Why of Things

the long version

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. In this book, the author, a noted psychiatrist offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions of causality. He maps a three-facet model of caulaity and applies it to a variety of questions in science, medicine, economics, and more. -- Book jacket.