ABSTRACT
The term science in the discussions that follow has little or no connection to the use and understanding of that term as it is uniformly thought of by the international scientific community. John Horgan, former editor of Scientific American, in his excellent book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age,1 sought out the world’s leading philosophers of science — theoretical physicists, evolutionary biologists, mathematicians, astronomers, and chaos theorists — to get their perspectives on whether “science” was at a close, with nothing significant left to be discovered. This book is a superb survey of modern scientific thinking across a very wide variety of fields. The contemporary legal question regarding
the adequacy of a scientific methodology to support an expert opinion is light years away from the type of scientific inquiry discussed by the scholars Horgan interviewed. Horgan notes the criticism by Nobel prize-winning chemist Professor Stanley Miller of scientific papers culled from other published papers where no hard-won finding has resulted from extensive laboratory work. Professor Miller referred to such works as “paper chemistry.” In the hard-fought, science-based civil cases, such as the breast-implant actions or the polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) and cancer litigation, we can borrow the idea and refer to the use of previously published articles, by extrapolation in such cases, to claim or deny causation as “paper science,” a charge that may be made in part only about forensic science-based testimony in criminal cases.2
