Why Society is a Complex Matter pdf

菲利普·鲍尔是一位自由科学作家。他之前在 Nature 工作了 20 多年，首先担任物理科学编辑（他的简介从生物化学扩展到量子物理和材料科学），然后担任顾问编辑。他为大众媒体撰写的关于科学的著作涵盖了从宇宙学到分子生物学的未来等热点问题。 菲利普是许多关于科学的流行书籍的作者，包括关于水的性质、自然界中的图案形成、艺术中的色彩、社会和政治哲学科学、音乐认知和纳粹德国物理学的著作。他撰写了大量关于艺术与科学之间相互作用的文章，并在维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆（伦敦）、美国宇航局艾姆斯研究中心、伦敦国家剧院和伦敦经济学院等场所向科学和普通观众发表了演讲。 菲利普继续定期为《自然》撰稿。他为《新科学家》、《纽约时报》、《卫报》、《金融时报》和《新政治家》等出版物做出了贡献。他是《展望》杂志的特约编辑（他为此撰写了一个科学博客），同时也是《化学世界》、《自然材料》和意大利科学杂志 Sapere 的专栏作家。他曾多次在广播和电视上播出，并且是 BBC Radio 4 的“科学故事”节目主持人。他是英国皇家化学学会会士，是《化学世界》和《跨学科科学评论》的编委，以及是波鸿鲁尔大学溶剂化科学 RESOLV 网络的董事会成员。 Philip 拥有牛津大学化学学士学位和布里斯托大学物理学博士学位。 菲利普鲍尔是一位作家。他的大部分书都以某种形式关注科学：它的历史、它与艺术和社会的互动、它的成就、乐趣和弯路。他是几家杂志的固定专栏作家，偶尔也是电台主持人和广播员。他多年来一直是《自然》杂志的编辑，很久以前，他还是化学家和物理学家。

Why Society is a Complex Matter pdf 菲利普·鲍尔

Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents – people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks – society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex systems operate, ranging from animal populations to earthquakes and weather. These systems show behaviours that cannot be predicted or intuited by focusing on the individual components, but which emerge spontaneously as a consequence of their interactions: they are said to be ‘self-organized’. Attempts to direct or manage such emergent properties generally reveal that ‘top-down’ approaches, which try to dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is needed instead is a ‘bottom-up’ approach that aims to guide self-organization towards desirable states. This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of complexity can be applied to the study and management of social phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion formation and the growth and structure of cities. Building on these successes, the book argues that the complex-systems view of the social sciences has now matured sufficiently for it to be possible, desirable and perhaps essential to attempt a grander objective: to integrate these efforts into a unified scheme for studying, understanding and ultimately predicting what happens in the world we have made. Such a scheme would require the mobilization and collaboration of many different research communities, and would allow society and its interactions with the physical environment to be explored through realistic models and large-scale data collection and analysis. It should enable us to find new and effective solutions to major global problems such as conflict, disease, financial instability, environmental despoliation and poverty, while avoiding unintended policy consequences. It could give us the foresight to anticipate and ameliorate crises, and to begin tackling some of the most intractable problems of the twenty-first century.