15. Dr. Barabasi's Discovery
We’re doing a series on the book “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
WARNING: If you want to comment on any of these articles, please read the previous articles to understand the foundation.
The previous article covered Scale-free Networks and fractals.
Scale-free: a Network that isn’t limited to being represented at a single level
Fractal: a geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole
The previous article brought up a point that has eluded us up until now and is the basis of the book Linked!
Dr. Barabasi writes:
Power laws “are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems.”
Dr. Barabasi realized that everything we have been covering still rests on two assumptions characteristic of Random Networks!
1. Every Node is present from the beginning
2. All Nodes are equivalent
Dr. Barabasi writes:?
“The networks generated by these models are therefore static, meaning that the number of nodes remains unchanged during the network’s life.”
Dr. Barabasi’s discovery:
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“...we find that real networks are governed by two laws: growth and preferential attachment. Each network starts from a small nucleus and expands with the addition of new nodes. Then these new nodes, when deciding where to link, prefer nodes that have more links.”
Growth: Nodes are continually being added to real world Networks
Preferential Attachment: in real world Networks, Nodes prefer to Link to Nodes that have more Links
(See graphic: The red Node would prefer to Link to the blue Node with 2 Links than the other 3 Nodes)
Dr. Barabasi writes:
“In real networks linking is never random. Instead, popularity is attractive.”
“Networks are not en route from a? random to an ordered state. Neither are they at the edge of randomness and chaos. Rather, the scale-free topology is evidence of organizing principles acting at each stage of the network formation process.” Fractal!
How was Dr. Barabasi’s paper detailing his discovery received?
“A week later it was submitted to the prestigious journal Science only to be rejected after ten days without having undergone the usual peer review process because the editors believed the paper did not meet the journal’s standards of novelty and wide interest.”
Have you noticed a pattern with revelatory papers getting submitted for peer review? They get rejected, sometimes like this one, BEFORE it even reaches peer review. How many revelatory ideas are denied us due to people (Nodes) preferring popularity (prestigious journals) rather than Truth?
Sounds like there's a major contradiction under Dr. Barabasi’s nose. Do you see it?
We will address this contradiction in our final post of Section 2 of Beyond Linked!
Next Article: 16. Fitness