--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Gergen, editor at large of 'U.S. News & World Report," engages John Horgan, senior writer at "Scientific American," author of the "End of Science, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MR. GERGEN: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Watson, and Crick, great men, great discoveries, great ideas. Your essential point in your book is we’ve come a long way but we’re reaching the end of discovery. Tell us about how far we’ve come first.
JOHN HORGAN, Author, "The End of Science": Well, first of all, all these great scientists in the past have helped us create a kind of map of all of reality from the very small scale of quarks and electrons right out to the edge of the universe, to the galaxies and quasars that we can see there through our telescopes. We have discovered with telescopes that the universe is expanding and at one point was much hotter and smaller than it is now. So there seemed to have been some kind of great explosion about 15 billion years ago that created the universe. Physicists have shown that all matter consists of a few basic particles ruled by a few basic forces. When you look at the history of life, we know that all life descended from a common ancestor that appeared about 4 billion years ago, and it became enormously complex and created all these different species through the process of natural selection and Mendelian genetics. My argument is basically that in the future, we will be filling in details within this framework that scientists have already created with all these different theories, and there won’t be any great revolutions analogous to the theory of evolution or to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity or to quantum mechanics.