In Paradigms Lost, mathematician and systems theorist John L. Casti examines moments when scientific certainty flunks out of school.

Drawing on case studies from physics, biology, mathematics and chaos theory, Casti looks at how dominant frameworks break down then investigates what replaces them. Rather than treating science as a steady march forward, he focuses on its innate instability. All the blind spots, errors and conceptual upheavals that force a discipline to rethink itself, are unravelled inside the pages.

Accessible but rigorous, this is late-80s science writing at its most ambitious — concerned less with facts than with how knowledge reorganises when we push the button a little too hard.

Abacus, 1989. Good condition. Only a few bits of marginalia in this one.