Main | In the Bubble: Designing in a complex world »
September 14, 2004
Linked: The New Science of Networks
| Title | Linked: The New Science of Networks | |
| Author | Albert-László Barabási | |
| Publisher | Perseus Publishing, Cambride, MA | |
| Date | 2002 | |
| ISBN | 0-7382-0667-9 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| “Everything touches everything,” said the great Argentinian storyteller Jorge Luis Borges, while in the words of John Donne, writing some four centuries earlier, “No man is an island.” Today, interconnectivity, one of those great truths which the mind seems to grasp instinctively, is no longer a matter of poetic or religious intuition only, but is hard scientific fact. We are all connected, through our biology, sociology, economy and religious and cultural traditions, inhabiting a world of networks. As contemporary scientists map this interconnectivity, they reveal a weblike universe, uncovering striking correspondences between different ‘maps’. Whether this new cartography represents the Internet or the ecosystem, the economy or genes in cells, the resulting maps follow a common blueprint. A series of simple, but far-reaching, natural laws govern the networks that surround us. In this lively and intriguing book, Albert-László Barabási traces the history of connected systems from early graph theory in the 18th century to cancer drugs based on our modern understanding of cellular networks, and identifies the correspondences between the work of network mapmakers active in a wide range of disciplines today. As he examines the networks behind such complex systems as the cell or society, he identifies the nodes and links, revealing the architecture of complexity and its universal organising principles, which affect everything from democracy to disease. Ultimately, this is a visionary book, which predicts that the new century will be about understanding complexity: “To achieve that, we must move beyond structure and topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks are only the skeleton of complexity, the highways for the various processes that make our world hum.” We have the maps, now we must capture the “dynamic interplay,” the flow within and between networks which makes them work, replacing a static idea of complexity with a fluid, active one. | ||
Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM