Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, (Paperback)

from Beholderess

As a student (not a very good one, arguably :) of social sciences, I've been more than a little disturbed by what I've seen as trying to "prescribe" how people "must" behave using statistical inferences. This book finally made me understand that social science has nothing to do with prescription,...

from pgmcc

This book asks whether there are underlying natural laws that govern the endeavours of humans in the same way that natural laws govern processes in nature, such as the growth of snow crystals, phase shifts between liquid and gas, and the way in which metal changes from being magnetised to non-mag...

from ElectricRay

This is a super book. Philip Ball, a self-confessed liberal - more on that later - is first and foremost a scientist (a former staffer on Nature magazine), and his brief here is to canvas the application of statistical scientific explanations of physical phenomena, such as phase transitions in li...

from woodpigeon01

Philip Ball covers a huge breath of topics in this book while continuously bringing us back to a central theme: how physics is beginning to be applied to human society with quite considerable success. His subject of choice is the mathematics of interdependence, and how interdependent units join t...

from lmckend

One of the most interesting and readable of the plethora of books exploring some of the underlying causes and effects of social phenomena.