Ooh. Science.
Righto. More exciting donut/science interaction at 5 o'clock this thursday; it all sounds a bit like Asimov's Foundation to me. On the other hand, statistical physics is my turf so I might stand a cat in hell's chance of knowing something about it.
[Lecture theatre A, James Clerk Maxwell Building, King's buildings (this is the email I got)]:
This week our speaker is Philip Ball, who is a freelance science writer
and a Consultant Editor for Nature. He worked as an editor for physical
sciences at Nature for over ten years, where his brief extended from
biochemistry to quantum physics and materials science. His writings on
science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from
cosmology to the future of molecular biology.
His talk is entitled "Utopia Theory: The Physics of Society", and the
abstract is as follows:
"Are there "laws of society" in the same way as there are laws of physics
- inevitable rules that govern the way people behave and organize
themselves collectively? And if so, can we use them to find better ways to
live? I will show how the social, economic and political sciences stand to
benefit from tools and concepts borrowed from a seemingly unlikely source:
statistical physics, the science of large numbers of interacting,
inanimate particles. I will argue that, in order to understand and perhaps
to predict human behaviour, sometimes the social sciences need to worry
less about the psychology and idiosyncrasy of individuals and should focus
instead on the ways that collective decisions arise spontaneously from
interactions between them. These ideas can be applied to phenomena as
diverse as traffic flow, economics, voting, and international relations."
So there.
[Lecture theatre A, James Clerk Maxwell Building, King's buildings (this is the email I got)]:
This week our speaker is Philip Ball, who is a freelance science writer
and a Consultant Editor for Nature. He worked as an editor for physical
sciences at Nature for over ten years, where his brief extended from
biochemistry to quantum physics and materials science. His writings on
science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from
cosmology to the future of molecular biology.
His talk is entitled "Utopia Theory: The Physics of Society", and the
abstract is as follows:
"Are there "laws of society" in the same way as there are laws of physics
- inevitable rules that govern the way people behave and organize
themselves collectively? And if so, can we use them to find better ways to
live? I will show how the social, economic and political sciences stand to
benefit from tools and concepts borrowed from a seemingly unlikely source:
statistical physics, the science of large numbers of interacting,
inanimate particles. I will argue that, in order to understand and perhaps
to predict human behaviour, sometimes the social sciences need to worry
less about the psychology and idiosyncrasy of individuals and should focus
instead on the ways that collective decisions arise spontaneously from
interactions between them. These ideas can be applied to phenomena as
diverse as traffic flow, economics, voting, and international relations."
So there.