Download or read book Social Physics written by Alex Pentland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks.
Download or read book More Heat Than Light written by Philip Mirowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-11-29 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the emergence of neoclassical economics are traced to reveal how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value.
Download or read book Sociophysics written by Serge Galam and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do humans behave much like atoms? Sociophysics, which uses tools and concepts from the physics of disordered matter to describe some aspects of social and political behavior, answers in the affirmative. But advocating the use of models from the physical sciences to understand human behavior could be perceived as tantamount to dismissing the existence of human free will and also enabling those seeking manipulative skills . This thought-provoking book argues it is just the contrary. Indeed, future developments and evaluation will either show sociophysics to be inadequate, thus supporting the hypothesis that people can primarily be considered to be free agents, or valid, thus opening the path to a radically different vision of society and personal responsibility. This book attempts to explain why and how humans behave much like atoms, at least in some aspects of their collective lives, and then proposes how this knowledge can serve as a unique key to a dramatic leap forwards in achieving more social freedom in the real world. At heart, sociophysics and this book are about better comprehending the richness and potential of our social interaction, and so distancing ourselves from inanimate atoms.
Download or read book Adolphe Quetelet Social Physics and the Average Men of Science 1796 1874 written by Kevin Donnelly and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.
Download or read book The Naked Future written by Patrick Tucker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A thorough yet thoroughly digestible book on the ubiquity of data gathering and the unraveling of personal privacy.” —Daniel Pink, author of Drive Thanks to recent advances in technology, prediction models for individual behavior grow more sophisticated by the day. Whether you’ll marry, commit a crime or fall victim to one, or contract a disease are becoming easily accessible facts. The naked future is upon us, and the implications are staggering. Patrick Tucker draws on fascinating stories from health care to urban planning to online dating. He shows how scientists can predict your behavior based on your friends’ Twitter updates, anticipate the weather a year from now, figure out the time of day you’re most likely to slip back into a bad habit, and guess how well you’ll do on a test before you take it. Tucker knows that the rise of Big Data is not always a good thing. But he also shows how we’ve gained tremendous benefits that we have yet to fully realize.
Download or read book The Social Relations of Physics Mysticism and Mathematics written by S. Restivo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1985-09-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sal Restivo's book is a major achievement in the sociology of science and mathematics. It is exciting to read and constitutes a creative, wide-ranging exploration of the connections between physics and mysticism, between the natural science and the humanities. Of particular interest is his attempt to show the emergence of abstraction and of formal disciplines in science by relating them to the structure of social interests in society. All told, this book challenges the separation of C.P. Snow's two cultures' and is an original attempt to overcome the chasms between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The implications of the book's content certainly go far beyond its title.' Prof. W. Heydebrand, New York University
Download or read book Critical Mass written by Philip Ball and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2006-05-16 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs. Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.
Download or read book Design in Nature written by Adrian Bejan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Physics written by Karoly Simonyi and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2012-01-25 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the physical sciences are a continuously evolving source of technology and of understanding about our world, they have become so specialized and rely on so much prerequisite knowledge that for many people today the divide between the sciences and the humanities seems even greater than it was when C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture,
Download or read book Social Physics written by Auguste Comte and published by . This book was released on 1856 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Probabilities in Physics written by Claus Beisbart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a philosophical appraisal of probabilities in all of physics. It makes sense of probabilistic statements as they occur in the various physical theories and models and presents a plausible epistemology and metaphysics of probabilities.
Download or read book Quantum Society written by Danah Zohar and published by WmMorrowPB. This book was released on 1995-07-24 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Quantum Society authors Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall offer a compelling vision for transforming society using the insights of quantum physics to illuminate their ideas. Diversity, they suggest, is the creative evolutionary force, and the more diverse the society, the greater the opportunity for transformation and growth. Their theory of cosmic and social evolution allows us to discover the meaning and purpose of society through an appreciation and understanding of pluralistic thinking. The result is an all-embracing social model that celebrates the dynamic unity that is possible when we work together to orchestrate and articulate our interdependence. The quantum society is flexible, evolving, and ambiguous. In short, it reflects the idea of society as a living system. The authors use the language of physics to provide the images and metaphors appropriate for understanding the principles that inform this system, bringing into focus our harmonious place within the natural world.
Download or read book Ego and Soul written by John Carroll and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crisis of meaning is the issue of our time. The old beliefs that guided the West have faded, without credible replacement. Who lives well? What characterizes the good life? More particularly, what may we in the modern West claim about ourselves? And, ultimately, does how we live and what we do make any sense? Concerned for today's society and its problems as they relate to meaning, faith, belief, morale, moral attachment, and social direction, John Carroll surveys these questions in Ego and Soul. He examines how people in their ordinary and everyday lives grope unconsciously for direction, casting lines into the transcendent in the hope of a catch. He focuses on the main areas of modern life—work, sport, popular culture, family, friendship, intimacy, shopping, tourism, computers, cars, do–it–yourself renovation, our democratic temper, and the retreat into nature. He also examines high culture, the upper–middle–class elites, and the universities, tracing why they have lost their way and failed to provide a language that might help modern people understand their condition. Ego and Soul offers a surprising and compelling new look at the way we live today, and the way we try to make sense of our lives.
Download or read book Aristotle s Physics written by Joe Sachs and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle's Physics is one of the least studied "great books"--physics has come to mean something entirely different than Aristotle's inquiry into nature, and stereotyped Medieval interpretations have buried the original text. Sach's translation is really the only one that I know of that attempts to take the reader back to the text itself. -- Leon Cass, University of Chicago
Download or read book Constructing Quarks written by Andrew Pickering and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-12 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely regarded as a classic in its field, Constructing Quarks recounts the history of the post-war conceptual development of elementary-particle physics. Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific knowledge, Andrew Pickering suggests that scientists are not mere passive observers and reporters of nature. Rather they are social beings as well as active constructors of natural phenomena who engage in both experimental and theoretical practice. "A prodigious piece of scholarship that I can heartily recommend."—Michael Riordan, New Scientist "An admirable history. . . . Detailed and so accurate."—Hugh N. Pendleton, Physics Today
Download or read book Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason written by F.A Hayek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The studies of which this book is the result have from the beginning been guided by and in the end confirmed the somewhat old-fashioned conviction of the author that it is human ideas which govern the development of human affairs," Hayek wrote in his notes in 1940. Indeed, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason remains Hayek’s greatest unfinished work and is here presented for the first time under the expert editorship of Bruce Caldwell. In the book, Hayek argues that the abuse and decline of reason was caused by hubris, by man’s pride in his ability to reason, which in Hayek’s mind had been heightened by the rapid advance and multitudinous successes of the natural sciences, and the attempt to apply natural science methods in the social sciences.
Download or read book Quantum Mind and Social Science written by Alexander Wendt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-23 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique contribution to the understanding of social science, showing the implications of quantum physics for the nature of human society.
