Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this very interesting book, Philip Ball takes us around through various formalizations of physics, as a method of describing how matter (or energy) is actuated in order to highlight a possible formulation for how society is actuated. Curiously, he starts with Hobbes and then walks through the various material relations. Along the way he notes various new ideas as they describe matter and energy, showing in clear lucid language how this may or may not apply with society.
He does come up with some striking similarities for the models, but ultimately this is less a new sociology that is an extension of physics (a new physics) and more of a “look what I found, isn’t this weird?” kind of text. I would recommend this as a very interesting read, but unlike physics, there isn’t an easy correlation of model to actual particulates, in part because while we can see some analogous lines (especially with his prisoner’s dilemma or and game theory) he does lack an object of study. Society is too vague, and human agency is not discussed at all. Ball is more interested in how mobs of people have “emergent properties” but he does not discuss the role of agency or how these properties might emerge. In this way, despite the thickness of the book, this is more about finding interesting descriptions than it is about creating a working theory with an episteme from which we can build a system of human society. This forms the fatal flaw in the book, if there is one.
Thus, if you find this kind of topic interesting, it’s well worth the read. It will give you food for thought. Ball writes very clearly, concisely. You get a glimpse at the very interesting but also very diverse fields of study which you may not be aware of. But if you’re looking for a manifesto or an outline for how society should work, or how to even approach understanding human groupings as a system, you’re bound to be disappointed. Ball seems to find such discussion to be fruitless for himself to contemplate even as he engages the thoughts of others who have attempted such conjecture before.
Nonetheless, his revolving around the topic of critical mass or supercritical fluids before phase shifts as a way of describing social relations was of great abstract interest for me. Unfortunately, computer models do not translate well into human interaction in the sense that we have no solid metrics from which to gauge how people vary from one to another.
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