Related papers: Sociophysics: a personal testimony
Attention is drawn to problems associated with superstatistics, including the apparent lack of knowledge of previous work in statistical physics displayed by workers in this supposedly new field.
The concept of infinity took centuries to achieve recognized status in the field of mathematics, despite the fact that it was implicitly present in nearly all mathematical endeavors. Here I explore the idea that a similar development might…
We discuss some of the key science questions that are bringing particle physicists and astrophysicists together, and comment on some of the cultural and funding issues that have arisen as these two communities become increasingly…
If human societies are so complex, then how can we hope to understand them? Artificial Life gives us one answer. The field of Artificial Life comprises a diverse set of introspective studies that largely ask the same questions, albeit from…
We discuss how developments in physics often imply in the need that spacetime acquires an increasingly richer and complex structure. General Relativity was the first theory to show us the way to connect space and time with the physical…
Publicly available data reveal long-term systematic features about citation statistics and how papers are referenced. The data also tell fascinating citation histories of individual articles.
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
Communities of practice in science communication can make important contributions to public engagement with science but are under-researched. In this article, we look at the perspectives of a community of practice in astronomy communication…
These are author's recollections of informal discussions on foundations of quantum mechanics, which happened in his presence in 1970-80s
The study of the weak-ties phenomenon has a long and well documented history, research into the application of this social phenomenon has recently attracted increasing attention. However, further exploration of the reasons behind the…
I present some reminiscences, both personal and scientific, over a lifetime of admiration of, and friendship with, one of the Grandmasters of our subject.
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
We review a series of models of sociophysics introduced by Galam and Galam et al in the last 25 years. The models are divided in five different classes, which deal respectively with democratic voting in bottom up hierarchical systems,…
As a basis for epistemological study of ``time,'' we analyze three suspect phenomena introduced by modern physics: non-locality, asymmetric aging and advanced interaction. It is shown that all three arise in connection with what has to be…
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 discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
The review is a survey of the present status of research in social networks highlighting the topics of small world property, degree distributions, community structure, assortativity, modelling, dynamics and searching in social networks.
Data science is creating very exciting trends as well as significant controversy. A critical matter for the healthy development of data science in its early stages is to deeply understand the nature of data and data science, and to discuss…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
The paradoxes of thermodynamics and statistical physics are unavoidable in the study of physical paradoxes because of their importance at the time they came to be as well as the frequency of their appearance in historical studies of…