Introduction [to Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives]

Uncertainty is a fact of life. Despite this, until recently, relatively little effort had gone into acquiring knowledge about uncertainty. In an age when human beings can travel into space and map genomes, ideas and methods for understanding and managing uncertainty are comparatively unsophisticated. There is, however, increasing appreciation of the limits to certainty, so that in the last 60 years there has been a flurry of activity in numerous disciplines and practice areas to rectify the centuries-old neglect of uncertainty. The major limitation in this activity has been the paucity of exchange across disciplines and practice areas, so that specialists are usually unaware of developments elsewhere. Trading information and building on the resulting new insights are the objectives of this book.