Critical Mass: How one thing leads to another

Why is society organized the way it is? Is it possible to use some of the laws of the physical universe to understand why and how national economies, stock and commodity markets, companies and clubs organize the way they do? Can physics provides "laws" of human nature that are as useful and universal as those of mechanics? Does the critical point in a phase diagram have analogies in human behavior? Veteran science writer and physicist/chemist Philip Ball writes very well, as evidenced by Elegant Solutions, which was one of my picks last year. He also thinks very well, as evidenced by this creative application to sociology of concepts familiar to physicists and chemists. Of course, social scientists have always tried to be as "scientific" as possible, using mathematical models, statistical analysis and, more recently, computer simulations to understand the human situation and to predict its future. Critical Mass uses a different approach: using whole concepts in physics for insight into economics, urban planning, and the self-organization of human networks. This is a very original and thought-provoking book; it has been recognized with the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books, bestowed annually by the Royal Society for Chemistry. ( )

This book asks whether there are underlying natural laws that govern the endeavours of humans in the same way that natural laws govern processes in nature, such as the growth of snow crystals, phase shifts between liquid and gas, and the way in which metal changes from being magnetised to non-magnetised when heated. To help him address this question Ball introduces tools commonly used in the physical sciences to analyse and simulate natural processes.

In the initial chapters the author describes the history of social science, economics and statistics. He tells how tools of the state, statistics, were adopted in the physical sciences. Then ball looks at processes in human society such as the formation of traffic jams, the pattern of movement in a crowd trying to escape a burning building, the growth pattern of cities, Internet morphology and what it owes to The Cold War years. In all these areas he demonstrates common traits that can be used to analyse and understand the processes in operation.

Ball describes the application of these tools in the natural sciences and then reports on how they have been used in the analysis of human behaviour and such things as the movement of share prices in the stock market.

It is Ball’s contention that there are fundamental patterns that describe many behaviours and trends in human endeavour, from the voting patterns in elections, through the distribution of wealth in nations, to the boom and bust nature of the world’s economies, and that understanding of these fundamentals will improve decision making and planning.

He also reports on simulations carried out to assess the effectiveness and otherwise of different forms of government, i.e. dictatorship, democracy, etc… This is most enlightening and interesting.

While he claims these tools can help us describe process behaviour and help us, he warns against the idea that they can necessarily be used to predict behaviour.

The above paragraphs do scant justice to this book. It is the first non-fiction book I have read in a long time that I was loath to put down. It is vast in scope and presents information at a level that the majority of readers will find accessible. This is a thought provoking book that I will be returning to time and again. ( )

How are we (readers) affected by Ball's book ? Such question (although not this particular one) is what the book addresses. From how bacterial colonies form and financial markets crash to how traffic evolves and human behavior is affected by its surrounding, Ball passes over countless of historical facts & scientific details (explained in plain English) showing how many scientists, sociologists, economists & others (even physicists) have been, for ages trying to put down the building blocks (even without a prior knowledge) of a field which is now referred to as "Social Physics".

One might wonder what social physics aims at. Well, its is not a science yet, but lots of progress has been made over the centuries by countless of investigators (as early as 1600 during which Thomas Hobbes is the key figure in Ball's book) if I may call them so, studying how humans interact (and thus are affected by external & internal influences) & are connected ( through the daily social network or the digital network), companies rise, fall & merge, countries form allies & wage wars, how phase transitions (p.119) changes the behavior of a system or its state & countless of other studies made over the centuries. Through such examples, Ball gives a detailed description of how life in general revolves around his title: Critical Mass. By critical mass, one understands a threshold beyond which the state of a system is abruptly changed. In other words, the critical mass is technically a "phase transition". Of course the book doesn't aim at describing phase transition but rather it shows how many of the studies included in the book & many other examples in daily life abide to some kind of phase transition or critical (point) mass. Phase transitions are often also called critical points. Critical points can be found nearly every where in physics.

Critical Mass is not a book that belongs to any particular category by itself, but rather dwells into sociology, psychology, physics & statistical physics, mathematics & fractals, chaos & order, game theory & the prisoner's dilemma & many others.

It is not just a good read, but one with a great ending [Epilogue]. It will surely expand your vocabulary & lubricate the traditional thinkers' mind & it's "linear thinking" or thought. ( )

An interesting foray into the field of "social physics", coupled with an history of how science evolved so as to provide the tools needed to describe it. The first half of the book is fairly motivating and well-written, but it quickly looses its momentum. I grew bored near chapter 12 and decided to stop reading. Too precise to be a good popular science title, yet not as accurate as a scholarly text. Too bad. ( )

a very well written introduction to a few important ideas from physics that have been used to model and explain facts in the social sciences. I liked the author's pedagogical insistence on certain themes. for example, I had never understood that phase transitions can be seen as the signature of processes where a lot of items almost simultaneously interact with their neighbors and so transitively with one another. similarly for power law distributions. the second part of the book (the internet and its patterns of connectivity) veers into territory that is very extensively covered by a large number of very good recent books and so I found it somehow less interesting/informative. ( )