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Why are some bars crowded one week and empty the next? What keeps a book on the bestseller list? What makes ethnic violence break out? Why do neighborhoods gentrify all of a sudden? What causes the stock market to fluctuate?
Look at patterns, not people, the way that physicists observe atoms, and you will find the answers. For years, the idiosyncrasies of human decision-making have confounded economists and social theorists, most of whom have relied on an old way of thinking that says the social world is complicated because people are complicated. Now, says theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan, we're witnessing something akin to a "quantum revolution" in the social sciences. The laws of physics are beginning to provide a new picture of the human or "social" atom -- and this is a picture that does not conflict with the existence of individual free will. Just as atomic-level chaos gives way to the clockwork precision of thermodynamics, so can free individuals come together into predictable patterns. Social physicists can dissect fads, anticipate whether companies will succeed or fail, and explain crime waves. In this eye-opening book, Buchanan suggests that understanding the laws of collective organization is the key challenge of our age. Brimming with mind games and provocative experiments, The Social Atom is an incisive, accessible, and comprehensive argument for a whole new way to look at human social behavior.
Mark Buchanan is a theoretical physicist and an associate editor at Complexus, a journal on biocomplexity. He has been an editor at Nature and New Scientist, and is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles in the United States and the UK. Buchanan is also the author of two prize-nominated books, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen and Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks. He lives in Cambridgeshire, England.
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