ABSTRACT
In the middle of the nineteenth century a serious proposal was made to close the U.S. Patent Office because all inventions of significance had been made. In light of the subsequent appearance of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, airplanes, and computers, we now laugh at the naiveté of this proposal. Some years ago an American journalist named John Horgan wrote a book entitled The End of Science (1996). In this book he speculated that the important questions about the nature of matter and life had been answered, and that most other questions about nature and mind were not susceptible to scientific answer. A century from now, the suggestion that science was effectively at an end in the 1990s is likely to seem equally ill informed.
