Social Physics and the Dynamics of Second Language Acquisition

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Background

Part of the wonders of nature is its aesthetic beauty and elegance - its stunning simplicity and striking self-similarity. For eons, scientists and philosophers alike have been captivated by it and contemplated unified explanations. The scientific and intellectual pursuits have led, inter alia, to the search for, and postulations of, universal laws. These laws fundamentally channel explanations and predictions of patterned behaviors, found not only in the physical world but also in the social world.

In essence, social physics is the study of patterned social phenomena through the lens of physics and mathematics. It dates back to the early 17th century, when the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who, in his treatise De Corpore, for the first time conceived of representing the physical phenomena of society in terms of the universal law of motion as had been proposed mathematically by Galileo Galilei. The idea substantively evolved in the early 19th century, with Henri de Saint-Simon, a French social thinker, conceptualizing, in his book Lettres d’un Habitant de Geneve (1803), the application to the study of society of laws similar to those of the physical and biological sciences. His student, Auguste Comte, a French philosopher, later coined and defined the term ‘social physics’: Social physics is that science which occupies itself with social phenomena, considered in the same light as astronomical, physical, chemical, and physiological phenomena, that is to say as being subject to natural and invariable laws, the discovery of which is the special object of its researches. (Cited in Iggers, 1959).

Contemporary social physics has seen the application of physics to the study of a multitude of social phenomena, including, but not limited to, voter dynamics through the lens of the Ising model, cultural dynamics through the lens of Potts model, migration dynamics through the lens of gravity model, and the dynamics of phone call records, credit card purchases, taxi rides, and the COVID-19 pandemic through the so-called big data analysis – mathematical modeling - guided by physics laws, yielding fascinating findings.

This Research Topic of Frontiers in Physics makes a foray into an uncharted domain of human behavior, that of human second language development (SLD), exploring the potential and relevance of physics to the understanding of developmental or learning process and outcome. The study of SLD, in recent years, has come under the influence of quantum physics (complexity science) and Newtonian physics. Although such influence is as of yet primarily conceptual, mathematical applications of physical laws – such as Conservation of Energy and Conservation of Angular Momentum - are on the horizon, as are empirical validations of the theory that resulted from the application of the universal laws.

This Research Topic, edited by Drs. ZhaoHong Han and Paul Wiita, aims to cover two sub-themes:
a) the current terrain of social physics - physics as applied in various fields of study such as economics, history, biology, and finance, and their comparison to SLD,
b) applications of physics –both conceptual and physical - in the study of SLD.

Accordingly, we welcome conceptual and empirical contributions to either sub-theme, and welcome a range of article types including Original Research, Review, Perspective and Opinion articles.

Keywords: social physics, second language development (SLD), applications of physics, second language acquisition (SLA), human behaviour, complexity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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