Paper: The End of Science: Confronting the Limits of Knowledge at the Twilight of the Scientific Age

A highly provocative assessment, written by John Horgan, former senior editor of the famed Scientific American magazine, after having exhaustively interviewed dozens of the most prominent scientists, cosmologists and empirical philosophers of the contemporary Western world (such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Dawkins and Sir Roger Penrose). In this analytical essay, Horgan postulates with abundant journalistic rigor that the golden age of fundamental scientific discovery—those monumental revolutionary paradigms such as the Big Bang theory, general relativity, foundational quantum mechanics, and the discovery of the helical structure of DNA—has irrevocably reached its collapse and definitive end. He argues that pure, empirical science has collided with its own immanent epistemic limits. He argues that what dominates the current academic landscape is no longer verifiable physics, but rather a highly speculative 'ironic science', made up of unobservable, fantastical and post-empirical theories (such as mathematical string theory or infinite multi-verses) that logically resemble literary fiction criticism or an obscure theology rather than demonstrable and rigorous physical science.