The End of Holy Shit Science
Here’s my pal James E. McClellan III, esteemed science historian, at a recent No Kings protest. Jim says “governments and taxpayers really don't give a shit about black holes, the elusive graviton, or any such esoteric matters that really drive the scientific enterprise.”
HOBOKEN, AUGUST 20, 2025. My friend Jim is helping me see science’s current troubles from an historical perspective. And that’s making me, the end-of-science guy, even gloomier about science’s prospects.
James E. McClellan III is professor emeritus of the history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I teach. Together with the late historian Harold Dorn, Jim wrote Science and Technology in World History, which traces human knowledge-seeking and invention from the Stone Age to the digital age. It’s deeply researched and yet fun to read, quite the accomplishment.
Jim has been re-researching and re-writing his book for a new edition, and I’m reading his updated chapters as the finishes them. One theme jumps out at me: Power, not truth, has always been the primary aim of human knowledge-seekers. Almost all ancient societies accumulated knowledge for practical reasons: because it helps us heal, feed and house ourselves, plan ahead, travel and communicate, kill our enemies and so on.
The exception is the Hellenistic empire, which resulted from the conquests of Alexander the Great (tutored by Aristotle) and lasted for three centuries. Greek rulers built the library of Alexandria and other centers of learning, where scholars could indulge their curiosity just for fun. Within reason.
The Romans, who displaced the Greeks, cared a lot about medicine and engineering, but they didn’t invest much in research for its own sake. Neither did ancient civilizations that emerged in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India and the Americas. For most cultures, religion served as the source of ultimate truth.
Not until the 19th century, long after Newton had done his thing and when the industrial revolution was under way, did Europe and the U.S. begin recognizing the economic, medical and military potential of research untethered to specific practical goals. And only after World War II did governments invest heavily in “basic” research, hoping for more spinoffs as nifty as The Bomb.
When I became a science journalist in the early 1980s, the U.S. was pouring money into science aimed at understanding the cosmos. I call this Holy Shit Science, because at its best it gives us insights into nature, it fills us with awe, it makes us go, Holy shit! Or words to that effect. Think of discoveries like quarks, the cosmic microwave background, planets orbiting other stars.
The National Science Foundation and other agencies supported research into big mysteries: How did the universe begin? How did life emerge on earth? Does life exist elsewhere? How does matter make a mind?
Our taxes paid for particle accelerators that peer into matter’s deepest recesses and telescopes that probe our universe’s outer reaches. These instruments could help us discover what Stephen Hawking called a “theory of everything,” a solution to the riddle of reality. Holy shit!
I became a science journalist because I wanted to report on Holy Shit Science, which I saw as humanity’s noblest endeavor. “We are here to figure out why we are here,” I pontificated in The End of Science. “What other purpose is worthy of us?”
Jim’s book, Science and Technology in World History, reminds me that the U.S. funds “pure” science for two impure reasons: One, such research might result in computers, radar, rockets, satellites, vaccines and other applications that make us healthier, wealthier, deadlier.
Two, the U.S. is marketing itself, implicitly bragging: Look how rich and powerful our capitalist-democratic system is! We can waste billions on totally impractical things! Let’s see you do that, Russia and China! The James Webb Telescope is the modern equivalent of the pyramids or Sistine Chapel.
That brings me to Trump. His administration has slashed budgets for the National Science Foundation and other research agencies, The Guardian reports, resulting in “unprecedented funding cuts and staff layoffs across federally funded agencies and programs.” The New York Times says Trump’s proposed cuts would reduce funding for basic research by “roughly one third.”
Trump has issued an executive order, “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” that implies he cares about scientific truth. That’s funny, because Trump, a convicted felon, clearly doesn’t give a shit about truth--or justice, for that matter. He and his minions care only about power.
But that’s true of most “civilizations,” according to Science and Technology in World History. In the light of Jim’s book, Trump's actions don’t seem “unprecedented,” as The Guardian puts it. Under Trump, we’re just reverting to the historical norm.
When I run this thesis by Jim, he responds: “I agree entirely that governments and taxpayers really don't give a shit about black holes, the elusive graviton, or any such esoteric matters that really drive the scientific enterprise.” What’s more puzzling, Jim says, is Trump’s hostility toward research with practical goals, such as reducing our vulnerability to climate change and pandemics.
Jim adds that “every civilization and proto-civilization has needed experts to help run things.” And yet Trump seems intent on eliminating “the kinds of things that government really needs and require institutionalized expertise. Fuck NASA, okay, but NOAA? In this sense he's going beyond the historical norm!”
It’s hard to predict where things are headed now, but here are a few guesses. In the future, pure, curiosity-driven science might return to being a modest, boutique affair, perhaps backed by modern-day Borgias with intellectual pretensions. Like Trump’s old pal Jeffrey Epstein.
Maybe tech billionaires, if only for self-glorification, will step up and fund space telescopes and other expensive projects with Holy Shit potential. I’d love to see extraterrestrial life discovered before I die. But according to the new book More Everything Forever by Adam Becker (who will speak to my school in October), tech lords like Musk, Bezos, Altman and Thiel fantasize about conquering the cosmos, not comprehending it.
Will artificial intelligence propel pure science forward, as some enthusiasts predict? Nah. If anything, programs such as ChatGPT, by doing our thinking for us, will make us even more incurious and less imaginative, exacerbating the anti-intellectualism of our age.
Just as a few folk still devote themselves to poetry, so a few science enthusiasts will keep chasing theories of everything. They will agonize over why there’s something rather than nothing, how consciousness arises, what quantum mechanics means.
But increasingly, those seeking truth for its own sake will be viewed as cranks, fanatics, “losers,” to borrow Trump’s favorite put-down. As humanity slips back into the oblivion whence it came, Holy Shit Science will fade into obscurity, recalled, perhaps, only by historians like my pal Jim.
In The End of Science, I speculate on what the world might look like if science ends: “We will continue to muddle along as we have been, oscillating between pleasure and misery, enlightenment and befuddlement, kindness and cruelty. It won’t be heaven, but it won’t be hell, either.”
In retrospect, that was probably too optimistic.
Further Reading:
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature