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2 - Webs, trees and branches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Bruce J. West  and
Paolo Grigolini
Bruce J. West
Affiliation:
Army Research Office
Paolo Grigolini
Affiliation:
University of North Texas
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Summary

In the previous chapter we examined examples of hyperbolic and inverse power-law distributions dating back to the beginning of the last century, addressing biodiversity, urban growth and scientific productivity. There was no discussion of physical structure in these examples because they concerned the counting of various quantities such as species, people, cities, words, and scientific publications. It is also interesting to examine the structure of complex physical phenomena, such as the familiar irregularity in the lightning flashes shown in Figure 1.13. The branches of the lightning bolt persist for fractions of a second and then blink out of existence. The impression left is verified in photographs, where the zigzag pattern of the electrical discharge is captured. The time scale for the formation of the individual zigs and zags is on the order of milliseconds and the space scales can be hundreds of meters. So let us turn our attention to webs having time scales of milliseconds, years or even centuries and spatial scales from millimeters to kilometers.

All things happen in space and time, and phenomena localized in space and time are called events. Publish a paper. Run a red light. It rains. The first two identify an occurrence at a specific point in time with an implicit location in space; the third implies a phenomenon extended in time over a confined location in space. But events are mental constructs that we use to delineate ongoing processes so that not everything happens at once. Publishing a paper is the end result of a fairly long process involving getting an idea about a possible research topic, doing the research, knowing when to gather results together into a paper, writing the paper, sending the manuscript to the appropriate journal, reading and responding to the referees’ criticism of the paper, and eventually having the paper accepted for publication.

Type
Chapter
Information
Complex Webs
Anticipating the Improbable
 , pp. 45 - 104
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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