Distinguished NICO Lecturer

Philip Ball

Lecture 1

"Utopia Theory - The Search for a Physics of Society"
Thursday, March 31, 2005
12:00 - 2:00
Owen L. Coon Forum, Leverone Hall

Lecture 2

"Synthetic Biology for Nanotechnology"
Friday, April 1, 2005
4:00 PM
McCormick School of Engineering, Tech LR2

Synthetic biology for nanotechnology

Synthetic biology - the redesign of biological molecules, structures and organisms - is potentially one of the most powerful emerging technologies today. The modification of biological structures has already been pursued for a variety of nanotechnological objectives; but synthetic biology could provide the tools and understanding needed both to develop 'nanobiotechnology' in a more systematic manner and to expand the scope of what it might achieve. I shall review what has been attained so far in this field, and look at some of the nanoscale possibilities that an engineering approach to cell biology might herald.

Utopia Theory: The Search for a Physics of Society

In economics, business, society and politics, institutions and structures typically arise from the interaction and consensus of many individuals. There now seems good reason to believe that their properties and behaviours may be dominated by factors that arise unbidden and are very difficult to control. Several centuries of economic theory still do not suffice to avoid market slumps and recessions. Most businesses fail or disappear within a few years. Free markets do not seem to equalize the distribution of wealth. Harsh penal systems do not systematically and unequivocally reduce crime.

In short, there seem to be 'laws' in these social systems that are somewhat comparable to the physical laws of nature, and which do not yield easily to planned and arbitrary interventions. Over the past several decades, social, economic and political scientists have begun a dialogue with physical and biological scientists to try to discover whether there is truly a 'physics of society', and if so, what its laws and principles are. In particular, they have begun to regard complex modes of human activity as collections of many interacting 'agents'--somewhat analogous to a fluid of interacting atoms or molecules, but within which there is scope for decision-making, learning and adaptation. These 'interacting agents models' often reproduce many aspects of the observed behaviour even on the basis of surprisingly simple assumptions about the 'rules' governing an individual's actions and interactions. This suggests that complex human systems have a tendency to become 'self-organized' into patterns and structures that no one has planned or foreseen. An ability to understand these structures is a prerequisite for being able to achieve a degree of control over the outcome, or to discover the boundaries of that potential for control.

I will discuss physics-based descriptions of social behaviour in areas such as economics, business, demography, voting, crime and decision-making, and weigh up the prospects of identifying a genuine physics of society.