I think the next century will be the century of complexity.
Everything is deeply intertwingled.
It (Twitter) closes the six degrees of separation to one degree of separation
The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.
Thus you see, most noble Sir, how this type of solution to the Königsberg bridge problem bears little relationship to mathematics, and I do not understand why you expect a mathematician to produce it, rather than anyone else, for the solution is based on reason alone, and its discovery does not depend on any mathematical principle.
Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
If everything in the universe depends upon everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.
Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement
Just because we say networks are important doesn't mean that networks explain everything. We're just adding additional information. Networks don't work like a match - they work like a magnifying glass.
Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.
At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.
BitCoin is actually an exploit against network complexity. Not financial networks, or computer networks, or social networks. Networks themselves.
I feel like everyone kind of knew someone, like 6 degrees of separation. In Hollywood that is very common.
Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.
One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks.
Science, as well as technology, will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.
There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.
