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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 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.
Philip Ball majored in chemistry at the
University of Oxford and received a Ph.D. in physics from
the University of Bristol. He is now a writer and consulting
editor of Nature. He is the author of Life's
Matrix: A Biography of Water (FSG, 2000) and, most recently,
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (FSG,
2002), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle
Award. He lives in London with his wife.
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