Intro Books for Bright People

Posted by Roger Critchlow on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Intro-Books-for-Bright-People-tp520499p520500.html

Irene gave Phillip Ball's Critical Mass to the Summer Intern high school
students at SFI this summer. The Amazon average review stands at 4.5 stars.
>From the editorial review:

First, he exhaustively details the development of key concepts in
contemporary physics, such as self-organization, phase transitions, flocking
behavior, chaos, bifurcation points, preferential attachment networks and
evolutionary game theory. Next, he shows how social scientists apply these
concepts to the study of human organization. Ball's primary assertion is
that we must attend to the relationship between global phenomena and local
actions. In other words, noticing the impact of individual decisions on laws
and institutions is more worthwhile than trying to predict the behavior of
individuals (as Ball's discussion of the logic of voting habits makes all
too clear). Ball's carefully argued disagreements with conventional economic
theory make for particularly engaging reading. Nonspecialist readers who
enjoy a steep learning curve will relish the thought-provoking discussions
Ball provides.

What I like especially is the serendipity of scientific progress portrayed,
that social scientists taught physicists to do statistics, and a century or
two later the physicists get around to returning the favor.

Open source rulez.

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