Not many people know that before he became an academic, Dave Caudill would sometimes sit at the end of a runway in Germany in an F-4 Phantom jet with an armed nuclear weapon, waiting for the alarm that would send him to release it on the forces of the Soviet Union. That was his earlier method of promoting peace. Now, the pen has taken the place of the sword. Like many of us, he sees the world getting ever nearer to mutually assured destruction as a result of the erosion of truth. A group of apprehensive people, including Caudill, think that a proper understanding and respect for science might help to stop the death of truth, followed by the death of all of us. However, this is not the kind of understanding of science that causes people to go around wearing “Trust the Science” T-shirts because we know science, most evidently science in formation, is too provisional and embedded in ordinary social life for that. Typically, the kind of science that confronts potential dictators and could limit their power to exercise “the will of the people” in any way they interpret it is the provisional sort of science that still could be wrong. We have to find a way to bring this kind of science to bear on public opinion without going back to slogans reminiscent of the 1950s. This is what some of us think of as the ambition of the Third Wave of science studies.

Too many social scientists take the easy way out, abandoning the old model so completely that science folds into public opinion; in this book, Caudill confronts the dilemmas. You cannot have checks and balances without elites. Caudill’s treatment of this is original in a number of ways and unique in bringing his immediate post-military profession of lawyer into the debate. He knows how the paradoxes of expert witnesses confronting lay juries work out, and if nothing else, this aspect of the book will make it indispensable.