Re: John Horgan - "The End of Science"

On Tue, 07 Mar 2006 01:37:04 -0600, Cyde Weys <cydeweys@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The following is taken from an essay I wrote in 2001 on the prospects
of the future of Science Fiction. The essay can be found at:

THE END OF SCIENCE

In 1996 John Horgan published the interesting and provocative
book, The End of Science. It is a flawed book - Horgan has,
perhaps, been corrupted by too much exposure to modern literary
analysis. In the individual sections wherein he interviews big
names in various disciplines he pushes too hard for the view that
the exciting big breakthroughs are all past and all that is left
is the mopping up. In my view the most important part of the
book is in the introductory section where he discusses the
progress myth and debunks the patent clerk myth. [According to
legend, "in the mid-1800's the head of US Patent Office quit his
job and recommended that the office be shut down because thre
would soon be nothing left to invent." (p20). The story has been
traced to the testimony of Henry Ellsworth before congress in
1843. Far from wanting the office closed down, Ellsworth was
asking for more money.]

Horgan envisions the end of Science as being one of running out
of surprises, new fundamental discoveries. The approach he takes
is that of surveying various fields and asking the big names what
surprises they expect. This, not surprisingly, yields little.
The main feature of the surprising unknown is that, after all, it
is unpredictable and unforeseeable. He does concede, however,
that progress will continue in the applied sciences.

The subtitle of Horgan's book is "Facing the limits of knowledge
in the twilight of the scientific age". I argue that we are not
in twilight but rather in the first flush of the heydey. It will
be a short heydey, however, and in another 50 years the game will
be all but over. Moreover innovation in the applied sciences and
in technology will have come to a standstill also.

The argument is not a matter of judging what will mostly be done
or not done. Rather the issue is one of rates of return of
investment. Advancement proceeds by cherry picking, i.e., by
exploiting the lines of most profitable development. Naturally
the the cherries change - what is difficult to exploit at one
stage may be easily accessible at a later stage. What happens is
that the cherries become sparse; it doesn't matter that we don't
know which technologies and which lines of study are chosen.
What does matter is that the rate of return from investment in
innovation declines and that the required capital investment
(capital here is not just money - it is intellectual and social
capital) increases.

The situation is similar that to species radiating in a region of
empty niches. There in an initial period of exploration followed
by rapid species diversification as niches are exploited and
developed. In turn diversification and rate of evolutionary
change (this would be morphological change in phenotypes rather
than accumulated genotype change) slows down until near stability
is reached.

Chad Orzel illustrated the argument with:

To take the concrete example of computer technology, much of the
current progress is driven by the exponential increase in
computing speed known as "Moore's Law" (and all too often cited
as if it were "F = ma", a personal peeve of mine). Most blind
techno-optimists want to continue this trend through another few
decades.

There are two major problems with this: 1) physics, and 2)
Moore's other law.

In reverse order, along with noting that the speed of computer
chips doubled every eighteen months, Moore also noted that the
cost of designing and building those chips had a similar
exponential growth. This is the "commitment of resources" issue
Mr. Harter mentions-- if you continue the well-known "Moore's
Law" growth for another fifteen or twenty years, you get a
terahertz computer, but you also expect the factory to build it
to cost something like the GNP of the entire planet. Something's
got to give, and a fair bet would be that it'll be "Moore's Law"
growth in computing speed.

Part of the reason for the expense, and a more fundamental
problem facing the field is just basic physics. The huge speed
increases of the past decades have been achieved mostly by making
everything smaller, and squeezing more transistors onto a chip.
Extrapolating this trend (as many are wont to do), you find that
somewhere in the 2015-2020 range, we need to make transistors the
size of a single atom. Which is a bit improbable... At this
point, blind techno-optimists usually wave their hands
frantically, and invoke Quantum Computing, but there are some
very serious issues there (chief among them being the difficulty
of algorithm design) that will prevent quantum computers from
being the means of continuing the rapid increase in computing
speed available to businesses and individuals.

NAVIGATING THE SINGULARITY

In a series of SF novels Vernor Vinge exploits the notion of The
Singularity. The thesis is that accelerating technological
change is approaching a singularity.

The "singularity", however, is not a true singularity but rather
is a short period of extremely rapid change, much like a phase
transition. I argue that we are going through the 'singularity'
now with the peak rate of change somewhere in the next 25-50
years. The singularity, while fun as a concept, isn't realistic.
Back in the 70's or thereabout there was an article that argued
civilization was approaching an asymptote. The chap graphed
various trends such as transport speed and argued that they all
showed asymptotic behaviour (the singularity) with the asymptote
occuring around 1997 - in other words (accordingin to him) the
singularity has come and gone and we didn't notice.

At this point it is natural to ask: How do we know where we are
on the curve? How can we tell that the near singularity won't
happen a hundred years from now rather than in the near future.
The answer is that the near singularity occurs just before we
start running into the limits that dampen out the rate of change.

The equation has two factors, each of the form x(1-x),
representing respectively the percentage of societal effort
devoted to technological advancement, and the rate of return per
investment. The key indicators are (a) the pecentage of people
involved in creating new technology, and (b) the capital
investment needed for effecting new technology. (Technology here
is a grab-bag term including scientific research.)

The percentage of people engaged in creating new
technology/science has climbed exponentially at a rate faster
than the population growth for the past 150 years and is now a
significant fraction of the total population; we are beginning to
hit the limits here. This is complicated by the fact that the
world is split into regions with different levels of development.
Euroamerica is well ahead of most of Asia in the percentage of
the population engaged in technology creation so there is room
for Asia to come up to speed but not much. In any event, what
with resources crises and ecological problems I think Asia
(China/India/Indonesia) has insuperable problems in the short run
(the coming century).

The other factor is size of investment and return on investment.
The size of investment required for individual technologies is
also climbing sharply. This varies a great deal - there are
still plenty of garage shop startups - but most of the action is
in good sized enterprises. Big science has become very big
indeed, not just in size of total effort but also in size of
individual efforts.

......



Richard Harter, cri@xxxxxxxx
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
It is not wise to examine apparent coincidences too closely.
Sometimes they are not coincidences at all.

.

Relevant Pages