Skip to main content

The End of Discovery – Russell Stannard ****

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.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Matt Chorley
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more