Physicist and science writer. I was formerly an editor with the international science journal Nature and also the magazine New Scientist. I am the author of three earlier books, and have written extensively for publications including Nature, Science, the New York Times, Wired and the Harvard Business Review. I currently write monthly columns for Nature Physics and for Bloomberg Views.
This blog explores the idea of my new book, The Social Atom, which is that human behavior is often simpler than we think, and that understanding the social world is a little like physics -- it means learning to anticipate the patterns that emerge naturally when many "social atoms" interact. If this sounds a bit nutty, look here for a brief summary of the key ideas!
New York Times
I explored some of these ideas as a guest columnist for the New York Times, in a column entitled Our Lives as Atoms (May, 2007).