Visiting scholar and physicist Freeman Dyson participated in a panel discussion entitled “The End of Science?,” yesterday at noon in the Memorial Union Sun Room.

Joel Snow, director of the Institute for Physical Research and Technology (IPRT) introduced Dyson and the other participants on the panel. Amy Sue Bix, assistant professor of history specializing in the history of science and technology, moderated the discussion.

Discussion centered on a recent book, also titled “The End of Science,” by Tom Horgan, a senior writer for Scientific American magazine.

The thesis of the book is that society has come to devalue science and scientific pursuit is declining, Bix said.

“[The book] has been the subject of some controversy among both scientists and non-scientists alike,” she said. “Horgan’s thesis is … that we are now facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age. He argues that the history of thrilling discovery has ended.”

Horgan said the fundamentals of physical and biological science have been established and we do not have any more truly meaningful prospects for investigation ahead, Bix added.

ISU history professor David Wilson defended Horgan’s thesis, while admitting that he was playing the Devil’s advocate.

Wilson said that most cultures, most times, have not had the idea of unending scientific understanding of the natural world.

He said that in fact the idea of permanent, continuing scientific pursuit may only be a cultural phenomenon of the past 100 years.

“The evolutionary theories of the late 19th century and relativity and quantum mechanics in the early 20th century … instilled an idea of radical and progressive scientific change,” he said. “It may be that the only reason we have to think that there is going to be unending science is because we are sort of trapped in this little bit of time of our own in which that idea has been current, but in most cultures, most of the time, and in western culture most of the time, that idea has not been present.”

He said this idea is a matter of people being too provincial to see the world in the context of its wider history.

Gary Comstock, professor of religious studies, argued that to argue that science is dead is similar to arguing that morality is dead.

“How could Horgan possibly know?” Comstock asked. “In order to know that there is nothing big yet to be discovered, we would have to know not only everything, or most everything, that there is now to know, but everything, or most everything, that there is now not known.”

He suggested that Horgan might be saying that scientists “play at science” without really doing science at all. They may learn about it and discuss it, but they really have no idea what they are doing in a larger cultural context of “proper beliefs, practices, attitudes and institutions.”

Although Dyson said he had not read Horgan’s book, he argued that although science might come to an end for a variety of plausible reasons, any predictions about it are meaningless.

“[Science] could come to an end tomorrow, we don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t look like it, but we don’t know for sure. That’s what makes it interesting.”

He said most of the major revolutions in science have been driven by new tools rather than by new concepts.

“Probably 30 or 40 major revolutions have been driven by tools, which are less dramatic perhaps from a scientific point of view,” he said.

He pointed out that the Galilean revolution was a result of the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the DNA helix was a result of using X-rays to analyze the structure of large biological molecules.

He said one of the most powerful tools in science is the computer, which doesn’t involve any new concepts.

“It’s just a tool that one uses for handling information, and that’s central, of course, to all kinds of science,” he said. “We’ve seen what that has done and still that revolution is not yet over.”

He said there are prospects for a “quantum computer” which would be vastly more powerful than today’s computers, but it will still be used for the same scientific pursuits.