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About John Casti's first book, Paradigms
Lost, Martin Gardner said, "A dazzling, splendidly
written survey of the leading scientific controversies of
our time… Casti has jumped into the ranks of the nation's
top science popularizers." Now, in his fascinating
new book, Searching for Certainty, John Casti tells
us why some systems for designing the shape of things to
come work better than others.
Since the beginning of time, human kind
has been searching for ways to predict future events. Although
the Oracle at Delphi has given way to modern scientific
theories, the prediction game is still a hard one to beat.
Taking us on a journey through the world's of possibility,
chance, and chaos, Casti investigates developmental biology,
modern warfare, weather and climate prediction, mathematics,
economics, and games of chance.
Casti asks a variety of intriguing questions:
Does any method exist to forsee stock market trends? Can
warfare be predicted and avoided? Why can't we get a foolproof
forecast for the weekend weather on Tuesday? Are such concepts
as nuclear winter and the greenhouse effect real threats
to humanity? And, finally, is mathematics, the queen of
sciences, really as infallible as it's cracked up to be?
With extraordinary wit and insight, Casti shows us the forces
that drive our world.
John Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics
from the University of Southern California and then worked
at the RAND Corporation and at the University of Arizona,
New York University, and Princeton. He was one of the first
research staff members of the International Institute of
Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. Casti
is now on the faculty of the Technical University of Vienna.
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