Explore how the formation, breakup, and collaboration of relationships can provide insights into wars and insurgencies. Discover the need to incorporate psychology, sociology, and economics into the study of group behavior, and the role of complexity science in these disciplines.
In our last episode, Neil Johnson explained how there was an underlying power law with a slope of 1.8 that described the number of casualties that occur in wars.
Today’s episode digs deeper into where this power law comes from, the route that Neil's research took to explain it, and how the arrival of the internet finally provided the missing datasets required to understand the underlying structure of something seemingly as chaotic as war.
Neil is Professor of Physics and Head of the Dynamic Online Networks Lab at George Washington University.
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This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.