Hi,
I'd be the first one to agree with the statement that
"people are not just particles".
But is Ball's book about a bunch of scientists who are just
re-using old ideas, or is there something truly and
fundamentally new in this approach?
The attached article from Tamas Vicsek in Nature seems to
suggest that the second hypothesis is worth considering .
Rui
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alain Chiaradia" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 12:04 PM
Subject: Re: "Critical Mass" -new book by Nature editor
Philip Ball's new book "Critical Mass" (Heinemann): A review
Model behaviour
Philip Ball describes a new 'physics of society' in Critical
Mass, but people are not just particles, argues James Buchan
Saturday March 27, 2004
The Guardian
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
by Philip Ball
644pp, Heinemann, £25
"The great advantage of the mathematical sciences above the
moral," wrote David Hume in 1748, "consists in this, that
the ideas of the former are always clear and determinate."
For example, Hume went on, an oval is never mistaken for a
circle, nor a hyperbola for an ellipsis. Yet for the moral
sciences, which in the 18th century embraced the
investigation of the mind and society as well as questions
of right and wrong, there was no such precision.
"Ambiguity," Hume said, "is gradually introduced into our
reasonings." With that passage, from An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding , the fat Scotsman waddled off to join
the wildest wild-goose chase in the history of western
thought, which is the attempt to capture for the various
sciences of humanity the precision and prestige of
mathematics. This yearning for universal mathematical laws
to govern the behaviour of human beings has burdened the
west with all sorts of harmless and less harmless nonsense,
from phrenology to economics. It now finds a champion in
Philip Ball in this long book.
Ball's argument is that this time, it's different, guv. In
other words, mathematical and statistical physics has
attained such a sophistication that its insights into the
behaviour of particles of matter can be transferred to the
mass behaviour of human beings, whether investing in the
stock market or racing for the exits after a fire at a
football ground.
In addition, and sotto voce, Ball tells us that society in
mass has now become so mechanical that human beings really
do resemble atoms of physical matter interacting with one
another through forces of attraction and repulsion.
Will and personality are not abolished, we are told, in
Ball's new "physics of society" but submerged into the
averages rather as, in Dickens's Hard Times , the
personality of each workman is absorbed into the industrial
arithmetic of the mill. For a scientific book there is quite
a lot of history. Ball writes clearly and is socko with
graphs, but I found his arguments utterly unconvincing.
Other readers may be more fortunate. In a series of short,
bright chapters, Ball mines the specialist journals to
provide the very latest applications of "social physics" to
urban planning, the movement of pedestrians and motor
traffic, stock price movements, trade, the rise and fall of
corporations, diplomacy, political alliances, voting
patterns, the composition of city neighbourhoods,
criminology, matrimony, the transmission of culture and
fashion, circles of acquaintance, the internet, sexual
epidemiology, weapons of mass destruction. It soon becomes
clear that this is not physics, but something that only
looks and sounds and tastes and smells a bit like physics.
Whether the experiments concern pedestrians crossing the
campus of Stuttgart University or Brazilians electing their
state governments, Ball presents patterns
and distributions which he says resemble those identified by
physicists, such as the Ising model of how atoms magnetise
or the sudden "phase transitions" that occur when water
melts or freezes. The experiments in political or social
organisation pro duce results that "parallel", "are
equivalent of", "look exactly like", "are reminiscent of"
patterns in experiments in natural science.
Ball is right, no doubt, that in a traffic jam on the
bypass, human beings are not at their richest and most
multifarious. They are converted by the automobile they're
sitting in into a quasi-automaton and "the capacity for good
or evil, for love or hatred" that interested Dickens in Hard
Times is beside the point for the traffic planner. They
become mere quantities that may be amenable to prediction
and manipulation. But he accepts that in the more
complicated scenes of human activity, this modelling seems
to work only by simplifying the human being out of
existence.
The notorious example is the perfectly rational, perfectly
knowledgeable, perfectly avaricious human subject of
old-fashioned political economy. Many of the studies Ball
quotes are as crude and tedious as electronic ping-pong and
one wonders if perhaps their devisers might profitably be
doing something else. As Adam Smith wrote in his Astronomy,
it is a constant temptation in philosophy to mistake
scientific metaphors "for the real chains which Nature makes
use of to bind together her several operations".
Occasionally, Ball does just that. After quoting a study
that attempted to model why certain corporations backed the
Unix computer operating code in the 1980s and why certain
European countries joined the Axis powers on the eve of the
second world war, Ball writes: "For a single model
successfully to predict the allegiances of computer
companies and the alliances during the descent into global
war suggests that we have moved beyond the
compartmentalised, case-dependent perspective of much
traditional social and political science and hit a deeper
seam in the order of things." Another way of looking at it
is to say that to predict well-known public events several
years after they have occurred is not perhaps the most
demanding of tasks for an educated mind.
In a final chapter, fearful of having left a totalitarian
impression, Ball retracts some of his claims for social
physics and reminds us: "There are few things quite so
misguided and dangerous as looking to science for moral
guidance." Why then does he extend the authority of the hard
sciences to these pedestrian and often footling essays in
social science? It was precisely such claims to universal
application that converted laisser faire and Marx's surplus
value from mere commercial theories into implacable social
moralities.
For this reviewer, far from social science gaining the
precision of physics, physics has come to partake of the
flakiness of economics. Rather than believing in the
Efficient Markets Hypothesis, I have come to doubt the
universal character of the Second Law of Thermo-dynamics.
That was probably not Ball's intention, but it is a gift of
incomparable sceptical value for which I will ever be in his
debt.
_______________________________
Alain Chiaradia
Associate Director
SPACE SYNTAX
_______________________________
-----Original Message-----
[log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Rui Carvalho
18 April 2004 22:38
[log in to unmask]
Subject: "Critical Mass" -new book by Nature editor
Hi,
Philip Ball's new book "Critical Mass" (Heinemann) may be of
interest to members of the mailbase -specially as it relates
to the current discussion on complexity.
Philip Ball is a consultant editor for Nature
(http://www.nature.com/). He can be found both at
http://www.philipball.com/ and at
http://www.nature.com/nsu/profiles/aboutus.html#ball
Here I must declare an interest: the book reviews my work.
But it also makes a compelling case for an interdisciplinary
approach to urban problems using rigorous, mathematical
techniques, so we can all be grateful to Ball for writing it
and I can promote it with a clear conscience.
Indeed, Philip Ball discusses the work of Profs. Mike Batty
and Paul Longley on fractal cities; the work of Profs. Bill
Hillier and Julienne Hanson on Space Syntax; the work of
Prof. Batty, Dr. Jake Desyllas and Elspeth Duxbury on the
Notting Hill Carnival as well as my own work with Prof. Alan
Penn on scaling and universality of urban space.
The book is available from amazon in Europe and Japan -and
will be available in the US in June.
Rui
___________________________________
Dr. Rui Carvalho
Research Fellow
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
1-19 Torrington Place
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
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