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november 16, 2004
Sociophysics
RedNova News: Psychohistory is Coming: Scientists Learning to Take Society's Temperature:
A little over half a century ago, Isaac Asimov created a new universe, home to a decaying galactic empire and a novel form of social order known as the "Foundation."
Asimov's "Foundation" novels - the most famous science-fiction trilogy between "Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars" - described a new science of social behavior called psychohistory. Mixing psychology with math, psychohistory hijacked the methods of physics to precisely predict the future course of human events.
Today, Asimov's vision is no longer wholly fiction. His psychohistory exists in a loose confederation of research enterprises seeking equations that capture patterns in human behavior. These enterprises go by different names and treat different aspects of the issue. But they all share a goal of better understanding the present in order to foresee the future, and possibly help shape it.
...
Among the newest of the enterprises - and closest to the spirit of Asimov's psychohistory - is a discipline called sociophysics. The name has been around for decades, but only in the 21st century has it become more science than slogan.
Like Asimov's psychohistory, sociophysics is rooted in statistical mechanics, the math used by physicists to describe the big picture when lacking data about the details. Nobody can track the trillion trillion molecules of air floating around in a room, for instance, but statistical mechanics can tell you how an air conditioner will affect the overall temperature.
In a similar way, science cannot describe how any given individual will behave. But put enough people together, Asimov's psychohistorian Hari Seldon reasoned, and laws of human interaction will produce predictable patterns - just as the way molecules move and interact determines the temperature and pressure of a gas.
...
"We're sort of working on little bits of it, trying to make connections," says Princeton University's Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist.
"The idea is really to have, in the end, a seamless understanding of the universe, from the most basic physical elements, the chemistry, the biochemistry, the neurobiology, to individual human behavior, to macroeconomic behavior - the whole gamut seamlessly integrated," he says. "Not in my lifetime, though."
(Via Social Capital Reading Stack.)
Mer om sociophysics:
Sociophysics: Theory, Resources, Quantification, News
Serge Galam: Sociophysics: a personal testimony
The origins of Sociophysics are discussed from a personal testimony. I trace back its history to the late seventies. My twenty years of activities and research to establish and promote the field are reviewed. In particular the conflicting nature of Sociophysics with the physics community is revealed from my own experience. Recent presentations of a supposed natural growth from Social Sciences are criticized.
Posted by hakank at november 16, 2004 07:28 EM Posted to Diverse vetenskap