Critical Mass
Regular price
€17.99
A01=Philip Ball
adam smith
Author_Philip Ball
behavioural science
Category=JMH
Category=PDA
collective intelligence
complex systems
conflict
consumer behaviour
critical thinking
decision making
economics
education
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
human behaviour
human nature
human traffic
math
non fiction
non fiction books
on human nature
physics
politics
psychology books
science books
science fiction
science gifts for adults
social physics
social psychology
social science
social theory
society
stock trading
technology
the advertising effect
thomas hobbes
Product details
- ISBN 9780099457862
- Weight: 444g
- Dimensions: 130 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2005
- Publisher: Cornerstone
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Is there a 'physics of society'? Philip Ball's investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology. Ball shows how much of human behaviour we can understand when we cease trying to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, in circumstances in which human beings both co-operate and conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.
Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything, Serving The Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler and Invisible: The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.
