Editorial: Statistical Mechanics and Social Sciences

Statistical physics has proven fruitful for the investigation of the collective dynamics of complex systems, including systems that lie beyond the scope of traditional physics. By leveraging behavioral regularities at the global level, such as averages and distributions, statistical physics can be used to analyze systems with large numbers of components whose individual behavior is highly idiosyncratic This regularity also occurs when the fundamental constituents are more complex than atoms or molecules. In the XVIII th century it was first noticed that events such as the number of births, deaths, suicides, etc., tended to be stable in a given geographical area, as long as the observation period is not too long. This stability was surprising because these events are generally unpredictable individually. These empirical regularities motivated Maxwell and Boltzmann to propose a statistical approach to understand the physics of many-particle systems, ultimately leading to the foundations of statistical mechanics [1]. Related observations also convinced scholars of the period that precise quantitative laws, like those of physics, also existed for social phenomena, in spite of the apparently erratic behavior of individuals. For example, Immanuel Kant, in his 1784 essay On History refers to universal laws that " however obscure their causes, [permit] us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment ". This conviction that there should exist a quantitative theory of social phenomena was shared by many noted scholars, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, Auguste Compte (credited as the father of sociology), Adolphe Quetelet, John Stuart Mill, Henry Thomas Buckle, to name a few. Yet more than two centuries after the empirical discovery of the stability of social aggregates, we still lack a social science equivalent of Newton's laws for the motion. There are two main reasons. The first is the relative dearth of empirical observations compared to those in physics. Robert C. Merton, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, pointed out that Newton's laws were the result of a many-decade process of careful observations by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, which were subsequently summarized in mathematical form by Johannes Kepler. The regularity of …