge, in which Christian was a human subject for the 2009 session in Brighton threads through the book. As Christian looks at ways he might distinguish himself as a human being (hoping to win the prize given for the ‘most human human’, just as one of the bots gets ‘the most human computer’), he explores what human reasoning and thought is about in terms of the development of artificial intelligence and the impact of computers, and particularly pseudo-intelligent computers have on human beings.

The book works best when Christian is dealing with technology and its implications. I first came across a chatbot when ELIZA was installed on our Dec-10 at work in the late 70s and the whole idea of interacting with a computer in conversational speech is fascinating. Similarly, when it doesn’t get too deep into the chess itself, the section where he looks at chess computers and Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov is also delightful.

Rather less successful are the sections where he spends rather too much time on philosophy and what can come across rather too easily as intellectual waffle. So we get statements like ‘Capitalism presents an interesting gray space, where societal prosperity is more than the occasional by-product of fierce competition: it’s the point of all that competition, from the society’s viewpoint.’ Yeh, right. I also found the author’s ‘bemused with British English, funny old Brits’ tone a little condescending.

Nevertheless, it’s easy enough to skip the worst of the philosophising, which is a relatively minor part of the book anyway, and there is plenty of excellent meat in there for anyone interested in AI, what it is to be human and how one informs the other. Recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Beautiful Invisible – Giovanni Vignale ****

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Whereas you might think of science as the opposite of art or literature – perhaps just as a collection of matter-of-fact observations and laws, lacking in emotion – there is just as much expression, imagination and beauty in our physical theories as there is in any poem or painting, physicist Giovanni Vignale argues here.

It is fundamental limits to our understanding that allow us to be imaginative, the book conveys. Reality is, at a deep level, inaccessible and unknowable, so we can only hope to describe it indirectly. We are forced to think creatively, to come up with stories and analogies, and to understand through metaphor and abstraction: scientific theories, the author says, “lie at the interface between the fictional and the real world.”

This may seem most obvious in the quantum mechanical world, where observations and experimental results don’t make intuitive sense, so we have to think outside the box when coming up with theories to make sense of them. But it is the same across all of physics, the book explains – fields, particles and all the rest are the result of the imaginative and creative thinking of physicists and have no physical existence in and of themselves.

Most of the examples the book chooses really get across the extent to which our descriptions of reality rely just as much on human imagination as on hard, matter-of-fact data. And, fittingly, much of the book is written in quite beautiful and poetic language.

The book has a particularly interesting section on the similarities between theories in physics and updated versions of classic pieces of literature. Think, for instance, of the modern takes on Shakespeare’s plays sometimes on television. Whilst these modern versions are superficially different from the original plays – the characters’ names may be different, or we might be in 21st century America rather than 16th century Italy – the underlying themes that are dealt with are the same, and there is a core storyline that remains whichever version you are watching. In this analogy, the core themes and core storyline are reality, with a physical theory being only a particular version or ‘representation’ of it we have come up with through creative thought, and only one of many theories that we could conceivably come up with that would serve just as good a purpose.

The Beautiful Invisible can be hard going at points. It combines a sophisticated philosophical outlook (about what reality is) and numerous references to literature (some pieces of which I know little about) with at times quite technical physics – with the section on electron spin being especially technical. It certainly took me out of my comfort zone on occasion. It is the kind of challenge that is enjoyable, however. And two aspects of physics are covered particularly well. One is entropy, and the other is the discussion around the violation of Bell’s inequality.

The book also wins points for uniqueness – I can’t recall reading anything quite like it before. It’s common for authors to point out that our theories are only imperfect representations of reality. But Vignale’s book explores the idea in much more detail than usual. All in all, it is an interesting perspective on theories in physics, which makes you appreciate science for the creative discipline it is.

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Review by Matt Chorley

Virtual Words – Jonathon Keats ****

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Because this book is about science and words, I’m easy prey. As a science writer, what could be more wonderful? Jonathon Keats, author of the Jargon Watch column in Wired magazine sets off on a series of riffs on different neologisms that have emerged in science and technology (more technology, if push comes to shove).

Each is an elegantly written essay, light enough to make bedtime reading or a good gift book, but with enough insight to make them really interesting. Of course, if you don’t give a damn about words, it’s all a big ‘So what?’ It doesn’t really advance our knowledge of science an iota. But who couldn’t be enticed into discovering what an unparticle is, the strange history of in vitro meat, the tricky scientific oddity of a memristor, the enjoyment of a touch of crispy bacn (sic), what cloud computing, crowdsourcing or a mashup is (those irritating words that everyone else seems to know what they mean), and what the true origins of w00t are.

I really looked forward to reading this book every time I came back to it – always a good sign – but there were sufficient flaws to have to raise a couple of concerns about it. Firstly there’s the author’s rather pernickety tone, which won’t be to everyone’s taste. Then there is a slight feel that his science knowledge lags somewhat behind his expertise elsewhere. In the ‘memristor’ section he tells us ‘the capacitor linked charge and current, the resistor, current and voltage, and the inductor, current and flux.’ I’ve never come across a component called an ‘inductor’ – and since up to this point he had been talking about electricity, I didn’t really know what he meant by flux. It took a moment to realize he was talking about magnetism and an induction coil.

Perhaps that one was just me, but there was one other jarring oddity. The author refers to the early use of the term ‘flying saucer’ – but his comments suggest he hasn’t a clue how this term came into use (it had nothing to do with the shape of the spacecraft and everything to do with the way it moved). If he can get the derivation of such a well known term wrong, it doesn’t bode well for the more obscure ones he describes in his text.

However, the objections are minor and easily overlooked. The fact remains that it’s a very enjoyable book on a subject that will delight anyone with an interest in science/technology and language.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The End of Discovery – Russell Stannard ****

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Russell Stannard argues here that at some point in the future we will have reached a stage where no new scientific discoveries can be made. It is unlikely we will have discovered everything about the physical world – there is no reason to believe that our brains are equipped to fully comprehend nature, Stannard argues, and even where we are not held back by fundamental limits to our understanding, we will face practical difficulties in continuing to make discoveries (we can’t build ever bigger particle accelerators, for instance). Instead, we will have discovered everything we are able to as human beings.

Each chapter looks at specific questions and mysteries in science that look like they could be beyond us to solve, and which may hint at where the boundaries lie of what we are capable of knowing. Some of the questions looked at may in fact soon have answers – is there a Higgs particle?; what is the nature of dark matter? – whilst some (the more philosophical questions) do indeed look like they might be too hard to solve – what is consciousness?; do we have free will?; where do the laws of nature come from?; can we talk meaningfully about a reality which is independent of what we observe?

Because of the background information given to each of these questions, the book serves as a good introduction to some of the key concepts and ideas in modern science, and in particular modern physics, towards which the book is heavily slanted. The explanations are clearly aimed at non-specialists, and there is only one occasion where the writing gets a little too technical – this is in the section on the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces (the question being considered here is whether we will ever be able to confirm whether a Grand Unified Theory of three of the four fundamental forces exists).

What I would have liked to read more about, however, is whether this issue – will scientific discovery some day come to an end? – should even occupy us greatly. I’m not sure we can answer it with any certainty (although I am inclined to speculate that science will always continue to progress but with diminishing returns), and as Stannard acknowledges, even if we do reach the stage where no further progress in our understanding can be made, we will probably not be aware we have reached this end point. I am tempted to think that, for the time being at least, we should not worry too much about making grand predictions about the future, and that we should instead just get on with the science.

Putting this to one side, though, the large amount of topics covered, together with Stannard’s accessible writing, means this is still an enjoyable and worthwhile read. If you want a guide to some of the most difficult questions scientists are struggling with in the 21st century, I would recommend this book.

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Review by Matt Chorley