I presented a rough approximation of what I may pursue as a research topic in my class yesterday. The instructor suggested that I look to see what had been written about social physics which asked many of the same questions I was curious about. This pleased me because its nice to have a place to start. So this morning I started looking for information on Social Physics and was somewhat disappointed to to learn that there are two areas of research that are known as social physics.
One describes itself as a many2many peer collaboration system interested in privacy and information exchange. This, while interesting, isn’t of any use.
The second area is of much more interest (and use). This is the social physics (which I imagine first coined the name) that looks at using a scientific framework to understand social interaction and human systems. Early examples of this framework include some work by Hobbes where by he used Galileo’s heavenly body studies to explain which political governance system was best.
although this isn’t exactly what I’m looking at, it’s part of the same suspect realm that tries to fit an understanding of human interaction into a framework that matches a real science like physics. Economics is a good example – there are theories and formulas, but they’re all based on things that can’t possibly be universal constants.
What I’m interested in social physics for is to develop a way to look at things like entropy in human communities. Where is the greatest loss of potential energy?
The reason I want to know this is because I’ve lost faith in the aesthetic and economic arguments for environmentalism. I still believe they’re effective, but they’re imperfect in the sense that aesthetic doesn’t matter to a lot of people, and economics only make a solid argument when you’re talking about including external costs, something we as Americans have been told by God we didn’t need to do.
My hope for physics is that it will provide something more helpful. You can argue all you want about how humanity needs wilderness for the good of its soul, or how in the long run sustainable food sources will be better for us, but you can’t ignore the laws of physics. Producing a good inefficiently, or producing it elsewhere and shipping it here greatly increases the entropy of that transaction. That energy can never be used again. Our tenure here surely depends on finding a way to reduce the amount of waste in our lives. So now I’ve got some reading to do.
This reminds me of a great This American Life show called Family Physics.
“We take the stately laws of physics–laws which mathmaticians and scientists have spent centuries discovering and verifying–and apply them to the realm of human relationships, to see if they shed useful light on our daily lives.”
You can listen to it for free here: http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/02/214.html
As far as invironmental economics, it’s not just external costs that are being ignored, but future costs as well. What happens if, say, 100 years from now we have to build 100,000 giant spaceships with launch facilities and cryo-sleep capabilities to launch the human race off of a dying earth and onto another planet to rape? This is a stupid example, but that would cost, well, more money than the earth has. More realistic things are research funding for newscience for waste removal or food creation or whatever.
and alternate energy sources, oil boy!
Preach on brotha freed!!! I couldn’t agree more on your envionmental views. And this is coming from a Huxley alumni. Social physics sounds interesting, looks like an offspring of the work that’s going into studying quannum mechanics. There’s some twisted mind bending theories being put forth right now. Cool stuff.
Wowza! To say the least. I wish I knew more about it, but Patrick lost my book so I have an excuse, but I wonder if social physics is discussed by any Chaos Theorists-if it can be. You definitely got my brain curious, but I don’t know if I have the will power. I look forward to seeing things you may come upon. I wonder if there are more Huxley grads like us?
Quantum Mechanics is acctually a lot of fun (in some sick sort of way). You can borrow my books on QM if you need them.
Scott, try a quannum mechanics book that looks at Eastern mysticism and compares the two. There are actually quite a few out there. I have an outdated one called the “Dancing wu li masters”. God, Buddha, Sponge Bob, enlightenment, the universal mind…. welcome to the quannum world.
There is also the movie “What the bleep do we know” which gets into that the duality between QM and EM. I’ll have to check out that book fletcher. Thanks. There was also a bunch of books from the Dr.s on WTBDWK that looked really interesting. God I love science! I am so much more inclined to believe in something if I can explain it through an equation.