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.

"From one of the world's leading data scientists, a landmark tour of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence" If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT's Alex "Sandy" Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We're social creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of action--and most basic notions of common sense--are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about "idea flow," the way human social networks spread ideas and transform those ideas into behaviors. Thanks to the millions of digital bread crumbs people leave behind via smartphones, GPS devices, and the Internet, the amount of new information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until now, sociologists have depended on limited data sets and surveys that tell us how people "say" they think and behave, rather than what they actually "do." As a result, we've been stuck with the same stale social structures--classes, markets--and a focus on individual actors, data snapshots, and steady states. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest. Pentland and his teams have found that they can study "patterns "of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge of the actual "content "of the information and predict with stunning accuracy how productive and effective that network is, whether it's a business or an entire city. We can maximize a group's collective intelligence to improve performance and use social incentives to create new organizations and guide them through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities, social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow. "Social Physics" will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work--and can be made to work better, at every level of society. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.

Where do ideas come from? How do they get put into action? How can we create social structures that are productive and creative? If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT’s Alex Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries that have become the bedrock of a new scientific field: social physics. This revolutionary science shows that innovation doesn’t come from a few exceptionally bright people, but from the flow of ideas — especially how our social networks spread ideas and turn those ideas into behaviours. Thanks to the rise of smartphones, GPS devices, and the internet, Pentland and his teams can study patterns of information exchange in a social network, without any knowledge of the content of the information. Using this data, they can tell with stunning accuracy how effective that network is, whether it’s a business or an entire city. Pentland shows us how to fine-tune these networks to improve their performance — for instance, by maximising a group’s collective intelligence, or by using social incentives to work through disruptive change. Social Physics will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work — and can be made to work better, at every level of society. It is an entirely new way to look at life itself.

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.

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.

“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.

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.