Riots, stock market crashes... and metastable states.

Rioting. Very Nasty.

There’s been a lot in the news about rioting recently, and for good reason. It’s everywhere, and it’s very unpleasant.

London riot police

My own particular lowlights were:

• Seeing Mr Reeves Snr and Jnr of Croydon heartbroken by the devastation of their family business.
• Seeing the bus stop where I used to awkwardly wheel my (then) baby daughter to the pavement on fire in Ealing.
• Talking to a colleague whose local tube station was the centre of the Clapham disturbances last night.

The obvious thing to start talking about now is social networking, maybe drawing some parallels with the Arab Spring – at least in terms of how it has influences behaviour. I won’t do this. Everyone else will.

Instead I’d like to dwell for a moment on phase transitions.

A diagram

For those of you not in the know phase transitions are those things in physics when a substance turns from being in one state into being in another. Water into steam, butter into liquid, orange juice into refreshing lollipop etc.

Under normal circumstances substances tend to operate in equilibrium states. The obvious thing to do here is talk about water, but for fact lovers out there… mercury freezes at around -39 degrees c and boils at 357 degrees on the same scale… so below -39 solid is mercury’s equilibrium state, above 357 degrees it’s a gas and in between it’s the liquid that we all know and love.

However it is entirely possible for substances to persist in a state outside their equilibrium. Known as ‘Metastable’, And this is where things start to get interesting… Gas in a snow cloud for example can stay as a gas, or liquid in temperatures way below the point where water (or presumably mercury) would normally freeze.

The point here is that metastable states aren’t terribly stable. It just takes a little reaction (nucleation) to transform some of the uber cold gas or water into a solid and the whole cloud can suddenly change… And what you get is a snow storm.

Back to the riots…

…Or if you want another example, back to the recent stock market slump.

The theory then is that certain pockets of society are living in a state you could describe as metastable.

In general society people have a reasonable standard of living. They feel safe, happy, part of the bigger group and empowered. In certain areas – and particularly with youngsters in these areas this is not happening. They are in effect metastable.

All it takes is a nucleation and they all (all the rioters at least) spontaneously change.

I think this is a really good explanation of why the current riots (and the recent stock market slump) happened – or at least how they happened when they did.

Clearly this is not my thinking. It was pioneered by a chap called Phillip Ball, and then taken on as part of Mark Earl’s book on Herd theory.

I think it’s worth a look, or failing that it’s worth pondering its applications to marketing – which I think are considerable.

Meanwhile, on the ground I wish all concerned in sorting the rioting out the very best.