From the Brexit referendum to Trump’s election victory, it’s fair to say that traditional polling methods have been way off the mark in some recent cases. An emerging research field known as “sociophysics” could help to explain and predict why political outcomes sometimes seem to come out of nowhere. At the core of this research is the idea that the dynamics of opinions obey discoverable universal quantitative laws and can be modelled in the same way that scientists model the physical world.

For an introduction to sociophysics see the video above. For a more in depth analysis you can read ‘The physics of public opinion‘ by science writer Rachel Brazil, an article originally published in the January 2020 issue of Physics World.