The End of Discovery: Are We Approaching the Boundaries of the Knowable? - Hardcover

Stannard, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199585245 ISBN 13: 9780199585243

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Many scientists make extravagant claims as to the scope and power of scientific thinking, claiming that ultimately it will provide a complete understanding of everything. But Russell Stannard, himself an eminent high-energy physicist, strongly disagrees with this grandiose claim. Indeed, in The End of Discovery, Stannard argues that eventually--perhaps in a few decades, perhaps in a few centuries--fundamental science will reach the limit of what it can explain. On that day, the scientific age, like the stone age and the iron age before it, will come to an end.
To highlight the boundaries of scientific understanding, Stannard takes readers on an engaging tour of some of the deepest questions facing science today--questions to do with consciousness, free will, the nature of space, time, and matter, the existence of extraterrestrial life, and much more. For instance, from his own research field, he points out that to understand the subatomic world, scientists depend of particle accelerators, but to understand the very smallest units of nature, it has been calculated that we would need an accelerator the size of a galaxy. Clearly, unless a new approach comes along, we might never understand fully the most basic building blocks of the universe.
As a scientist, Stannard remains hopeful that several of the questions addressed will one day be answered. But other puzzles will remain for all time--and we may never even realize it when we have hit an insuperable barrier in those directions.
He assures us that there will always be new uses of scientific knowledge. Technology will continue. But fundamental science itself--the making of fresh discoveries as to how the world works--must ultimately grind to a halt.

About this title

About the Author

Russell Stannard is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University where he headed the Department of Physics and Astronomy. A high energy nuclear physicist, he has carried out research at CERN in Geneva, has been awarded an OBE, and received the Bragg Medal from the Institute of Physics. He is also the author of a bestselling trilogy of children's books on science and Relativity: A Very Short Introduction.

From Publishers Weekly

Around 1900, many scientists declared that they knew all there was to know. Now, a century later, particle physicist Stannard (Relativity: A Very Short Introduction) throws out a list of scientific problems that he thinks may never be resolved. An infamous problem is string theory: this idea that minuscule vibrating "strings" are the lowest possible denominators of existence passes all the mathematical smell tests, but the odds of its being experimentally proven anytime soon are about as minuscule as strings themselves. Or take consciousness: will we ever understand the interplay between free will and determinism? And is it true that we live in a "block universe" in which our entire lives are already embedded in time--and that we just haven't reached the frames in our future? Stannard is at heart a popularizer of science, and his "end of science" approach is a hook on which to hang a survey of the perplexing theories floating around science today. His presentation is clear enough for even science-savvy high school students--who may be challenged to try to solve Stannard's intractable problems. 23 illus. (Nov.) (c)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0199585245
• ISBN 13: 9780199585243
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240