Social physics

[2] It was here that Hobbes began to outline the idea of representing the "physical phenomena" of society in terms of the laws of motion.

[2] In his treatise De Corpore, Hobbes sought to relate the movement of "material bodies"[3] to the mathematical terms of motion outlined by Galileo and similar scientists of the time period.

[4] His student and collaborator was Auguste Comte, a French philosopher widely regarded as the founder of sociology, who first defined the term in an essay appearing in Le Producteur, a journal project by Saint-Simon.

After Saint-Simon and Comte, Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, proposed that society be modeled using mathematical probability and social statistics.

In the middle of the 20th century, researchers such as the American astrophysicist John Q. Stewart and Finnish geographer Reino Ajo,[7] who showed that the spatial distribution of social interactions could be described using gravity models.

One of the most well-known examples in social physics is the relationship of the Ising model and the voting dynamics of a finite population.

For example, if two adjacent spaces share the same spin, the surrounding neighbors will begin to align,[citation needed] and the system will eventually reach a state of consensus.

In social physics, it has been observed that voter dynamics in a finite population obey the same mathematical properties of the Ising model.

[18] In modern use “social physics” refers to using “big data” analysis and the mathematical laws to understand the behavior of human crowds.

A 5x5 representational grid of an Ising model. Each space holds a spin and the red bars indicate communication between neighbors.
Example of social validation in the Sznajd model. If two neighbors agree (top), then their neighbors agree with them. If two neighbors disagree (bottom), their neighbors begin to disagree as well.