Related papers: Social physics
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…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
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…
In the post year 2000 era the technologies that facilitate human communication have rapidly multiplied. While the adoption of these technologies has hugely impacted the behaviour and sociality of people, specifically in urban but also in…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
This opening editorial aims to interest researchers and encourage novel research in the closely related fields of sociophysics and computational social science. We briefly discuss challenges and possible research directions in the study of…
Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general…
Socio-economic inequalities are manifested in different aspects of our social life. We discuss various aspects, beginning with the evolutionary and historical origins, and discussing the major issues from the social and economic point of…
The status of the sociophysics is discussed as placed between the physics and the sociology. In particular we ask if the second law of thermodynamics can be useful in social sciences.
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…
The origins of Sociophysics are discussed from a personal testimony. I trace back its history to the late seventies. My twenty years of activities and research to establish and promote the field are reviewed. In particular the conflicting…
Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional…
As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in physics…
Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build…
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…
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are rapidly becoming more capable, autonomous, and deeply embedded in social life. As humans increasingly interact, cooperate, and compete with AI, we move from purely human societies to hybrid human-AI…
Science, being a social enterprise, is subject to fragmentation into groups that focus on specialized areas or topics. Often new advances occur through cross-fertilization of ideas between sub-fields that otherwise have little overlap as…
The paper discusses the fundamental characteristics distinguishing the natural and social systems from each other. It considers in detail the basic approaches, prospects, and possibilities of constructing mathematical description for social…
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
Containing the spreading of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult,…