Small World Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks

Most of us have had the experience of running into a friend of a friend far away from home -- & feeling that the world is somehow smaller than it should be. It turns out that this Ôsmall-world' phenomenon is not a coincidence but a manifestation of a hidden & powerful design that binds the world together. The Internet, the brain, power-grids & the global economy are all networks that seem to have evolved a Ôsmall-world' geometry, with properties independent of the nature of the things themselves. This underlying pattern may be one of nature's greatest design tricks, & shows how scientists are putting this profound insight to work. It may well provide the foundation for a new kind of physics that searches for the laws not of substance, but of pure form.Buchanan, Mark is the author of 'Small World Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks', published 2002 under ISBN 9780756783228 and ISBN 0756783224.