Dr Mukul C Bora
(drmukulcbora@gmail.com)
Social physics, sometimes referred to as socio-physics, is a scientific field
that uses mathematical tools inspired by physics to analyse human behaviour, especially in crowds. In modern commercial applications, it also includes the analysis of social phenomena using big data. Social physics shares a close relationship with econophysics, which similarly applies physics-based methods to understand economic and public opinion dynamics. While socio-physics has made significant strides in recent decades, the concept of examining human societies through the lens of physics and mathematics is far from new.
The roots of socio-physics trace back to 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who was captivated by the emerging rationalist approach to understanding the world through logic and deduction. During a visit to Florence in 1636, Hobbes met physicist-astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose studies of motion deeply influenced Hobbes. This encounter inspired Hobbes to contemplate the possibility of representing societal behaviours using the laws of motion, a concept he explored in his work De Corpore. Although he didn’t use the term “social physics,” Hobbes introduced the idea of modelling society’s “physical phenomena” in scientific terms, establishing a foundational perspective that would shape later thought in socio-physics.
Hobbes further elaborated these ideas in Leviathan, his landmark work in political philosophy, where he argued that governance arises naturally from human interactions and can be understood in terms of physical laws. He likened humans to intricate machines governed by predictable dynamics, suggesting that society as a whole—a collective he called the “Leviathan”—behaves in ways that differ vastly from the behaviours of individuals within it. This notion resonates with a modern principle in physics that “more is different,” a concept famously expressed by theoretical physicist Philip Anderson, where the behaviour of complex systems cannot simply be inferred from their individual components. Although Hobbes’s work lacked scientific rigour by contemporary standards, his vision of studying society through its constituents laid important groundwork for socio-physics as it stands today.
Nearly 200 years ago, Conde introduced the concept of social physics, initiating a field that has since evolved through three major phases: classical, modern, and contemporary social physics. Today, contemporary social physics integrates principles and methodologies from the natural sciences to investigate, simulate, and understand social behaviours and economic dynamics. It does this by extending, integrating, and refining these scientific concepts to discover patterns in social interactions and economic processes (Fan et al., 2006). Significant advances have been achieved over the past 50 years.
Public opinion reflects the collective consciousness, ideas, and emotions of the public regarding social realities and phenomena at various historical stages. It involves the general public as the subject, a specific community focus as the object, and is expressed through targeted remarks or commentary. The saying “public opinion precedes unrest” has gained consensus, indicating that before major social shifts, there is usually a perceptible buildup in public opinion. During such shifts, public opinion often experiences oscillations, while afterward, certain opinions may persist as frameworks guiding new societal transformations, serving as lessons, preparations, and references. Public opinion functions as a social behaviour and can create both moral or legal boundaries that support societal harmony. However, it can also fuel social tensions, highlighting the importance of understanding the rules governing opinion formation and evolution to better guide public sentiment.
Social physics posits that opinion formation and evolution, like many social processes, follow phases of latency, activity, and closure. Three foundational theories in this field—social combustion theory, social shock wave theory, and social behaviour entropy theory—offer frameworks for understanding these phases. When individuals or groups discuss an issue at scale, opinion progresses from a latent to an active phase, marked by the gradual synthesis of localised viewpoints with insights from opinion leaders. The formation of opinion at each stage can be quantitatively analysed by factors like scale, intensity, and volume. In the subsequent sections, social physics and its three primary theories will be applied to analyse the mechanisms of public opinion formation.
Econophysics is an interdisciplinary field that integrates physics theories and methods—particularly those involving uncertainty, stochastic processes, and nonlinear dynamics—into economic analysis. When applied to financial markets, this approach is sometimes called “statistical finance” because of its reliance on statistical physics principles. Econophysics is also closely related to social physics.
Physicists’ interest in social sciences dates back centuries. For instance, Daniel Bernoulli introduced the concept of utility-based preferences, while Irving Fisher—a key figure in neoclassical economics and former Yale professor—trained under physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Similarly, Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969 for his dynamic economic models, studied physics under Paul Ehrenfest at Leiden University. Tinbergen’s gravity model of international trade has since become foundational in international economics.
Econophysics emerged in the mid-1990s, pioneered by physicists skilled in statistical mechanics who were dissatisfied with traditional economic models that often prioritised theoretical simplicity over empirical accuracy. These physicists began using physics-based methods to analyze financial data and later extended their scope to broader economic issues. The field gained momentum with the surge of accessible financial data from the 1980s onward. Traditional economic methods, which often assume equilibrium and homogeneity among agents, struggled with the complex, diverse, and dynamic nature of real financial systems, which led to the development of econophysics as a response.
1996. Eugene Stanley coined the term “econophysics” at a 1995 statistical physics conference in Kolkata, and it appeared in Physica A in 1996. The first conference dedicated to econophysics was held in 1998 in Budapest, organized by János Kertész and Imre Kondor, and the first comprehensive book on the subject was published in 2000 by R. N. Mantegna and H. E. Stanley.
Both sociophysics and econophysics offer insights into public opinion and voter behaviour. In a country like India, key social forces shaping voter alignment include religion, caste, community, and regionalism, along with other local issues. In every election, these factors drive voter consolidation, contributing to the persistence of identity-based politics centred on caste, community, and religion. During the 2024 Lok Sabha election, for instance, discussions around constitutional changes and the possible revocation of reservations for Adivasis, Dalits, and other backward classes galvanized voter support for alliances like INDI, illustrating how voter consolidation often relies on strategic narrative-setting in elections.
As we have already known, the economic forces that bring the voters together are known as econophysics as they relate to the attractive forces created by some economic issues related to the voters. There are several economic issues related to the majority population of voters, like free electricity, free water, free electricity to the farmers, waiving of farmers loans, etc. But it was observed that due to the dynamism of these economic forces, it changes from place to place as well as election to election. It is true that these forces change the mind of the voter to consolidate, and hence some parties have voted to power. But sometimes it is observed that although it works for some elections, it does not work for other elections. The Khata Khat Fata Fat scheme of the INDI alliance worked in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, but it did not work in the Haryana elections, which were held just four months later, and it can be attributed to the voter dynamics of econophysics.
In short, although voter dynamics change from time to time, it is high time to consolidate the voters in the name of “Developed Person to Developed Nation” as well as the security of population control, which is the root cause of climate change, unemployment, food adulteration, declining water bodies, forest coverage, etc. So, Indian voters should get united to make our country a Vikshit Bharat@202. I am hereby making a quote of our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on the population of undivided India, and I quote, “Nehru foresaw that a great surge of Asian populations would ensue in the wake of the continuing ‘eastward sweep of technology, accompanied by education, sanitation, and better public health’” and, at the same time, noted that “some of these countries, like India, far from needing a bigger population, would be better off with fewer people.”