From Scientific American:
I’ve been mulling over the potential, and limits, of social science again lately. One reason is that last month philosopher James Weatherall of the University of California at Irvine visited my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, to talk about his new book The Physics of Wall Street. Weatherall, who has a Ph.D. in physics as well as in philosophy, argued that the methods of physics can help make economics more rigorous. Then someone sent me an article in The Economist on how “data from social networks are making social science more scientific.”

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