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

Stannard, Russell

3.63

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9780199645718: The End of Discovery: Are We Approaching the Boundaries of the Knowable?

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019964571X ISBN 13: 9780199645718

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

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Praised as "lucid and provocative" (New Statesman) and "a tour of some of the deepest questions facing science" (The Independent), this fascinating book highlights the outer limits of scientific understanding, taking readers on an engaging tour of some of the most perplexing issues 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. 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. As a scientist, Stannard remains hopeful that several of the questions he addresses here 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.

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About the Author:

Russell Stannard OBE is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University where he headed the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

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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