Sociophysics: Weaknesses, achievements, and challenges

The current trend of physics becoming "global" is analyzed. Underlying the initial hostility of the physics community, I focus on sociophysics in order to enumerate the conditions to establish a new scientific paradigm for the understanding of the human world. Epistemological foundations are suggested so as to be able to provide a framework and to streamline our new emerging field. Existing attempts of Soviet-like rewriting of the history of sociophysics are criticized. Weaknesses and strengths are reviewed with an emphasis on what is intrinsic and specific to the very nature of the field dealing with human beings, from what is structural in the way that the field is developing. Featuring the recent success of sociophysics in the prediction of a few real political events, a strategy is proposed to collectively validate the robustness of the sociophysics approach. The challenge is to provide solid tools to make sociophysics a quantitative and heuristic field of research. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.