ABSTRACT
The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
,
sought out the world’s leading philosophers of science — theoretical physicists, evolutionary biologists, mathematicians, astronomers, and chaos theorists — to get their perspective as to whether science was at a close and nothing significant was left to be discovered. This book is a superb survey of modern scientific thinking across a very wide field of fields. The present
legal
question regarding the adequacy of scientific methodology to support expert opinion is light years away from the type of scientific inquiry discussed by the scholars interviewed by Horgan. Horgan notes the criticism of Nobel prize winning chemist Professor Stanley Miller that scientific papers culled from other published papers that have no hard-won findings resulting from extensive laboratory work of their own, were “paper chemistry.” In hard fought science-based civil cases, such as the breast implant actions or PCBs and cancer litigation, we may borrow the idea and apply it to the use of previously published articles by way of extrapolation to prove or disprove cause. In such cases, to claim or deny causation as “paper science” is a charge that may only be made, in part, about forensic science-based testimony in criminal cases.
