Critical mass : how one thing leads to another / Philip Ball.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ball, Philip, 1962-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sociology.

Human behavior--Philosophy.

Human behavior.

Physics--Social aspects.

Physics.

Physical Description:

520 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Summary:

Critical Mass asks the question, Why is society the way it is? How does it emerge from a morass of individual interactions? Are there laws of nature that guide human affairs? Is anything inevitable about the ways humans behave and organize themselves, or do we have complete freedom in creating our societies? In short, just how, in human affairs, does one thing lead to another? In searching for answers, the acclaimed science writer Philip Ball argues that we can enlist help from a seemingly unlikely source: physics. The first person to think this way was the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His approach, described in Leviathan, was based not on utopian wishful thinking, but rather on Galileo's mechanics; it was an attempt to construct a moral and political theory from scientific first principles. Although his solution -- absolute monarchy -- is unappealing today, Hobbes sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this same idea from different political perspectives.

Today the purpose of applying concepts from physics to the social, political, and economic sciences is no longer to prescribe how society ought to be; instead, it is to understand the way it is, and how it evolves. In Critical Mass, Ball looks at what this "physics of society" has to say about how people move in open or enclosed spaces; how they make decisions and cast votes, form allegiances, join groups, establish companies and communities. He examines the behavior of financial markets and reveals the hidden structures in networks of social and business contacts, and he explores the politics of conflict and cooperation from a scientific point of view. If physics can help us explain and understand human interaction and social behavior, can it also be used to anticipate and thereby avoid problems? Can physics be harnessed to improve societies, to guide us toward better decisions, and to make a safer and fairer world? Or is that merely another dream destined for the graveyard of utopias past? Critical Mass is a provocative and startlingly original work that combines science with sociology and political philosophy to show how the new physics of society fits within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Contents:

Introduction: Political Arithmetick 3

1 Raising Leviathan: The brutish world of Thomas Hobbes 9

2 Lesser Forces: The mechanical philosophy of matter 33

3 The Law of Large Numbers: Regularities from randomness 48

4 The Grand AH-Whoom: Why some things happen all at once 80

5 On Growth and Form: The emergence of shape and organization 98

6 The March of Reason: Chance and necessity in collective motion 118

7 On the Road: The inexorable dynamics of traffic 156

8 Rhythms of the Marketplace: The shaky hidden hand of economics 178

9 Agents of Fortune: Why interaction matters to the economy 204

10 Uncommon Proportions: Critical states and the power of the straight line 226

11 The Work of Many Hands: The growth of firms 250

12 Join the Club: Alliances in business and politics 270

13 Multitudes in the Valley of Decision: Collective influence and social change 295

14 The Colonization of Culture: Globalization, diversity, and synthetic societies 337

15 Small Worlds: Networks that bring us together 352

16 Weaving the Web: The shape of cyberspace 372

17 Order in Eden: Learning to cooperate 402

18 Pavlov's Victory: Is reciprocity good for us? 429

19 Toward Utopia?: Heaven, hell, and social planning 449

Epilogue: Curtain Call 467.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [489]-501) and index.

ISBN:

0374281254

OCLC:

53288031

Online:

Publisher description