Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another

A fascinating exploration of the age-old question: are there any "laws of nature" that guide human affairs? Is there anything inevitable about the ways humans behave and organise themselves? Have we complete freedom in creating our societies, or are we trapped by "human nature"? Is there a "physics of society"?

Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology, psychology, Philip Ball shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, whether in circumstances in which human beings co-operate or conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive.

By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new 'Harry Potter' book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.