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Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
By Philip Ball

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Are there “natural laws” that govern the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves, just as there are physical laws that govern the motions of atoms and planets? Unlikely as it may seem, such laws now seem to be emerging from attempts to bring the tools and concepts of physics into the social sciences. These new discoveries are part of an old tradition. In the seventeenth century the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, dismayed by the impending civil war in England, decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His solution 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 idea from different political perspectives. But these philosophers lacked the tools that modern physics can now bring to bear on the matter. Philip Ball shows how, by using these tools, we can understand many aspects of mass human behavior. Once we recognize that we do not make most of our decisions in isolation but are affected by what others decide, we can start to discern a surprising and perhaps even disturbing predictability in our laws, institutions, and customs.
 
Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.
Philip Ball majored in chemistry at Oxford University and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Bristol. He is now a writer and consulting editor for Nature. He is the author of Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water; Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Devil's Doctor. He lives in London, England, with his wife.
Winner of the Aventis Prize

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, 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 structure 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?
"A wide-ranging and dazzlingly informed book about the science of interactions. I can promise you'll be amazed."—Bill Bryson, chair of the 2005 Aventis General Prize Judging Panel
 
"Philip Ball makes physics sexy again in Critical Mass."—Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair
 
"A prolific and accomplished science journalist . . . [Critical Mass is] lively and wonderfully informative."—George Scialabba, The Boston Globe
 
"Fascinating . . . impressively clear and breathtaking in scope . . . substantial, impeccably researched . . . persuasive. For anyone who would like to learn about the intellectual ferment at the surprising junction of physics and social science, Critical Mass is the place to start."—Stephen Strogatz, Nature
 
"Critical Mass is an intellectual roller-coaster."—The Economist
 
"A highly provocative work of popular science."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
"In this wide-ranging investigation of pioneering attempts to explain social behavior by applying formulas borrowed from physics, Ball explains how maverick social theorists are now using discoveries about molecular motion and crystal formation to predict the behavior of various human groups, including crowds of soccer fans and clusters of pedestrians. Ball acknowledges that past 'political arithmeticians' have often dehumanized their subjects by adopting mechanistic assumptions about individual psychology and have sometimes legitimated totalitarian rulers by giving them a putatively scientific charter. But Ball's numerous detailed examples of the new social physics show how statistical models from physics can yield highly reliable predictions for large-group outcomes without abridging the unpredictable freedom of individual choice. These same examples teach that a consistent physics of society yields not an ideological straitjacket stipulating how people should act but rather a detailed portrait of how people do act. Because the new social physics can help managers and policy makers in dozens of fields, this accessibly written book will attract a very diverse audience."—Bryce Christensen,
Booklist
 
"What can physics have to say about how people behave in groups, how networks such as the Internet evolve, and why the stock market fluctuates, among other questions? According to Ball, a lot. The application of physical methods to social problems isn't particularly new, as the author demonstrates, beginning with Hobbes's attempt at a scientific explanation of politics. The development of statistical measurements of society paralleled the growth of statistical physics; as Ball puts it: 'physical science and social science were the twin siblings of a mechanistic philosophy and when it was not in the least disreputable to invoke the habits of people to explain the habits of insensate particles.' With that in mind, Ball explores recent applications of statistical physics toward a study of social physics. He draws on a wide body of contemporary literature that includes physical approaches to traffic, economics, group dynamics, and politics. While the physical application to the social sciences is not alien, as physics explains the behavior of particles and phase transitions, can it explain human behav

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #67071 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-05-16
  • Released on: 2006-05-16
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 528 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Ball (an NBCC award finalist for Bright Earth) enthusiastically demonstrates how the application of the laws of modern physics to the social sciences can greatly enrich our understanding of the laws of human behavior: we can, he says, make predictions about society without negating the individual's free will. He opens his lucid and compelling study with an account of Thomas Hobbes's mechanistic political philosophy and shows how Adam Smith, Kant, Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill expanded on Hobbes's scientific but anti-utopian theories of government and society. Ball notes a return to such a scientific view of the social sciences in the past two decades, and he examines the application of physical laws to economics, politics, even the inevitable synchronization of a theater audience's applause. First, he exhaustively details the development of key concepts in contemporary physics, such as self-organization, phase transitions, flocking behavior, chaos, bifurcation points, preferential attachment networks and evolutionary game theory. Next, he shows how social scientists apply these concepts to the study of human organization. Ball's primary assertion is that we must attend to the relationship between global phenomena and local actions. In other words, noticing the impact of individual decisions on laws and institutions is more worthwhile than trying to predict the behavior of individuals (as Ball's discussion of the logic of voting habits makes all too clear). Ball's carefully argued disagreements with conventional economic theory make for particularly engaging reading. Nonspecialist readers who enjoy a steep learning curve will relish the thought-provoking discussions Ball provides. Photos, illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In this wide-ranging investigation of pioneering attempts to explain social behavior by applying formulas borrowed from physics, Ball explains how maverick social theorists are now using discoveries about molecular motion and crystal formation to predict the behavior of various human groups, including crowds of soccer fans and clusters of pedestrians. Ball acknowledges that past "political arithmeticians" have often dehumanized their subjects by adopting mechanistic assumptions about individual psychology and have sometimes legitimated totalitarian rulers by giving them a putatively scientific charter. But Ball's numerous detailed examples of the new social physics show how statistical models from physics can yield highly reliable predictions for large-group outcomes without abridging the unpredictable freedom of individual choice. These same examples teach that a consistent physics of society yields not an ideological straitjacket stipulating how people should act but rather a detailed portrait of how people do act. Because the new social physics can help managers and policy makers in dozens of fields, this accessibly written book will attract a very diverse audience. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A highly provocative work of popular science." -- Kirkus,starred review

"Fascinating. . . impressively clear and breathtaking in scope." -- Nature

"Philip Ball makes physics sexy again." -- Elissa Schappel, Vanity Fair

Customer Reviews

A physicist's view of emergent phenomena5
Readers of "Critical Mass" by Philip Ball will learn many new concepts and ideas from a skilled science writer with a doctorate in physics. His book opens with brief historical account that weaves the political confusion that engulfed Britain in the seventeenth century into early developments of science, but it is with the work of Thomas Hobbes that the author is particularly concerned. Although others had imagined ideal societies - Plato's "Republic", Thomas More's "Utopia", and Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" come to mind - Hobbes attempted to deduce the laws of society from basic postulates in the manner that Isaac Newton had recently managed to explain planetary motion. In other words, Hobbes sought to establish a "physics of society" which is also the aim of Ball's book.

Sensitive to charges of "arrogance", Ball asserts that his work is "not an attempt to prescribe systems of control and governance, still less to bolster with scientific reasoning prejudices about how society ought to be run." Rather he would help us to understand how "patterns of behavior emerge - and patterns undoubtedly do emerge - from the statistical melée of many individuals doing their own idiosyncratic thing." Thus he uses the tools that have recently been developed in nonlinear science to understand collective social behavior. To this end, the historical introduction is followed by a discussion of the concept of probability and the corresponding growth of statistical physics that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The general reader who would understand these important ideas will benefit from the early chapters which clearly expound the notion of a phase change (think of boiling water or melting ice). As a central metaphor for much of the book, Ball carefully presents the Ising model, which comprises a two-dimensional array of rotating magnets (think of small compasses) each influencing the orientations of its nearest neighbors. Below a certain "temperature" (random vibrations of the magnets), the magnets all "freeze" into a certain orientation - a global effect that stems from local (nearest neighbor) interactions. To what extent, the author asks, do local interactions among people lead to the emergence of global social phenomena?

Beginning with discussions of snowflake growth, the formation of complex patterns in bacterial colonies, and the dynamics of flocking birds (in which the interactions are local), the author turns to collective phenomena involving humans, including the organization of passing rules on sidewalks and corridors, tragedies stemming from inept crowd control, path formation in parks, and the nonlinear dynamics influencing the growth of cities. These fascinating discussions are followed by a chapter on traffic flow (in which the dynamics of jamming are clearly explained) and several chapters on economics.

In the first of these, Ball considers fluctuating price levels, which Adam Smith deemed to be governed by the collective effect of an "invisible hand" as far back as the eighteenth century. An important aspect of price variations, well laid out in this book, is their statistics. If all the influences on prices were random, the variations would be governed by Gaussian statistics with large variations falling off as a negative exponential of the square. In fact, large variations are often found to be much more likely than in a random process, suggesting the statistics of Lévy flights used unconsciously both by foraging bees and also by Jackson Pollock in his famous drip paintings. Interestingly, an analysis of the S&P 500 market fluctuations shows a power-law distribution lying between Gaussian and Lévy statistics in which the likelihood of a variation is inversely proportional to a power of its magnitude. Power-law distributions have been found to govern many phenomena including the probabilities of avalanches and earthquakes, sizes of individual incomes, and growth rates of firms. From economics, Ball segues into the more slippery area of politics. Appealing to the Ising model, he considers analytic descriptions of the possible international alliances prior to the Second World War, statistics of recent voting patterns in Brazil (which are also found to follow a power law), and various models for investigating balances between social order and justice. Final chapters discuss the nature of interconnecting networks, the World Wide Web (in which the number of links to a site are governed by a power law) and analytic evaluations of strategies for international relations. Surprisingly, Ball ignores the application of collective dynamics to the human brain even though physicist John Hopfield has famously based such a description on the Ising model.

While this book is highly recommended, the author seems unaware of a seminal study of living systems published by Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster a quarter century ago on how the first biological structures might have first become organized, which showed that three or more interacting hierarchical levels of organization are necessary for self-reproduction. In addition to being important for the emergence of life, this result has deep implications for the emergence of consciousness in our brains. Why? Human brains are organized into cognitive hierarchies, just as living organisms are organized into biological hierarchies, and cities are organized into social hierarchies. To better understand the dynamics of such intricate systems, we must move beyond the concept of emergence at a particular level of a nonlinear dynamic hierarchy to appreciate the possibilities of downward causation and positive feedback networks that extend over several hierarchical levels. Also, the author ignores the vast amount of work in cultural anthropology produced by physicist Franz Boas and his many brilliant students at Columbia University over much of the twentieth century, including Ruth Benedict's classic "Patterns of Culture".

Alwyn Scott
http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/

Insightful!4
This is a sometimes dense, often rambling and always interesting book about the history of science, the history of social philosophy and many points of congruence between the two, from how traffic jams happen to how communities self-organize. Author Philip Ball seems to include almost every notable physical scientist since Sir Isaac Newton as he traces how key scientific theories have influenced or been influenced by the speculations of economists and political scientists. Anyone whose acquaintance with science is minimal, but whose curiosity is deep, will find that reading this book is something like floating down a river that is a sometimes windy, sometimes swampy, sometimes roiling stream of discoveries, ideas, broken hypotheses and curious characters. There are two small flaws. First, the author identifies almost every scientist who ever worked on a problem remotely related to the book's subject and sometimes he does not clear the path through the thicket of names and experiments. And, second, in a social science discussion toward the end, Ball permits his political biases to color his story with occasional, apparently heartfelt, denunciations of right-leaning politicians. These quibbles aside, we say buy this book and enjoy an intriguing raft ride through interesting intellectual waters.

An excellent historical analysis of group interaction5
This book is an excellent historical look at how scientists and social scientists have attempted to measure,analyze and discuss the effects and causes of group interactions,be they the interactions of atomic particles or speculators operating on the New York stock exchange.The author provides a superb overview of herd effects,cascades, and other types of crowd effects,as well as a good discussion of how economists have attempted to model the interactive effects of crowd behavior.Readers who are interested in this topic will find a much more detailed discussion in"The Wisdom of Crowds",by J Surowiecki(2004).John Maynard Keynes and Benoit Mandelbrot are both given appropriate recognition for their pathbreaking contributions in this area.Ball recognizes,as did Keynes and Boltzmann before him,the faddish nature of much of the social sciences , economics in particular ,in attempting to mimic mathematical physics in its approach to the use of formal mathematical methods.In many cases this leads to fads which emphasize the mere use of the technique,irrespective of any quantifiable scientific results.Ball points out that the overuse of the normal(Gaussian)probability distribution among economists is an attempt to obtain the self ordering and equilibrating structure of gas particle models within the human domain even if there is no empirical support for such a distribution.Here both Pareto,Zipf,and Mandelbrot receive credit.