Critical Mass Quotes

“In principle, agent-based modelling should make some of the grandest social and political questions of our time accessible to rational experiment, such as whether the globalization of the economy is likely to lead to greater cultural harmony or to cultural conflict. But some social scientists remain uneasy, suspecting that any particular agent-based model of a social phenomenon risks coming to conclusions that depend on the underlying assumptions of the model. How do we know whether any one set of rules or assumptions will lead to truly representative behaviour, and not to an excessively crude caricature of the real situation? In short, such models can hardly be expected to provide a sound basis for policy until we can distinguish what is contingent from what is robust: what a particular model will produce as opposed to what all good models will produce.”
― Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

“In a sense we can see network theory as a natural extension of statistical physics a kind of "sticky" version of many-particle systems in which encounters between individuals lead not simply to collisions but to the formation of permanent, elastic links. The network then becomes a kind of map of the history of the system, just as the expansion of the Internet over time is recorded in the growing web that it weaves. In networks the past matters: a memory of it is frozen in place and shapes the present. These networks provide a graphic image of the extent to which our lives become entwined in ways as innumerable as they are barely fathomable.”
― Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another