Critical Mass : How One Thing Leads to Another

Rating:
Summary: An excellent historical analysis of group interaction
Review: This book is an excellent historical look at how scientists and social scientists have attempted to measure,analyze and discuss the effects and causes of group interactions,be they the interactions of atomic particles or speculators operating on the New York stock exchange.The author provides a superb overview of herd effects,cascades, and other types of crowd effects,as well as a good discussion of how economists have attempted to model the interactive effects of crowd behavior.Readers who are interested in this topic will find a much more detailed discussion in"The Wisdom of Crowds",by J Surowiecki(2004).John Maynard Keynes and Benoit Mandelbrot are both given appropriate recognition for their pathbreaking contributions in this area.Ball recognizes,as did Keynes and Boltzmann before him,the faddish nature of much of the social sciences , economics in particular ,in attempting to mimic mathematical physics in its approach to the use of formal mathematical methods.In many cases this leads to fads which emphasize the mere use of the technique,irrespective of any quantifiable scientific results.Ball points out that the overuse of the normal(Gaussian)probability distribution among economists is an attempt to obtain the self ordering and equilibrating structure of gas particle models within the human domain even if there is no empirical support for such a distribution.Here both Pareto,Zipf,and Mandelbrot receive credit.

Rating:
Summary: Insightful!
Review: This is a sometimes dense, often rambling and always interesting book about the history of science, the history of social philosophy and many points of congruence between the two, from how traffic jams happen to how communities self-organize. Author Philip Ball seems to include almost every notable physical scientist since Sir Isaac Newton as he traces how key scientific theories have influenced or been influenced by the speculations of economists and political scientists. Anyone whose acquaintance with science is minimal, but whose curiosity is deep, will find that reading this book is something like floating down a river that is a sometimes windy, sometimes swampy, sometimes roiling stream of discoveries, ideas, broken hypotheses and curious characters. There are two small flaws. First, the author identifies almost every scientist who ever worked on a problem remotely related to the book's subject and sometimes he does not clear the path through the thicket of names and experiments. And, second, in a social science discussion toward the end, Ball permits his political biases to color his story with occasional, apparently heartfelt, denunciations of right-leaning politicians. These quibbles aside, we say buy this book and enjoy an intriguing raft ride through interesting intellectual waters.