Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Synopsis of Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

«Critical Mass» is Philip Ball's essay exploring physics applied to social behavior, published by Arrow Books in 2005.

Is there a physics of society? Philip Ball starts from authors such as Hobbes and Adam Smith and moves to current studies on traffic and markets, showing how physics can illuminate collective conduct. He analyzes situations of cooperation and conflict, and phenomena such as the purchase of a bestselling book, political voting or response to advertising, revealing common patterns in mass behavior.

Philip Ball was editor of physical sciences at Nature. The edition includes 656 pages in paperback.

For readers of popular science and social sciences who want to understand collective behavior from a physical perspective.