Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Philip Ball. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.

This is a big book by an author "who thinks big. Holding a PhD in physics, now a writer and consulting editor in England, he asks essential questions. Why is society the way it is? Are there laws of nature that guide human affairs? Do we have complete freedom in creating our societies? Just how, in human affairs, does one thing lead to another? Where are we headed?

Can applying concepts from physics to our culture (he calls this "the physics of society")-to the social, political, and economic areas-improve societies, lead to better decisions, and make for a safer and fairer world? His answers are thoughtful and original, and deserve our thought and attention.

He waxes poetic and scientific, bringing the insights of poets and Taoist scholars to bear on the subject. His first chapter centers on the brutish world of Thomas Hobbes, fathering the Enlightenment enthusiasm for a mechanistic philosophy that looks naïve to us now.

Still, in the work of authors like Galileo and Newton, there are deep and elegant truths about the way the universe works. Their ideas, expanded in later centuries, underpin the physics of society. Understanding what atoms do when they get together is one of science's greatest triumphs. But no one could have expected this to lead where it has.

Today, we have confronted "phase transitions," which explain processes of sudden change in...