Spin-glass state is a thermodynamically metastable nonequilibrium state. What knowledge about this state can affect the process which is far from physics?
Spin glasses have multiple local stable states, this is how at criticality, memory can be stored in a scale-free fashion. This can be related to neuronal networks (not neural) and social networks. See for example this recent paper by Tkacik et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.5409 Such analogies are helpful to understand complex collective mechanisms. From this perspective, they are well suited to explain complex behaviour in both of these systems using the language of physics. So they are useful for physicists studying these phenomena. But they may be of limited use for neuroscientists and sociologists who use more detailed micro-scale models, or macro-scale phenomenological observations and do not attempt to explain complexity at meso-scales. Physicists can help to bridge this gap with such models.
Hi, Zbigniew. Thank you very much for this information.
Best wishes,
Yuriy
The characteristic feature of a spin glass is frustration, usually demonstrated as the situation arising between three neighboring spins interacting antiferromagnetically. When two of them orient themselves in antiparallel fashion, then the third one "doesn't know what to do". Such a situation seems very similar to the one when young contrarian (we all tend to question nearly everything around us when we are young) is subjected to the two opposing views, say one "leftist" and one "rightist". There are more similarities: a) the interactions are short-ranged, and b) there may be an external force (field): magnetic field in case of spin glasses, tv in case of society. Well, we also have gossip (in society) and double exchange interaction (that is via intermediate ions) in spin glasses. In addition, there are itineratnt electrons (carrying magnetic moment --> RKKY-type exchange interactions, oscillating with distance) and people changing their places and communicating with others, of course, during their trips, thus changing their views from time to time. Enough?
I think the paradigm of spin glass may be an excellent starting point to make sociology more quantitative than it is today. The bad news is that the results may be used by politicians to effectively control the society, or whole nations, that is to take our freedom away.
@ Marek: I had a great interest and pleasure reading your considerations. I totally separates them. Thank you.
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just an example of the (too ?) many papers using variants of Ising model to build political/sociological interpretations :
SPONTANEOUS COALITION FORMING: A MODEL FROM SPIN GLASS
Eastern Europe post cold war instabilities
S. GALAM
Abstract.
In this paper a simple model is proposed to decribe the spontaneous formation of coalitions among a group of actors like countries. The basic ingredients are from the physics of disorder systems. It is the interplay of two different spin glass models with respectively random bond and random site disorders which is instrumental in the present approach. The cold war stabilty period is then given an explanation as well
the instabilities produced by the Warsow pact dissolution. European and Chinese stabilities are also discussed.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/9901022.pdf
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@ Clerot : Thank you very much for the intrinsing paper.
It is hoped that a deeper knowledge of the nature of spin glass will also make successful predictions about political stability in the world.
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