The pursuit of destiny : a history of prediction /

Halpern (Univ. of the Sciences, Philadelphia), a physicist and author of several science popularizations, here uses the theme of "prediction" to link a sequence of episodes, from the Delphic Oracle to the Santa Fe Institute, of accounts of the flow of time. The first third of this engaging tale covers the long history of cosmological predictions, from the Greek divination, the Kabbalah, and Nostradamus, through the "scientific revolution" of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, and ending with the determinism-probabilism quandaries of Laplace, Darwin, Freud, and Marx. The last two-thirds excerpt some 20th-century twists to the theme: Einstein's revision of the ideas of "time" and their offspring, time-reversing tachyons, black-holes, and wormholes; the celebrated quantum probabilism of Heisenberg, leading to the "many-worlds" multiple histories of Everett and Wheeler; and Feynman's spectacular success in bundling such notions into quantum electrodynamics. The rise of chaotic dynamics introduces modern "computational philosophy," its limits through Godel and Turing, and its successes in neural nets and cellular automata (and the pragmatic predictive efforts such as Kahn's "Year 2000" project). Halpern finishes with modern cosmological evolution theory, through the recently discovered acceleration of cosmic expansion to the predicted fates of the universe. An exhilarating tour. Highly recommended for a general science-oriented audience. General readers; undergraduates. P. D. Skiff Bard College