Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $7.68
You Save: $8.32 (52%)
New (30) Used (18) from $4.44
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 141349
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 528
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0374530416
Dewey Decimal Number: 501
EAN: 9780374530419
Publication Date: May 16, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New - Direct from Distributor - Light Shelf Wear - No Remainder Mark
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 A physicist's view of emergent phenomena April 3, 2005
Alwyn Scott (Tucson, Arizona USA)
65 out of 67 found this review helpful
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 melee 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 Levy 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 Levy 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/
An excellent historical analysis of group interaction November 9, 2004
Michael Emmett Brady (Bellflower, California ,United States)
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
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.
Popular science at its best May 17, 2005
Konstantin Momot (Australia)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
Books about complexity and self-organization might be a dime a dozen, but this book by Philip Ball is unique. Underneath its popular style is a serious analysis of the science that underlies the concepts of complexity and collective dynamic phenomena. The analysis of specific examples of self-organizing systems (e.g., traffic models) is quite professional, with good referencing of the original literature. At the same time, the writing is clear and understandable to a non-specialist, and the examples given in the book will stimulate the interest of most readers. Another strength of this book is its historical approach; the author shows how the dynamic concepts evolved from 19-th century thermodynamics, to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, to the science of non-integrable dynamic systems. I really enjoyed reading it.
Still reading it... do not let the poilitical physics misguide you April 7, 2007
Humberto Mejias (Caracas, Venezuela)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My Profile 43 yo Mechanical Engineer.. beginner enterpreneur
First I am only in chapter 6, so I will revisit this review and edit accordingly.
As an admirer of the style of Dr. Ball's way of making chemistry accesible to everyone (specially me).. I was just curious by the comments and the approach of this new book, so when I saw the price was right I bought my used copy..just started some days ago and wow!! talk about a tour d force! I went back to my collegue years to remeber the classical political theorist and Hobbes.. just when I thought it was going to be a lecture in political theory, we are taken ino the realms of thermodymamics and statistical physics as models to be used for political physics..but I have not reach that part already, what I think its that this book is a must as a way to teach thermodynamics!!!
So I must admitt I am kind of slow to learn, but if the principles and scopes of thermo were explained as in Critical Mass, then universities would at least be true to the root of word universal.. and that in those times men of science were holistics in their endevours and connected everything in their theories.. if that was good or not let us judge by history.. but at least we were not surrounded by specialist in their ivory towers.. getting back at the book, if thermodynamics is a dry subject be prepared to be enlighten, wow! I even dusted out my "Thermodynamics, Kinetic Theory , and Statistical Thermodynamics" by Sears-Salinger ad began to see the light on the chapters on phase transitions.. in a way, I felt like if the fear of having to hear the axioms and descriptions was shedded off by Dr. Balls's explanations.. do not believe me? see if it happens too.
Again, Im in chapter 6, so there is a lot to see, but only for the thermodymaics insight the book is worth its weight in gold
Fascinating thinking in the overlap zone between our physical and our social universe. November 1, 2005
D. Stuart (Auckland NZ)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Philip Ball describes his interest as "social physics" and that's a pretty apt description for a volume that examines the parallels between physical laws and the way our society operates. Such chemical phenomena as Phase Transitions (think of water suddenly reforming into ice...or steam) are akin to the way societal change can suddenly emerge: the massive and sudden adoption of the internet around 1995-1997 for example.
This book is wonderful, and Ball does us a real favour by weaving together various schools - from physics to history to sociology and economics to illustrate his argument from many stimulating angles. Some of the thoughts here are quite gigantic, the effect is a little like turning a kaleidoscope and suddenly seeing an elegant, perfect pattern emerging from the chaos.
The book isn't light reading though Ball has a gift for explaining big ideas in reasonably simple though not simplistic terms. But a warning: I'm somebody who reads in bed, and each night with this book I had trouble getting to sleep: the ideas and the writing are practically caffeinated!
I'd actually recommend making a few notes as you go. In the past few weeks I've been dipping back frequently into the 640pp to re-read some of the really big ideas that are influencing my own social research work. Looks like I need to read Critical Mass once more. Its something I look forward to.
Try also Duncan Watts "Six Degrees" which covers similar territory (network theory especially) and John Gribbin's "Deep Simplicity" a recent publication that also deals with emergence and the relationship between physics and society. This is fascinating territory and Ball, who won a science writing prize for this volume, deserves our attention.
|
|
|
