No physics werw involved in this article. But I guess it makes it appear more "sciency"
You know, strictly speaking, a guinea pig isn't really a pig either. If you were expecting real physics, you should have realized from the word “social” that it wouldn't be in there. Particle families aren't really families either. Quantum mechanical spin and flavor are just metaphors, too. Welcome to human language.
Wrong. Energy, velocity, and flow characteristics are central to this analysis. The term Social Physics differentiates this context from Physics.
You can to some extent model a flexible number of conversations in a room in terms of a kind of graph theory: duration, number of participants, correlations or overlap between participants, and so on. The assertion here is that those particulars change the fundamental nature of what is taking place. Though “kinetics” or “mechanics” are probably more apt terms for the framework of those interactions, I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand.