Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

by Mark Buchanan

This is a phenomenal book for students of history to understand how the concept of universality in physics relates to the field. Universality simply states that under very broad conditions, interacting objects display universal features of their behavior. Furthermore, it appears that systems generally tend to move into a self-organized critical state on their own, which could result in a catastrophic event.

Through a series of examples, Buchanan guides the reader through the history of the concept of the critical state and connects it to the study of history. Buchanan’s style of writing is engaging and approachable and the book tries to tackle a very complex idea in order to cause a paradigm shift.

The final thought that I left with was that human history is fundamentally unpredictable because we operate in a semi-independent state. Generally speaking, our civilizations, societies and cultures appear to follow basic power laws and remain stable, yet individually we display dramatic differences in variability which in turn change many other variables. So we are able to evolve and create new tools and types of societies to attempt to bring about new levels of stability to our systems, yet we still reflect the basic characteristics at the atomic level, as defined by universality and self-organized criticality.