3.4 Creating a Planetary Nervous System as a Citizen Web
41
data in ways that do not aim to undermine privacy. Appendix 3.1 provides further
information on the platform. With your help, it may very well become a cornerstone
of the public information infrastructure of the emergent digital society. So why don’t
you join us in building the Nervousnet platform or in measuring the world around
us?
24
3.5 Sociophysics: Revealing the Hidden Forces Governing
Our Society
But it takes more than data to understand the world and its problems. Measuring,
analyzing and visualizing data is just the first step, because data mining alone may
not lead to a good understanding of unstable system dynamics, which produces most
of the good and bad surprises in the world. In order to help us when we really need it,
we must find explanatory models, which can predict situations that haven’t occurred
before and cannot be understood by extrapolation.
In fact, some “social mechanisms” influence human behavior in a similar way
to how the gravitational force determines planetary motion
25 . Just think of the way
social norms determine our roles and behaviors.
26 The scientific approach of “agentbased simulations” aims to formalize these rules and turn them into computer codes.
Complementary, the research field of sociophysics tries to express the corresponding
interactions and their outcomes using mathematical formulas.
27 In this chapter, I
will particularly discuss the powerful concept of “social forces”, which enables
researchers to understand the link between micro-level interactions of individuals
and the often unexpected macro-level outcomes in socio-economic systems.
The concept of forces is one of the main pillars of physics. In order to discover it,
the old geocentric worldview, in which the Earth was assumed to be the center of the
universe, first had to be replaced by the heliocentric worldview, which recognized that
all the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. Later, the new understanding
of the planetary system allowed Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to interpret measurement
data about the planets in a new way, which led him to formulate a simple and plausible
model of planetary motion based on the concept of gravitational forces. Now, most
concepts used in modern physics are formulated in terms of forces and the way they
influence the world. The predictive power of these models is striking and has been
impressively demonstrated by the Apollo moon shot and every single satellite launch.
Another foundation of the success of physics is the tradition of building instruments to measure the forces that would otherwise be imperceptible to our senses.
This has enabled physicists to explore a vast array of questions, spanning from
24 You can get in touch with us through nervousnet@ethz.ch.
25 Even though there is more diversity and randomness to human interaction (which mostly benefits
our economy and society).
26 Hechter and Opp [9].
27 Pentland [10], Chakrabarti et al. [11].
41
data in ways that do not aim to undermine privacy. Appendix 3.1 provides further
information on the platform. With your help, it may very well become a cornerstone
of the public information infrastructure of the emergent digital society. So why don’t
you join us in building the Nervousnet platform or in measuring the world around
us?
24
3.5 Sociophysics: Revealing the Hidden Forces Governing
Our Society
But it takes more than data to understand the world and its problems. Measuring,
analyzing and visualizing data is just the first step, because data mining alone may
not lead to a good understanding of unstable system dynamics, which produces most
of the good and bad surprises in the world. In order to help us when we really need it,
we must find explanatory models, which can predict situations that haven’t occurred
before and cannot be understood by extrapolation.
In fact, some “social mechanisms” influence human behavior in a similar way
to how the gravitational force determines planetary motion
25 . Just think of the way
social norms determine our roles and behaviors.
26 The scientific approach of “agentbased simulations” aims to formalize these rules and turn them into computer codes.
Complementary, the research field of sociophysics tries to express the corresponding
interactions and their outcomes using mathematical formulas.
27 In this chapter, I
will particularly discuss the powerful concept of “social forces”, which enables
researchers to understand the link between micro-level interactions of individuals
and the often unexpected macro-level outcomes in socio-economic systems.
The concept of forces is one of the main pillars of physics. In order to discover it,
the old geocentric worldview, in which the Earth was assumed to be the center of the
universe, first had to be replaced by the heliocentric worldview, which recognized that
all the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. Later, the new understanding
of the planetary system allowed Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to interpret measurement
data about the planets in a new way, which led him to formulate a simple and plausible
model of planetary motion based on the concept of gravitational forces. Now, most
concepts used in modern physics are formulated in terms of forces and the way they
influence the world. The predictive power of these models is striking and has been
impressively demonstrated by the Apollo moon shot and every single satellite launch.
Another foundation of the success of physics is the tradition of building instruments to measure the forces that would otherwise be imperceptible to our senses.
This has enabled physicists to explore a vast array of questions, spanning from
24 You can get in touch with us through nervousnet@ethz.ch.
25 Even though there is more diversity and randomness to human interaction (which mostly benefits
our economy and society).
26 Hechter and Opp [9].
27 Pentland [10], Chakrabarti et al. [11].