But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

“My argument in The End of Science is that science is a victim of its own success,” he tells me from his home in Hoboken. “Science discovers certain things, and then it has to go on to the next thing. So we have heliocentrism and the discovery of gravity and the fundamental forces, atoms and electrons and all that shit, evolution, and DNA-based genetics. But then we get to the frontier of science, where there is still a lot left to discover. And some of those things we may never discover. And a lot of the things we are going to discover are just elaborations on what we discovered in the past. They’re not that exciting. My belief is that the prospect for really surprising insights into nature is over, and the hope for future revolutionary discoveries is pretty much done. I became a science journalist because I thought science was the coolest thing that humans have ever done. So if you believe the most important thing about life is the pursuit of knowledge, what does it mean if that’s over?”