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Physicists make religion crystal clear popular

The rise and fall in the popularity of major religions can be described using the same mathematics that is used to model crystallization processes, claim physicists in Belgium. The researchers have modelled the time evolution of the numbers of adherents to religions and claim that their work sheds light on an important social phenomenon -- how a religion such as Christianity can grow rapidly from very small beginnings (Europhysics Letters (EPL) to be published).

 

Physicists have a long history of applying statistical models to the study of human behaviour and have tackled problems as diverse as the performance of financial markets and the spread of languages. Now, Marcel Ausloos and Filippo Petroni at the University of Liege have turned their attention to the dynamics of religion by relating the emergence, growth and demise of religions to phase transitions that occur during crystallization and other physical processes.

Using methods borrowed from statistical physics, the researchers searched for patterns in data describing the numbers of adherents to major religions -- including Christianity, Islam and Buddhism �over the past century. These patterns suggested that the changes in the numbers of religious adherents can be modelled using an gent-based�approach. Agent-based models assume that the collective behaviour of a group of individuals arises from a set of simple rules that define how an individual interacts with others in the group. This approach has already been used to study a wide range of sociological and physical processes including crystallization.

The researchers then created a model of the time evolution of religions using the agent-based concept of referential attachment� which was first formulated in 1999 to explain self-organizing networks such as the World Wide Web. Preferential attachment is the tendency of an individual to form relationships with popular individuals �which are defined as individuals who themselves have relationships with a large number of other individuals.

According to Ausloos, the number of adherents to a specific religion appears to follow a rowth-death law�that also describes how the size of crystalline regions grow and shrink in some materials. One striking similarity to crystallization is that religions can appear almost spontaneously in a process that is similar to the nucleation of crystals �with a popular leader often fulfilling the role of a nucleation point. A recent example of the spontaneous nucleation of a religion is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), which was founded about 175 years ago in the US by Joseph Smith and now has nearly 13 million members worldwide.

The growth and demise of a religion can also be affected by phenomena such as mass conversions or genocide that affect entire groups -- rather than the interactions between individuals. Ausloos describes these influences as external fields� in analogy to externally-applied electric fields or temperature gradients that can affect the crystallization process.

Darius Nikbin

译文：

来自比利时的一个研究小组宣称，用于描述晶体生长过程的数学模型同样能够用来解释人类社会中几个重要宗教的兴起与衰落过程。通过这一方法，科学家们研究了宗教信徒随时间的演化过程，宣称他们的工作能够清楚地解释社会学领域的一个重大问题－宗教，例如基督教，是如何从很小的起源而后迅速成长起来的(EPL即将发表)。

长期以来，一直有物理学家利用统计模型来研究人类行为，并且对相当广泛的领域都有涉及——从金融市场的表现到语言的传播等。而现在，通过把宗教的合并，发展与消亡与晶体生长等物理过程联系起来，比利时列日大学的Marcel Ausloos与 Filippo Petroni将研究方向转到宗教发展的动态表现。

利用统计物理的研究方法，他们在过去一百年的数据中寻找能够描述几个主要宗教信徒数量变化的模式——宗教包括基督教，伊斯兰教及佛教。这些模式说明宗教信徒数量的变化可以用一种基于"代理人"(agent)的方法进行模型化。代理人模型假设一个群体的总体行为是由一些简单规则所决定，这些规则定义了群体中的某个人与同群体中其他个人的相互作用。这样的方法已经被广泛应用在对社会过程以及物理过程(包括晶体生长行为)的研究中。

在代理人模型的基础上，研究人员们利用"择优趋附"的概念建立了宗教时间演化的模型。"择优趋附"早在1999年就已经被提出，目的是用于解释自组织的网络——例如国际互联网——的演化行为。择优趋附表示某一个个体与受欢迎个体建立关系的趋势，所谓受欢迎个体(popular individual)的定义是与大量其他个体有相互联系的个体。

根据Ausloos的说法，某一宗教的信徒数量遵循所谓的"生长-消亡"定律，而该定律同样描述某些材料中结晶区域的生长与萎缩。一个惊人的相似是宗教可以几乎完全自发的出现——与晶体成核行为一样——此时一个受大众欢迎的宗教领袖就起到了结晶核的作用。最近的一个例子是耶稣基督末世圣徒教会(即摩门教)的自发成核现象，该宗教在175年前的美国由Joseph Smith建立，而现在全世界范围内已经有一千三百万左右的信徒。

当然除了个体间的相互作用之外，宗教的生长与消亡还与一些其他的因素有关，譬如大量改宗者的出现或者影响整个群体的种族灭绝等。Ausloos将这样的影响视为外场作用-类似晶体生长过程中电场或温度梯度的影响。

这是一篇典型的用自然科学方法研究人文领域内现象的文章，读来很有趣味，但我怀疑这类研究对人文学者的价值，这里的主要结论人文学者通过对历史现象的分析可以直接得到，而人文学者关心的问题（比如如何判断某历史事件的影响），这样研究所能带来的帮助或启发也是很有限的。

另外一个联想是，这个研究对关心网络社区的xba应当有些启发，一个迅速窜红的社区对应的就是宗教的兴起，它一样需要法则，领袖，和事件。当然我们在这里会再次发现这篇文章的主要结论，几乎已是想做社区人的常识了。