Related papers: Statistical Physics for Humanities: A Tutorial
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Calculations and mechanistic explanations for the probabilistic movement of objects at the highly relevant cm length scales has been lacking and overlooked due to the complexity of current techniques. Predicting the final-configuration…
Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers…
These lecture notes introduce some topics of classical statistical physics, particularly those that are relevant for neural networks and deep learning. Statistical physics is treated as a branch of probability theory or statistics, with the…
Many questions of fundamental interest in todays science can be formulated as inference problems: Some partial, or noisy, observations are performed over a set of variables and the goal is to recover, or infer, the values of the variables…
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…
This document presents the material of two lectures on statistical physics and neural representations, delivered by one of us (R.M.) at the Fundamental Problems in Statistical Physics XIV summer school in July 2017. In a first part, we…
We build simple computational models of belief dynamics within the framework of discrete-spin statistical physics models, and explore how suitable they are for understanding and predicting real-world belief change on both the individual and…
Processes of mass communications in complicated social or sociobiological systems such as marketing, economics, politics, animal populations, etc. as a subject for the special scientific discipline - "mediaphysics" - are considered in its…
I give an overview of the topic of this special issue, the applications of (statistical) physics to social sciences at large. I discuss several examples of simple social models put forward by physicists and discuss their interest. I argue…
An Ising-type classical statistical model is shown to describe quantum fermions. For a suitable time-evolution law for the probability distribution of the Ising-spins our model describes a quantum field theory for Dirac spinors in external…
This work discusses simple examples how quantum systems are obtained as subsystems of classical statistical systems. For a single qubit with arbitrary Hamiltonian and for the quantum particle in a harmonic potential we provide explicitly…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
About 45,000 years ago, symbolic and technological complexity of human artefacts increased drastically. Computer simulations of Powell, Shennan and Thomas (2009) explained it through an increase of the population density, facilitating the…
Statistical Inference is the process of determining a probability distribution over the space of parameters of a model given a data set. As more data becomes available this probability distribution becomes updated via the application of…
Statistical thermodynamics delivers the probability distribution of the equilibrium state of matter through the constrained maximization of a special functional, entropy. Its elegance and enormous success have led to numerous attempts to…
The s=1/2 Ising chain with uniform nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor coupling is used to construct a system of floating particles characterized by motifs of up to six consecutive local spins. The spin couplings cause the assembly…
When very small particles are suspended in a fluid in motion, they tend to follow the flow. How such tracer particles are mixed, transported, and dispersed by turbulent flow has been successfully described by statistical models. Heavy…
Quantitative social science is not only about regression analysis or, in general, data inference. Computer simulations of social mechanisms have a 60-year long history. They have been used for many different purposes -- to test scenarios,…
The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical evaluation of…