Robert Northcott, _Science for a Fragile World_

Robert Northcott, at the beginning of his highly readable Science for a Fragile World, asks us to imagine a world “in which laws and causal relations are fragile, winking in and out like bubbles in a boiling soup” (1) or like the mud bubbles rising and popping on the cover image. Northcott has two aims in this philosophy of science book, written mainly for an academic audience. First, to defend the claim that many of the relations studied by and of interest to the sciences are indeed fragile. And second, to suggest that when relations are fragile, scientific investigations should be carried out in the manner of a ‘Case-Worker’ rather than a ‘Stability-Theorist’, methodological approaches the book sets out to define. Despite being relatively short, the book makes a convincing case for these two claims. It also opens avenues for further research, as well as inviting scientists from a range of disciplines and “science funders, planners, and educators” (15) to reflect on, and potentially change, some of their practices.