In hmolscience, laws of social thermodynamics refers to supposed or apocryphal laws in sociology based on the laws of thermodynamics.
Overview
In 1972, American political theorist Marlan Blissett used the term "laws of social thermodynamics" to characterize American physicist Alvin Weinberg’s 1967 theory of the underlying process by intellectual “thermodynamic revolutions”, which argues that paradigm changes in science, similar to the theme of Thomas Kuhn’s scientific revolution structure, are the result of two factors: available “energy levels”, a variation he culled from Leo Szilard who defining energy and entropy as having a meaning or measure as information) and the “second law” (entropy or disorder always tends to increase) both intertwined with Wienberg’s idea of the "semantic complexity" inherent in the various branches of science as they become more and more specialized, where at the same time science as a whole becomes more and more tensioned. [1]
In 2009, Chinese physicist Yi-Fang Chang, in his “Social Synergetics, Social Physics, and Research of Fundamental Laws in Social Complex Systems”, claims that in his paper he searches the subject of “social thermodynamics and the five fundamental laws of social complex systems,” so to discuss topics such as the evolution equation of the system, social temperature, social entropy, the latter two which he gives equations for, among other theories. [2]
References
1. (a) Weinberg, Alvin M. (1967). Reflections on Big Science. MIT Press.
(b) Blissett, Marlan. (1972). Politics in Science (section: Big Science and the Laws of Social Thermodynamics, pg. 25-35; term: entropy, pgs. 26, 53, 66, etc.). Little, Brown and Co.
2. Chang, Yi-Fang. (2009). “Social Synergetics, Social Physics, and Research of Fundamental Laws in Social Complex Systems” (abstract), eprint arXiv: 0911.1155.
