27 SEPTEMBER 2007
All good things must come to an end, they say, but it isn't true.
Sure, some good stuff fades away or dies, or just terminates from its own internal structure -- a pennant race, for example, or a New Year's Eve party. And columns that were occasionally good (or at least fun to write) can't go on forever -- that would violate the law of increasing entropy, or something like that.
Science, though, defies the conventional proverbial wisdom. Science does go on forever, or it will at least as long as there are people with brains (real brains, not the fake ones that make such a mess of the world). For science is the ultimate expression of the power of human thought. Science is the one reliable way of making sense of the world, and sense remains in short supply. As long as there is a need for sense, and some thinking to seek it, science will survive.
Science
is all about exploring old frontiers and creating new ones for future
explorers, and is consequently self-sustaining. Good science never answers
a question about nature without simultaneously generating new ones. Observational
science (what goes up always comes down) leads to the need for theoretical
explanations (the curvature of spacetime). Those theoretical explanations
generate new implications (black holes, gravity waves, the expansion of
the universe), generating new scientific fields to plow. And occasionally
entire new disciplines grow (complexity, networks, quantum information)
out of efforts to solve old disciplines' problems.
Book cover of the Rudolphine Tables, frontispiece of "Tabulae Rudolphinae: quibus astronomicae...." by w:Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Graphic from the history of astronomy at Wikipedia.
A decade or so ago, a popular book called The End of Science suggested that all the questions that science could answer had been answered, and that all the deep discoveries had already been made. It was a clever gimmick to sell a book, but about as intelligent as FEMA's response to Katrina. Science was hardly ready to end. To pick just one example, a couple of years after the book appeared scientists discovered that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, a surprise comparable in magnitude to the original idea of the Big Bang itself. Cosmic acceleration implies the existence of a strange repulsive form of energy permeating all of space (or something even stranger), and physicists are pulling their hair out trying to figure out what it is. If Einstein were alive today, he'd be bald.
Countless other quests occupy scientists all across the spectrum of
disciplines. Neuroscientists continue to map the circuitry of the brain
with more exquisite detail, yet remain decades away from fully explaining
its abilities and its maladies. Biologists know that the Earth still harbors
a multitude of uncategorized species -- some, no doubt, with properties
or abilities that will help transform medicine, the economy, and maybe
society. 
Chemists
and physicists and engineers have gathered at the nanoscale to explore
the world where atoms are toys and tools for further scientific exploration
and economic exploitation. Scientists of the air, land and sea still seek
the insights needed to understand the warming of the weather, the scheduling
of earthquakes and the forecasting of hurricanes.
Science's longevity -- and prospects for a perpetual future -- derive from a simple principle: ultimate questions never have ultimate answers. Science's best answer to date for the origin of the universe (something called the inflationary Big Bang) does a good job. But analysis of that answer shows that it implies the existence of other universes, perhaps too many to count. The best answer for why the universe is governed by two incompatible constitutions (known as quantum mechanics and relativity) is a theory (superstrings) that implies more dimensions of space than science's current best instruments can perceive. Ultimate questions about space and time just keep getting deeper with every new "answer."
The discovery that DNA underlies genetics eventually led to the realization that genetics can be hijacked by "epigenetic" effects from molecules that attach themselves to sites on the DNA. Not to mention the mysterious mini-RNA molecules that also influence what some genes do. And the mini-RNAs just might offer new insight into the origin of life itself, another ultimate question that never quite gets answered.
Meanwhile, every time scientists think they're getting close to ultimate answers, new wrinkles appear that can't be smoothed out without poppping some new question into view. Before the human genome was sequenced (supposedly closing the books on the basics of genetics), most experts guessed that humans had 100,000 genes or so. But then the actual count came in at closer to 25,000. So a grand new question arose about how so few genes could work together to create such complicated creatures.
And so it goes. News keeps happening in science, and somebody needs to report it to the people who care, like those of you who are reading now. But some good things, unlike science, do need to come to an end. Fortunately, to paraphrase Semisonic, every end leads to some other new beginning.
So it's closing time for this column, but not for science itself. Stay tuned. There will always be science news.
E-mail: tsiegfried@nasw.org
