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Scientist explains the unexplainable

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'Interconnectedness' puts physics in layman's terms

By Kang Hyun-kyung

The internet is gripped by conspiracy theories as the economy is showing low growth and few signs of breaking out of a stalemate.

Some experts present the possibility of an economic crisis that could be equivalent to, or even worse than the fallout from the Asian financial crisis which began with the collapse of the Baht, the Thai currency, in 1997.

Statistical physicist Kim Beom-jun says such a view is scientifically incorrect. "Predicting whether the stock market will be bullish or bearish in the near future is almost impossible," he says in his new book "The Science of Interconnectedness: The Wonder of Statistical Physics Explaining Interactions of the Complex World."

"Predicting the stock market is as meaningless as guessing when the next wildfire will occur. The same holds true for an earthquake. No one knows when the next earthquake will hit the nation. Some experts tried in vain to find out if there is a cycle for earthquakes based on past data."

In "The Science of Interconnectedness," Kim, a professor of the Department of Physics at Sungkyukwan University in Seoul, warns of the danger of interconnectedness.

"Upheavals share one thing in common, no matter how different their nature is," he says. "All components of their systems are closely connected to one another. This is the case for the stock market, massive wildfires or the extinction of certain biological species. Strong interconnectedness magnifies a scale of the event if it occurs in one of the components (as it leads to a chain reaction), and consequently leads up to massive, uncontrollable changes in the entire system."

"The Science of Interconnectedness" makes a case for physics, depicting physicists as people who are curious about phenomena and trying to find out the rules behind them.
The author says physics is much more useful than most people think.

To prove this, Kim uses statistics and data to explain various social, cultural and political phenomena.

The real-world cases he explains are diverse in nature: earthquakes; the fluctuation of stock markets; and the 2016 candlelit rallies, which brought down then President Park Geun-hye, are some of the cases he has analyzed from the perspective of a physicist.

"Like social or political scientists, we, physicists, also analyze what's happening, albeit our way is different from theirs," it reads.

He says physicists explain the unexplainable.

Kim compares two phenomena ― one is about the relationship between Korea's top 10 most-watched movies and their aggregated ticket sales over a 50-day timespan and the other about the outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which put the nation in chaos in 2015, and the number of patients who contracted the virus.

The two graphs display differences in terms of their shape and trends.

The graph for the top 10 box-office hits the highest value in admissions on the opening days and ticket sales continue to decrease as days are passing.

Compared to the early peak of the movie graph, MERS patients begin with a low value in the first week of the outbreak and the number grows exponentially from a certain point to reach a peak from which the number keeps going down until it disappears.

Kim says the way a certain movie becomes a box-office hit and the spread of the MERS virus have very different dynamics.

"Like other epidemics, the MERS virus is contagious. But movies are not," his book reads. "The best possible explanation about the highest ticket sales on the opening days appears to be associated with a marketing effect."

According to him, word of mouth is not a factor that determines moviegoers' choice of films. He says marketing has a real impact on consumers. If moviegoers make decisions to see certain movies following recommendations from friends or relatives, he says ticket sales after opening days have to be higher than on the first day. "Yesterday's ticket sales have virtually no effect on today's tallies, because those who watched it on the first day were affected by marketing," his book says.

"The Science of Interconnectedness: The Wonder of Statistical Physics Explaining Interactions of the Complex World" by Kim Beom-jun

"The Science of Interconnectedness" shares the results of several interesting experiments performed by the author. Years ago, Kim said he conducted and published research about Korean surnames and the distribution of population with same surnames in cities, counties and towns with data he downloaded from the Statistics Korea website.

Before him, he said he found several similar research papers performed and published by researchers and most of them were physicists.

Physicists conduct research about such topics and their approach is different from that of historians or humanity studies researchers. "Physicists do research the same topic but we do it in our way," he says. "My research, for example, was about the distribution of the Korean population by surnames and I compared my findings to that of Japanese by using the probability distribution function and looked at how they are different and what caused their differences to draw conclusions about macro-level patterns," he said.


Kang Hyun-kyung hkang@koreatimes.co.kr


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