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Can we talk about physics and groups in the same breath? Can we think about the physics of critical states common to earthquakes, forest fires, ecological populations, stock markets and processes that are human, historical and group-related?
Mark Buchanan, theoretical physicist and science writer, attempts to link current thinking in complexity theory to previous endeavours of scientists and historians to explain events that occur in cycles, progressions or patterns, both large and small.
While one might expect a reductionist tendency in such an attempt to link so many areas, Buchanan writes in a lively and sensitive way about diverse fields of knowledge.
We hear about seismologists who cannot predict earthquakes, biologists whose advice leads to worse forest fires, palaeontologists who can't explain extinction and creation events without reference to ‘external’ causes, economists who cannot account for stock-market crashes without blaming computer failure, or poorly tweaked policy levers. Our final group of academics are the historians who are doomed to post-hoc explanation and live on the uncomfortable position (like the rest of us) of living life forwards, but explaining it backwards, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. Scientists themselves are also vulnerable to complexity, and in a lively revisiting of Thomas Kuhn (1996) he notes how scientists suffer from “intellectual earthquakes and avalanches” at the hands of complexity processes at work in knowledge and scientific communities.
But why is complexity ubiquitous, what does a critical state look like, and what do “power laws” have to do with either, and with human relations?
Buchanan quotes the work of historian Niall Ferguson (1997) in his proposed use of chaos theory as a conceptual tool that reconciles the