John Horgan

John Horgan is a science journalist who has irritated many people over the course of his career. For a critical (albeit weirdly selective) take on his work, check out his Wikipedia page. Horgan was a full-time staff writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997, when he was fired due to a dispute over his first book, The End of Science. After a management change at Scientific American, Horgan blogged and wrote online columns for the magazine from 2010-2022.

Horgan has also written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Washington Post, and other publications too obscure to mention (like Time and Newsweek). Since 2005, Horgan has received a steady paycheck from the Stevens Institute of Technology for teaching and running a lecture series, which means he can write for fun rather than money.

Horgan’s The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age became a U.S. bestseller and was translated into 13 languages after its publication in 1996. Pundits still cite The End of Science (republished with a new preface in 2015) when they’re fretting over science’s future, even though they usually emphasize that they disagree with Horgan’s gloomy outlook.

Horgan loves all of his subsequent books, even though none has matched the commercial success of The End of Science. They include, in chronological order, The Undiscovered Mind; Rational Mysticism; The End of War; Mind-Body Problems; Pay Attention, a lightly fictionalized memoir; and My Quantum Experiment, which like Mind-Body Problems, is available for free online.

Horgan’s work has provoked international coverage. He has been interviewed by PBS, MSNBC, NPR, and BBC, among other major media, and he has lectured at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, McGill, and the London School of Economics, among other fancy institutions. His ego has been further inflated by winning the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (twice) and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award. But those awards were long, long ago.

In 2023 Horgan, who doesn’t know when to shut up, launched the online journal “Cross-Check,” which was also the name of the blog he wrote for Scientific American from 2010-2020. Horgan produces (sporadically) “Mind-Body Problems” for the online talk show Bloggingheads. Tv. He tweets (sporadically) as @horganism. Phil Anderson, a physicist and Nobel laureate coined the term “Horganism” to describe excessive pessimism about science. 

Horgan became a science writer in spite of his lack of formal training in science. He received a B.A. in English from Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1982 and an M.S. from Columbia's School of Journalism in 1983. IEEE Spectrum, a journal for electrical engineers, gave Horgan his first writing job (1983-1986) even though he had no idea what an ohm was.