Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter

Any list of the big data revolution's presiding visionaries includes MIT's Alex "Sandy" Pentland. Through years of groundbreaking experiments, Pentland has made discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics.

Human beings are social creatures first and foremost, and our essential habits are wired into us through our coordination in social groups. >social physics is about how ideas flow through these social networks and how those ideas are ultimately transformed into behaviors. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a generation, and to an entirely new way to look at life itself.