Uncertain Science ... Uncertain World

Using science headlines and everyday examples, this engaging book describes why science is uncertain for the general reader.

Henry N. Pollack (Author)

9780521619103, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 23 June 2005

256 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.365 kg

'One of the strong points of this book is the author's fusion of his extensive scientific experience and broadly based professional judgment with a keen sense of intellectual propriety and of ethics - not just scientific ethics in the narrow sense, but the ethics of the use of science in support of the broader human enterprise.' Palaios

Is the world warming due to the Greenhouse Effect? Can nuclear weapon arsenals be relied upon without periodic testing? Is the world running out of oil? What action should be taken against an outbreak of foot-and-mouth or BSE? Why can't scientists provide certain answers to these and many other questions? The uncertainty of science is puzzling. It arises when scientists have more than one answer to a problem or disagree amongst themselves. In this engaging book, Henry Pollack guides the reader through the maze of contradiction and uncertainty, acquainting them with the ways that uncertainty arises in science, how scientists accommodate and make use of uncertainty, and how in the face of uncertainty they reach their conclusions. Taking examples from recent science headlines and every day life, Uncertain Science … Uncertain World enables the reader to evaluate uncertainty from their own perspectives, and find out more about how science actually works.

Acknowledgments
About the author
1. Setting the stage
2. Uncertain about science
3. Can the media help?
4. Unfamiliarity breeds uncertainty
5. Fever or chill?
6. A fifty-fifty chance
7. How does this work?
8. Let's see what happens if...
9. Reconstructing the past
10. Predicting the future
11. Out of the blue
12. A climate of uncertainty
Index.

Subject Areas: Earth sciences [RB], Popular science [PDZ]