Quantum Leap for Happiness Science Required

Stop people in the street and ask them if they recognise happiness as an important and serious subject, and most would probably say it isn’t worthy of the name of science. They’d be wrong of course. Chemists, biologists and neuroscientists have been having a crack at the subject for a long time, and the lead on happiness science has been firmly grasped by the Positive Psychology movement backed by the power of data from brain scanning and computing technology. But where’s the physics?

Great physicists have historically had an interest in arts, culture and philosophy, but I’ve not seen any significant contributions to the science of happiness from this quarter. Noticing a paper called ‘The curvature of Constitutional Space: What lawyers can learn from modern physics’, I thought I’d see how my knowledge of physics might apply to the science of happiness in order to advance the case for happiness as an appropriate (and in fact vital) subject of political and economic debate. You can read the article in full here.