Critical Mass

According to Donne, 'no man is an island', but how exactly are we affected by the behaviour of others? Are there 'laws of nature' that guide human affairs? Have we complete freedom in creating our societies, or are we trapped by 'human nature'? And how, in human affairs, does one thing lead to another?

Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology and psychology, Philip Ball shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the actions of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions.

• Introduction
  Political Arithmetick

1. Raising Leviathan
   The brutish world of Thomas Hobbes
2. Lesser Forces
   The mechanical philisophy of matter
3. The Law of Large Numbers
   Regularities from randomness
4. The Grand Ah-Whoom
   Why some things happen all at once
5. On Growth and Form
   The emergence of shape and organization
6. The March of Reason
   Chance and necessity in collective motion
7. On the Road
   The inexorable dynamics of traffic
8. Rhythms of the Marketplace
   The shaky hidden hand of economics
9. Agents of Fortune
   Why interaction matters to the economy
10. Uncommon Proportions
    Critical states and the power of the straight line
11. The Work of Many Hands
    The growth of firms
12. Join the Club
    Alliances in business and economics
13. Multitudes in the Valley of Decision
    Collective influence and social change
14. The Colonization of Culture
    Globalization, diversity and synthetic societies
15. Small Worlds
    Networks that bring us together
16. Weaving the Web
    The shape of cyberspace
17. Order in Eden
    Learning to cooperate
18. Pavlov's Victory
    Is reciprocity good for us?
19. Towards Utopia?
    Heaven, hell and social planning

• Epilogue
  Curtain Call

I feel very let-down! I was expecting to read a book about the conjunction and possible cross-fertilization between Physics and Economics. Instead, I get a long lecture of the history of physics, and why it is better than all other sciences as well as an explanation of why economics is not a science. And to top it of, when the author tries to tell me why (on both accounts), he manages to mis-represent both economics and the applicability of physics on it. Maybe the physics part are good (I am not enough of an expert to determine that), but the economics parts are so stupidly expressed, that the author would fail 101 Economics!

Waste of space and time.