Article: Nonlinear thermodynamics and social science modeling: fad cycles, cultural development and identificational slips.

I

Introduction

Many social scientists and historians appear to confuse two kinds of historical change when they study socio-political phenomena.(1) With the advent of nonlinear dynamics metaphors, chaos theory, Prigogine's dissipative structures, spin glass models, Haken's synergetics, Thom's catastrophe theory, and so on, some historians have tended to apply such tools, which are appropriate to dynamics, to the study of developmental processes as well. But the nonlinear phenomena in physics would be at best homologous to only one kind of temporal change, viz., dynamics.

Stated straightforwardly, modeling developmental processes of cultural evolution ...

Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:

 
 
Newsweek Harper's Magazine The Washington Post Chicago Tribune Crain's Chicago Business PRNewswire Pediatric News The Nation Advertising Age The Economist (US) A FREE trial gives you access to over 80 million articles! Access over 6,500 publications with a FREE trial!