This is a diary about the end of the world.

No, I haven’t been going over my newspaper with a highlighter, looking for signs of the end times.  I haven’t been studying the proper type of cow needed to sanctify the Second Temple.  I haven’t been contemplating the probability of a bird flu pandemic, or the effects of the Russians marketing long range bombers to the Chinese.

This is about a quieter end.  An end with all the inevitable entropy-driven ignominy as that which awaits us all personally.  What I’m going to talk about is not a popular thought, and not yet mainstream thought, but for some people it’s starting to look like a sickeningly sure bet.  For everyone who has that little achy feeling down deep in their guts that Things Just Aren’t Quite Right… this one’s for you.

And it starts in 1989.

Part I: The Most Unpopular Man in Science

Actually, the story starts better than two million years ago, when hominids figured out that stone plus pig skull equaled a lot more bacon for diner.  Some time after that came the fire thing.  Around 40,000 years ago, there was an explosion of technology — almost the Cambrian of the mind — and about 30,000 years after that, along came agriculture.  After that, it was all just fiddly bits.

What happened in 1989 was that Scientific American writer, John Horgan, began to follow around some of the top scientists and researchers in the world.  He shot the physics breeze with Roger Penrose.  Discussed evolutionary science with Stephen Jay Gould.  Put some hair on black holes with Stephen Hawking.  And contemplated structures with Freeman Dyson.  

Jealous much?  I know I am.  And Horgan wasn’t limited to this foursome.  He interviewed scores of scientists, from the old guard to the young Turks, across almost every field imaginable.  He didn’t limit his discussions to only the so-called “hard scientists,” but branched out to talk with luminaries of the mind like Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky.  He interviewed these men (and precious few women) in their homes and laboratories.  He talked to them about their personal lives and their professional dreams.  

In 1996, the results of his world-wide science groupie junket were published, but even the title of the book was enough to set teeth on edge for many of the people he had interviewed.  Horgan called his book The End of Science.

Once, Horgan said, science had made great discoveries.  Scientists had ferreted out the structure of the atom, the cause of evolution, and the nature of DNA.  They had taken electricity from side-show wonder into the lab, and into the home.  Where man had once lived in a state of decidedly non-blissful ignorance, full of disease and superstition, science had allowed us to understand and manipulate the world around us.  Science had produced one big idea after another, and all those ideas had reshaped the world.  The trouble was, according to Horgan, the well of ideas was running dry.

Where once physicists grappled with the whole idea of elementary particles, now they are reduced to seeking ever more elusive variants of quarks, and even then any discovery they made was unlikely to have more than negligible impact, even in their own field.  Where geologists and astronomers had once upended the views of a young universe, they were now limited to wondering what happened in only the first fleeting microseconds of an origin pushed back billions of years.  Biology had gone from understanding muscles and tissues, to genetics and increasingly well defined molecular chemistry.  In short, the era of big ideas was past.

Modern scientists are limited to studying the very big or the impossibly tiny, and to make progress at either end demands experiments so expensive that they are inconceivable to any but the richest governments.  Unfortunately, the rich governments are less and less inclined to support these experiments, because the returns they deliver and tougher and tougher to quantify.  No one has to speculate about the return on investment of self-funded 18th century gentlemen dabblers who laid much of the foundation for today’s science.  But start a debate over the economic benefits of the space program, and you’ll see how divergent the views can be.  Can anyone really promise that the returns from the proposed (and now abandoned) Super-conducting Super-collider would really cover its multibillion dollar price tag?

The universe may be infinite, but ideas about how the universe works are not.  Every idea developed is one less that can be developed in the future.

Horgan’s work is not without its critics.  In fact, finding a supporter of his contention may be more difficult than getting a good photo of a neutrino.    But the more that people argued against Horgan’s point, the more that others came to admit that there might be something in his contention.  As we prepare to celebrate a century since Einstein first scribbled down the famous E=MC2 equation (please excuse the lack of superscript), the lack of such blinding insights over the interim seems at least puzzling.

Sir Isaac Newton once famously said that if he saw further because he was “standing on the shoulders of giants.”  Scientists today had not only Newton’s shoulders to climb, but Einstein, Planck, Bosen, and a host of others.  Plus, they have dandy new instruments for looking.  So why is it, the things they’re seeing seem so incredibly dull?

Part II: The iPod Illusion

Somewhere — I suspect back around the time that H. erectus was learning how to nap flint — there came a break between those who studied stones, and those who concentrated on turning out the spear points.  Since then, there’s been a irreparable schism between the “ivory tower” researchers and the “sell out” technologists

Even while most scientists would be loath to accept Horgan’s gloomy positions, they’ve long been making the case that basic research — the kind of contemplation that leads to developing one of those Big Ideas — has been supplanted by the kind of “practical research” that goes toward making ideas into something you can purchase at your local Radio Shack.  The public rarely thinks of this one as a problem.  While the Big Idea guys are frustrated by the lack of bucks, the idea that the investments are going into consumer products is something that keeps us all reading the catalogs.

Here’s a phrase for you, see if you’ve heard this one “the ever increasing pace of technology.”  Sound familiar?  It should.  It’s become as big an assumption about the world we live in as gravity.  Things change, and they keep changing ever more quickly.  Oh, what a hectic, hurried life we live.

Everyone knows that the pace of technological change is increasing.  Just like everyone knew that a heavy ball would fall faster than a light one before Galileo paid a visit to the leaning tower.  

But in 2000, Phillip Longman put out an article entitled The Slowing Pace of Progress.  Longman based his article on a statistic called Total-Factor Productivity (TFP).  This number tracks a kind of over-all sense of how effectively raw material is being turned into goods, and how quickly new kinds of goods are coming onto the market.  When you look at these numbers, the results are surprising to anyone who thinks this is the go-go high tech wonder age.  

Between 1913 and 1972, TFP grew by an annual average of 1.08 percent. Then between 1972 and 1995, for reasons economists are still debating, the rate of improvement collapsed to less than one fiftieth that of the previous era, despite a widespread adoption of computers.

 
After delivering your best Jon Stewart Whhhhaaattt?  Sit back and contemplate one of Longman’s examples.  Say you took a typical couple from the 50’s and dropped them in a home of today.  What is there that they would not understand?  Well, there’s computers and… computers.  The TV is still a TV, even though it might have a better image and have assorted gadgets attached to it.  The stove is a stove, the oven an oven.  A vacuum cleaner still sucks — even if it does so on a zero-radius ball and a cool vortex cleaning system.  

The gap looks even worse if you contemplate our technology vs. that from the late 1970’s.  Home computers?  Check.  Portable music player?  Sure.  VCR?  Microwave?  Hey, both of those were invented back in 50’s couple time.  

Do we have better gadgets today?  Boy, and how.  I’m writing this on my keen little Mac Mini (complete with iSight camera, iPod, and iLoveGlossyAppleGear).  But what we have is only a refinement of what was already there decades before.  

Now reverse the thought experiment.  Take our 50’s couple and toss them in the Way Back machine to 1900.  What’s left of the technology they knew?  Precious little.   That previous fifty years saw the rise of so many new technologies, the difference is astounding.  

So why was 1900 to 1950 (or 1800 to 1900) so radically better at cranking out new tech than we are today?  Far from living in a the most rapidly changing time in history, we may be living with the slowest change in technology since the Dark Ages.  We celebrate each increase in computer speed, each new wire for delivering more data to our homes, or each improvement in the rate at which we can pop popcorn.  But when’s the last time a technology was introduced that changed the world like the telephone?  Radio?  The automobile?

It would be easy to dismiss Longman and his funny statistic, but other researchers have approached the problem from other directions, and they keep coming to the same conclusion.  Face it, we’re techno-slackers.

There are two possibilities here, and neither one of them is all that pleasant to contemplate.  Either we are too stupid to make the kind of breakthroughs made by our parents and grandparents, or our technology problem is directly related to our research problem. Maybe, with no new Big Ideas, we don’t have the basis for any new Big Breakthrough.

And you always wondered why we didn’t have didn’t have any flying cars.

Part III: Brother, Can You Paradigm?

One a road marked by a shortage of both Big Ideas and Big Inventions, there’s really only one destination: doom.   We’ve coasted for decades on cheap energy and the disparity of the global labor market (in other words, we suck at science and technology, but we’ve become aces at exploitation).  Faced with a decline in the ready availability of energy and raw material, we’re approaching that ugly tipping point where the cost of basic commodities once again becomes the primary factor in the lives of all but a very few.  It’s not even a matter of going back that fifty years, or a hundred, because we’ve already done such a fine job of exploiting the resources that made a non-technological life style possible.  

To put in terms that would make any geek cry, imagine that there’s not going to be any real Star Trek.  Ever.  Never ever.  In fact, it’s increasingly likely that the handful of landings we made on the moon were high tide for mankind.  We lapped this far into the universe, and no farther.  No warp drives.  No interstellar federation.  Heck, we don’t even get to see BladeRunner, much less Captain Picard.

If oil really is as restricted as all the models now indicate, don’t think “how much will a tank of gas cost me in ten years,” think “how many burgers can you make from a dachshund?”  Because not long after the supply crunch really hits, the glossy advertising-driven world we’ve built gets revealed as a shaky construction with a good paint job.  Then we discover that the future looks more like the Flintstones than the Jetsons.

But wait!  There are outs.

First off, all these guys could be wrong.  Believe you me, no scientist wants to think Horgan is right about the dust at the bottom of the idea well.  Nobody at Sony or Microsoft welcomes Longman’s idea that they’re squeezing the last drops of engineering milk. No one likes to think that the end is inevitable, no matter how many times Team Entropy cleans up on the rest of the universe.

So where do we look for some sunlight at the end of this very gloomy tunnel?  Into the mystical mirror of the paradigm change.

Imagine you’re living somewhere in Northern Africa around 12,000 years ago and the business of tossing rocks at meat is starting to look a little, well, old.  Spears and scrapers and the rest of the hunter-gather kit have been around for a long while, and you’ve worked up just about every variation on how flint can be flaked and how weapons can be made.  Sure, you’ve got new colors in the beadwork, and there’s new songs around the campfire, but nothing is really improving.  Worse, with a growing population of people and fewer big critters ripe for the stabbing, you’re starting to worry that the whole system has a serious flaw.

Then along comes the agriculture paradigm.  Bang, everything changes.  

The tricky thing about a paradigm shift is, you can’t see what’s on the other side.  Hunter-gatherer man can’t even contemplate what lives in agriculture world.  If he could, he’d have invented it already.  Paradigms are a wall.  A crazy mirror.  You look toward the future, expecting more of what you’ve already seen.  Only shinier.  But with a paradigm shift, it’s like an alien invasion.  You can’t even think like those people over there, so don’t try.

So far, paradigm shifts have come along and kicked people into the next gear at several phases in history.  And if we ever needed one, we need it now.

There are a couple of good potential candidates for a paradigm shift.  The first one lies in that “big and little” problem facing science.  Yes, physicists trying to understand the nature of reality are restricted these days to looking at the extraordinarily large and the unimaginably small.  However, the two theories that describe the behavior of the large (relativity) and the small (quantum mechanics) have proved surprisingly hard to pull together.  Even among scientists who study these fields, there’s a general feeling that neither theory actually tells you what’s really going on.  Both are only sort of convenient mathematical models that are awfully good at predicting how things work under most conditions.  What’s really happening may be infinitely niftier.

Putting the big and the small together may yet reveal a different model of the universe, as divergent from what we understand as Newton’s world from Einstein’s.   That alone would add at least a few inches of fresh water at the bottom of the idea well, and may actually prove to be a spring, providing a source for a lot more big ideas to come.  I hope so, because while there are a few other dark corners in scientific theory that look like they might hide possible doorways into new rooms, they are precious few, and every one of them is a long shot.

The other candidate for a big shift, is a shift in the way we think.  It may not be that we’re running out of big ideas so much as that science is running out of big ideas.  It’s almost impossible to talk about this possibility without sounding like a mystical kook, but it may be that the whole “scientific method” approach is so limiting, that we’re ignoring a lot of what’s possible.  Mr. End of Science himself, Horgan, has become an advocate of this idea, which is pushed in his latest book, Rational Mysticism.  

I have a hard time with this one.  Partly it’s because I don’t understand it.  Mostly it’s because I deeply resent the idea that the future may be more influenced by Deepak Chopra might have more to say about the future than Hawking or Penrose.  There’s also, weirdly enough, a techno option on this, as some people have proposed that the flurry of information now available (through mind-bending sources like this diary) will itself lead to new ways of exercising the gray matter.  Personally, while I like to think the blogs are both informative and helpful, I have a problem believing they’ll save humanity.  

Still, I expect we’ll escape.  Yes, I have that sneaky, icky feeling down in my stomach.  The feeling that we’ve bounced a few fundamental checks and the repo man is already warming up his truck.  But I’m optimistic.  Or in deep denial, take your pick.

In any case, I’ll spare you the semi-inevitable T. S. Elioit quote.