Slashdot Mirror
The Physics of Friendship
Santosh Maharshi wrote to mention a Physorg story about a new way to model social networks. From the article: "Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical - and perhaps more rational - applications. The many factors that influence an individual's fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision. By modeling people's interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge 'in a very natural way.'"
Another post mentioned Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels. If you like reading, I think you should give them a try, sounds like you'd enjoy them.
In the novels, Psychologists use the theory of Psychohistory to predict the future on a large scale, because populations have grown so large - 40 billion on the capital planet iirc - that their actions are almost totally predictable.