Searching for Certainty: What Scientists Can Know about the Future

This is a fun and thought provoking book. I only give it four stars, because I had questions, and they did not all get answered. Not fair, but neither are the grades that Casti gives science. My original questions were as follows: 1. What is chaos theory? Casti provides a clear and concise answer, although this is not the main theme of the book. 2. Does chaos theory have anything to say about the philosophy of determinism? This is not addressed in the book. 3. Does chaos theory provide any guidance on when to stop spending time and money analyzing a chaotic system? This is not addressed. Some questions that were provoked by the book follow: 1. Are climatologists still using the same modeling techniques to predict climate change as used to predict weather? Casti made the point that predicting climate and predicting weather are two different endeavors, yet they were both using the same modeling techniques, as of the time that this book was written. I don't think he explained why. 2. What is Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness? Casti provides a good (as far as I know), non-rigorous explanation in chapter 6. 3. Does the fact that biological forms (or any other things) exist, imply that science can eventually describe a means of creating them? This controversial question is probably only implied by the full context of the book. Casti seems to want his audience to keep an open mind, because he cleverly avoids the creation versus evolution debate. Instead, in chapter 3, he focuses on what science could tell us (in 1990) about how cells differentiate into tissues in an embryo, and then form organs of appropriate size, shape, and arrangement. As in all chapters, he ends by jokingly giving science a letter grade on its ability to enlighten us. Much later in chapter 6, he includes a humerous description of a chocolate cake machine (CCM) that he would like to invent, so that he could have any conceivable kind of chocolate cake. He then worries that Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness implies that there may not be a recipe for every conceivable type of chocolate cake. The implications with respect to my question about creation are not directly addressed, but perhaps the conclusion is obvious. If you find the title of the book intriguing, you'll probably like the book.

Overall I agree with the other reviewer on this page. The opening chapters of Searching -- those treating science and uncertainty from a theoretical perspective, and those devoted to 'case studies' of the weather and the stock market -- were concisely and strongly argued. Together they formed a solid introduction to scientific reasoning and method. The chapter on the prediction and explanation of war was the least compelling. Casti is at his best when discussing the hard sciences. Like the other reviewer, I am also at a loss to understand Casti's discussion of mathematics (Goedel's theorem, Turing machines, etc.) in a book on scientific uncertainty. That said, it was a useful overview of the topic (albeit a more or less verbatim excerpt from Casti's slim volume on Goedel [Goedel: A Life of Logic]). On balance, Searching is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking book. I particularly appreciate the attention Casti lavished on his annotated bibliography.