Product Description

Is there a 'physics of society'? Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology and psychology, Philip Ball shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, whether in circumstances in which human beings co-operate or conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new "Harry Potter" book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16528 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

The Guardian
Critical Mass fizzes with ideas and insights

Independent on Sunday
‘more than a book, this in an intellectual curiosity’

Glasgow Herald
‘lucid, accessible and engaging’

Customer Reviews

Philip Ball's Masterpiece
Yes, without a doubt, Philip Ball's greatest book to date. He is probably better known among scientists than laypersons as he was for a long time editor at Nature one of the worlds top multi-disciplinary science journals. He has a degree in chemistry and a doctorate in physics but he seems to know a great deal more, when he mentions literature he sounds like an english professor but enough about the man - what about his book?

The joy of Ball's erudition is that he can speak intelligently on any subject which must have been useful at Nature and is essential when he tackles popular science books such as this. His books are not for the lazy but curious person, to get joy out of Ball's books you must be prepared to think hard, concentrate a little and then the rewards will come. In this book, Ball discusses the startling results that physicists have had when applying physics to social phenomena - war, business, traffic. People are particles is a common theme. Obviously classical physics or even quantum phenomena are not going to predict a single persons actions, but what about a million? As it turns out there are parallels which we run in to again and again. One fascinating analogy - and it is more than just analogy really, thats the whole point - is how traffic slowing to a jam is much like water freezing. Phase changes and critical points come up repeatedly. Reading this book was absolutely fascinating. I looked forward to my bus rides to work so I'd have another chance to read some more.

The diagrams ease comprehension and the writing is lucid and entertaining throughout. There is even some dry humour which I found refreshing. I'm not sure I can praise this book highly enough, I've read popular science, and many academic titles and this is probably the one I've enjoyed most - it is one of those books that will make you look at everything differently.

Five stars without a doubt. A stimulating, exciting, fascinating read. 1st rate popular science, 1st rate writing.

People as particles
I found this book incredibly thought provoking. It would have been much quicker to read in fact if I hadn't been constantly writing down ideas that occured to me as I delved into its chapters.

It covers an enormous amount of ground and is, mostly, very readable despite sometimes covering a whirlwind of several hundred years of theory.

The main gist of the book is applying physics theories to human social interaction (be it in crowds, queues, crime, traffic, war, politics, markets, towns, businesses etc). It highlights how certain signature patterns seem to turn up time and time again in all these disparate theatres of human life.

It covers the familiar "bell curves" of probability theory but it was most interesting (to me) when discussing phase changes - for example how a liquid line of traffic suddenly morphs into a solid because one car (particle) brakes too fast and the knock on effects this has.

I'd strongly recommend this book as I think it's given me a better understanding of how certain types of change happen. Now I know why you wait ages for a bus and then three turn up at once.

The Will to Power (Law)
This is a super book.

Philip Ball, a self-confessed liberal - more on that later - is first and foremost a scientist (a former staffer on Nature magazine), and his brief here is to canvas the application of statistical scientific explanations of physical phenomena, such as phase transitions in liquids and solids, by analogy to human behaviour.

This is a splendid enterprise, not just because it is a very imaginative application of established knowledge to novel fields of enquiry, which to my mind is always a worthwhile endeavour (whether or not the results are useful, we're better off if someone has done the intellectual exercise than if they haven't), but also because it grasps a fundamental point which social scientists almost always miss: It is what a population will *actually* do which matters, not what it *ought* to do, or what *we'd like it* to do.

Politics is the pursuit these latter questions, and it is almost always pursued in ignorance of scientific data describing the former, and a central point of Ball's book is that this is a dreadful shame. And so it is.

A complaint one sees levied against Ball's book is that it misses the critical distinction between physical particles - which are all identical, except for a few key easily measured properties - and humans who, in almost every respect, are entirely different from each other. But this misses the point: the very beauty of statistical physics is that you can draw inferences about how a large mass of particles behave without knowing or measuring *anything* about the behaviour (vector, spin, magnetism, whatever) of any given particle. And so it is with people: Ball's argument is to say, on the basis of the statistical evidence, from the markets, from patterns on university lawns, from trajectories of individuals navigating a corridor: we can make inferences about what a group of people will do knowing nothing about their individual motives, in the same way we can about particles without knowing their vector or spin. At that level, people are *not* significantly different: people *do* behave like particles. Therefore these fundamental differences between people, which may be real (but may be not - for all we know, these "special qualities" we cherish may be a product of human chauvinism) are not material to how we behave en masse.

As Ball moves on, his subject resolves slowly to focus on social interaction within a society, and the interesting work on game theory and iterated prisoner's dilemma by Axelrod and others, all of which tend to suggest, in spite of centuries of supposition to the contrary, that if left to their own devices and allowed to act selfishly, folks will tend to get on with each other - in life, co-operative strategies will tend to be more successful than uncooperative ones, so people naturally inclined to cooperate will tend to flourish. This is contra Marx, Hobbes and so forth, but stands to reason when you think about it: if this principle were not true at the most fundamental evolutionary level, it is hard to see how we would be here to argue about it.

Despite that, Ball's liberalism does show through, and in odd ways, in a couple of places. One result suggested by research is that many distributions in society - sizes of incomes, cities, businesses and so on) will tend to be arranged according to a power law, rather than a normal distribution (that is, there will be a large number with a broadly similar size, and a very few with a very much larger size). Traditional social-liberal orthodoxy is that this is a bad thing, and by implication Ball thinks so:

"This is not to say that power law disparities in the free market are inevitable. But it does suggest that, if we decide they are undesirable, we shall probably need to restrict some of the freedom with which the market operates."

Unobjectionable, centrist sentiment you might say. But hold on: a free market assumes the free participation of everyone in the market (otherwise, it wouldn't be a free market). Now, if that market arranges itself according to a power law, then must that not be precisely what "we" - the participants in the market - have decided, by our very own actions, *is* desirable? We have, all by our own actions, unwittingly colluded to make one city very big, or one company very rich - if that is truly not want we want, we can move, or we can buy a different product. By Ball's own argument, there is no better indication of what "we" decide is what we want. As soon as someone starts talking about what "we" want, overriding the judgment of the market (which, statistically, describes how we collectively behave without needing to measure individual vectors, spins or magnetisms, remember) it seems to me we are in very dangerous territory.

Ball, I think, realises this and never dares more than a wistful look in this direction. In any case, it is certainly not enough to deprive this book of five stars: a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read.

Olly Buxton