Thursday, April 9, 2026

Spring 2026


17 April

Seth Lawence

The Physics of Society: A Geometric Framework for Social Consequences


Abstract: Carlo Cipolla’s classification of human behavior organizes actions by their outcomes for the actor and others. In this talk, we reinterpret this plane as a geometric representation of relationships between agents, where each action is a point defined by its evaluated outcomes.

This perspective reveals a natural decomposition of actions into total outcome and its distribution, leading to a coordinate transformation that separates these effects. Under changes of point of view, the total outcome remains invariant while the distribution reverses, exposing a symmetry structure underlying social interactions.

These results point to a broader geometric framework in which relationships form networks and suggest a form of social relativity.