Water freezes.Īll phase transitions are the result of two competing forces, like the tug-of-war between binding energy and entropy in water. When the strengths of those two forces cross, the system snaps. As temperature decreases, binding forces get relatively stronger and entropy forces get relatively weaker. Entropy encourages those molecules to roam. Binding energy ties to lock water molecules into rigid formation.
Systems snap when the tide turns in a microscopic tug-of-war. Highways will suddenly change from smooth flow to jammed flow. Water, for example, will suddenly change from liquid to solid. That sudden snap is known as a phase transition. Here’s how it works: For all these applications-from highways to hipsters-the key is to start with a model of that system that is “simple but not simplistic.” What does that mean? We want a model of our system that captures enough of the rules behind the interactions we wish to study, but not so much that it because impossible to extract useful lessons.Ī key feature we wish to understand in any complex system is the sudden change between two types of emergent behaviors. Sherlock Holmes may have captured it best in The Sign of the Four: “While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”
HIPSTER MOSH PIT MEANING DRIVERS
jammed flow-don’t depend on whether the cars are Fords or Chevys, or the drivers are teenagers or grandmothers. While individual behaviors of course vary, it turns out that certain collective behaviors of groups don’t depend on those micro details, in the same way that certain collective properties of cars on highways-smooth flow vs. Shouldn’t we expect the behavior of individuals to be much more complex than cars on a highway-too complex to model with simple rules? Traffic engineers use these principles to design better highways-more smooth flow and less jammed flow. Those sound like simple rules, but those two rules can help us understand many of the important collective properties of traffic flow: when traffic will flow smoothly and when it will jam. But they also want to avoid crashing, so they like to keep some distance from the car in front of them. Drivers would like to travel at some cruising speed. Usually those rules boil down to a competition between two forces. The behaviors of the whole depend only on certain rules of interaction between the parts. Here’s why it works: certain macro behaviors we wish to influence don’t depend on the micro details. Aren’t all teams different? All people different? Why can we generalize? The ideas help us identify the small changes in structure rather than culture that can transform the behavior of a group (for more on this see “ Why Structure Eats Culture for Lunch ”). A researcher in France used similar techniques to explain “The Hipster Effect”: why anti-conformists all look the same.Īpplying similar principles to the behavior of groups can help us design more innovative teams and companies. A research team at Cornell identified emergent behaviors among “Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts”. Over the past couple decades, scientists have been applying the tools and techniques of a new kind of science, called the science of emergence, to help us understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, criminals behave, ideas spread, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse.Įven more recently, those ideas have helped us understand group dynamics.
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