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Book Reviews: Review article: The New Social Physics and the Science of Small World Networks

The label ‘new social physics’ has been coined to denote a growth of interest in sociological questions within certain quarters of the physical and mathematical sciences (Scott, 2004; Urry, 2004). The four books reviewed here constitute an important strand in this development. Albert-Lásló Barabási is a distinguished professor of physics who has turned his hand to questions of social order and dynamics, amongst other things. Mark Buchanan has a PhD in theoretical physics, has worked on the editorial team of Nature and, like Barabási, is now showing an interest in sociological matters. Duncan Watts has gone all the way. Having obtained a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics, and published in such journals as Nature, he is now a professor of sociology at Columbia University. All three have written popular science accounts of this social physics and it is these accounts that I am reviewing here (in addition to Watts’ (1999) more advanced text). Barabási and Watts are also practitioners of this new science, however, and are major protagonists in the popular accounts which both they and Buchanan give.