Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 22:19:58 -0700
Subject: Re: Buddy, can youse paradigm?


Alex Trotter wrote:
> 
> Has anyone read the book *The End of Science* that has been referred to
> here recently? It sounds like the basic idea would be that the 'heroic'
> age of scientific discovery is over, and stagnation has set in (the
> Hubble telescope notwithstanding, I guess). I haven't seen any reviews.
> 
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I haven't read it either, but I'd be pretty suspicious.  The director of the U.S. Patent 
office once said "Everything that could be invented has been invented."  He said that in 
1896, I believe.  I noted this in a paper on Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last 
Man";  I think it applies equally well here.

Whether one agrees with his philosophy of science or not, Kuhn's work in the history of 
science shows that it is (usually) the fine points often mistaken for stagnation that 
move science along.  Two classic cases: Copernicus, whose system resulted from 
essentially the attempt to work out the Ptolemaic system to "the next decimal place" to 
which Barkley referred.  The other is Relativity, the result of the crisis produced by 
Black Body radiation and the photoelectric effect.  I'd be quite suspicious of anyone 
who claims that science is through with discovery because it is not in a state of crisis.
-- 
Yours &c.,

Jeff Johnson				  "Amicus Socrates, amicus Plato,
Graduate Student, Political Science		sed magis amica veritas."
University of Wisconsin--Madison	 	              --Aristotle


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