Critical mass : how one thing leads to another / Philip Ball.
"Critical mass asks the question, Why is society the way it is? How does it emerge from a morass of individual interactions? Are there laws of nature that guide human affairs? Is anything inevitable about the ways humans behave and organize themselves, or do we have complete freedom in creating...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2004.
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| Edition: | First American edition. |
| Subjects: |
Table of Contents:
- Introduction : political arithmetick
- Raising Leviathan : the brutish world of Thomas Hobbes
- Lesser forces : the mechanical philosophy of matter
- The law of large numbers : regularities from randomness
- The grand ah-whoom : why some things happen all at once
- On growth and form : the emergence of shape and organization
- The march of reason : chance and necessity in collective motion
- On the road : the inexorable dynamics of traffic
- Rhythms of the marketplace : the shaky hidden hand of economics
- Agents of fortune : why interaction matters to the economy
- Uncommon proportions : critical states and the power of the straight line
- The work of many hands : the growth of firms
- Join the club : alliances in business and politics
- Multitudes in the valley of decision : collective influence and social change
- The colonization of culture : globalization, diversity, and synthetic societies
- Small worlds : networks that bring us together
- Weaving the web : the shape of cyberspace
- Order in Eden : learning to cooperate
- Pavlov's victory : is reciprocity good for us?
- Toward Utopia? : heaven, hell, and social planning
- Epilogue: Curtain call.