Linked: The New Science Of Networks Science Of Networks
June 13, 2011 by Actaphysica
Filed under Mathematical Physics Book Reviews
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![The Dark Matter & Dark Energy [1/5]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rLmcbjLVPKc/default.jpg)
Cotton Candy–Lots of Air, Some Sugar, No Bibliography,
Updated 28 Dec 07 to add links.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also–being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate–somewhat shallow and empty…. especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind of Science”, 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme.
Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks–called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility.
Among the key points that the author discusses and which certainly make the book worth buying and reading, my above reservations not-with-standing:
1) Reductionism has driven 20th century science (and one might add, all other knowledge), with the result being that we have experts who know more and more about less and less–and )as CIA and FBI recently found)while leaving us devoid of generalists and multi-disciplinary artists and scientists who can “connect the dots” across these fragmented foci.
2) Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about networks being equally distributed and thus largely invulnerable to catastrophic meltdown, the author does a fine job of documenting the importance of selected “hubs”, so important that their removal ultimately breaks the network down into isolated pieces. The functionality of the network, its strength, is also its weakness–vulnerability to deliberate attack against the hubs (the author does not mention the Internet domain directories except in passing while discussing a table error, but MAYEAST and MAYWEST would be two obvious directory hubs that could be better protected through replication).
3) The author inadvertently makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how to defend America against terrorism–discussing why no single authority can close down the Internet by fiat, he notes “The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible.” LOCALLY GUARDED–this is the key phrase. Federalizing counter-terrorism, and using federal agents and computers at the state and local levels, will not be effective against terrorists in civilian guise within the homeland–only a complete extension of counterintelligence and counterterrorism methods to the state & local level–teaching them to fish for terrorists, rather than trying to catch the terrorists with federal trawlers, is the way to go.
4) The author flirts with what is known as nomadic computing, making the point that nodes built around individual people are becoming as important–some would say more important–in a networked economy than nodes built around static organizations. There is a useful general discussion of how “fitness” in a networked economy is a combination of speed and scalability as well as diversity of linkages. As a general rule, as the FBI found (and also CIA, INS, and the State Department), systems with a single hub resistant to initiative from the field offices will tend to be slow and ineffective.
Missing from this populist overview is a discussion of the vital importance of geospatial information. While the author helpfully notes the Earth is increasingly covered by an electronic “skin” with millions of measuring devices, with experts predicting that by 2010 there will “around 10,000 telemetric devices for each human on the planet” (one suspects this refers only to privileged humans, not the billions of dispossessed that lack telephones, never mind computers), he does not take the next essential step, which is to note that in the absence of an XML-GEO standard and a global push to associate geospatial as well as temporal tags with all data, much of what we collect will, like the trillions of bits we have collected with secret satellites, never get processed in a meaningful manner.
This is a helpful book that will be of value to the general reader at the elementary (adult) level.
See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration…
Read more
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A New Mathematics and Its Applications,
What do sexually transmitted diseases, the World Wide Web, the electric power grid, Al Queda terrorists, and a cocktail party have in common? They are all networks. They conform to surprising mathematical laws which are only now becoming clear. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has helped discover some of those laws over just the past five years, and though they are some pretty abstruse mathematics, he has written a clear and interesting guide to them, _Linked: The New Science of Networks_ (Perseus Publishing). Not only has he attempted in this book to bring the math to non-mathematicians, he has shown why the work is important in down-to-earth applications.
It is important for those multitudes who have no taste for math to know that this is not a book full of equations; Barabasi knows that for most of his readers, doing the math is not as important as getting a feel for what the math does. He explains the basic history of network theory, and then shows how his own work has turned it into a closer model of reality, a model that most of us will recognize. Networks are all around us, and they are simply not random. Some of our friends, for instance, are loners, while others seem to know everyone in town. Some websites, like Google and Amazon, we just cannot avoid clicking on or being referred to, but many others are obscure and you could only find them if someone sent you their addresses. Barabasi calls these “nodes” with such an extraordinary number of links “hubs,” and he and his students have found laws of networks with hubs, showing such things as how they can continue to function if random nodes are eliminated but they fragment if the hubs are hit. Barabasi is currently doing research to show what intracellular proteins interact with other proteins, and true to form, some of them are hubs of reactions with lots of others. Finding the hubs of cancerous cells, for instance, and developing ways of taking them out, show enormous promise in the fight against cancer. And finding the hub terrorists in Al Queda in order to take them out would be the best way to eliminate the network.
Barabasi obviously enjoys drawing examples from all over, and because of his ability to link them, his book is a pleasure to read. He also shows how this type of mathematics is being done, by conference in obscure European locales and by e-mail. He shows how “eureka” insights by his students have propelled the new science, and he is full of good stories from a teacher. In fact, he is a good teacher, and those who follow along here will have reason to be glad to join, if only in the role of isolated nodes, into this network of mathematical thought.
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A captivating read on a deep and difficult topic,
The arrow of time is a central issue in fundamental physics, and one that remains an open question even in the age of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a tall task even to define the question properly, never mind to explain what some of the proposed resolutions are. Nevertheless, Carroll is one of the best writers of popular science working today, and in this book he tackles the topic beautifully, guiding the reader through the relevant ideas, many of which we all think we have an intuitive feel for, like entropy, and explaining their physical meanings, and how gravity complicates the story.
The book is worth reading for its expert descriptions of the background material alone, but the reader hungry for speculations of how physics at the frontier may provide an understanding of the arrow of time will not be disappointed. Carroll devotes ample space to the concepts of cosmic inflation, the role of quantum mechanics, baby universes, and the setting that string theory may provide for all of this. None of this is settled ground in physics yet, and the author makes that entirely clear. But it hard to read this account and not come away with a tangible sense of the excitement to be found in taking on these most fundamental of problems.
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Time in the eternity of the multiverse,
This is a wonderful book that would merit a second reading to understand it more fully. At a fundamental level physics consists of the Standard Model, General Relativity and the Big Bang Inflationary Model of the universe. However, in this model there is something unexplained and it is the Past Hypothesis, that is that the universe started in a low entropy configuration. However the author speculates that perhaps the Big Bang was neither the beginning of time nor a moment of low entropy, but a moment of lowest entropy and the entropy increases in both directions of time, towards the future of the Big Bang and towards its past (from our point of view). This would be the situation in a single connected universe, although string theory predicts a multiverse.
Trying to elucidate the meaning of time (perhaps “an emergent phenomenon rather than a necessary part of our ultimate description of the world”) the author reviews special and general relativity, Boltzmann’s entropy, black holes and the controversy about conservation of information, life, quantum mechanics, inflation and the multiverse. Generally speaking the book is written in an accessible style (eggs can be broken and turned into omelettes, but not the other way around to describe the Second Law), but you will need to reread some parts to make the most of it.
In the final chapter Sean Carroll faces the “search for meaning in a preposterous universe”. I quote: “We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos, but as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy…Purpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent…it is our job to create them. One of those purposes -among many- stems from our urge to explain the world around us the best we can. If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves”. I think he has a point. It is in our human nature to try to find meaning to things. The universe is meaningless. I agree and I think that Woody Allen would also.
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Genius for non-geniuses!,
I am not a physicist. I majored in English in college. I shouldn’t be able to understand this book on any level. But I do. And it’s fascinating. Illuminating. And just plain interesting as hell. That’s Sean Carroll’s greatest achievement in this page-turner about the TIME we live in. If you have any interest at all in getting your head around just what this elusive “time” we all experience is all about, you should read this book.
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