The Why of Things: Causality in Science, Medicine, and Life
Peter Rabins
Abstract
Why was there a meltdown at the Fukushima power plant? Why do some people get cancer and not others? Why is global warming happening? Why does one person get depressed in the face of life's vicissitudes while another finds resilience? Questions like these—questions of causality—form the basis of modern scientific inquiry, posing profound intellectual and methodological challenges for researchers in the physical, natural, biomedical, and social sciences. This book offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions of causality. The text maps a three-facet model of causality and appl ... More
Keywords: cancer, Fukushima, global warming, causality, scientific contexts, quantum mechanics, cybernetics, chaos theory, epigenetics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 | Print ISBN-13: 9780231164726 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 | DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231164726.001.0001 |
