Sept. 18th: Barabasi Questions

1. One element critical to Paul’s success in spreading the Christian message was the fact that he decided it was necessary to get rid of having strict rules and barriers to becoming a Christian; this includes softening food rules and abolishing circumcision. Another element that lead Paul to success was that he walked all across the world in order to spread Christianity. He used his own knowledge of the social network of that century and went around to the largest communities in order to spread his beliefs effectively.
2. I would think this could happen again. This was the first century and clearly, it took a lot more time and effort to spread the word of Christianity. However, these days there are many ways of communicating ideas: books, letters, media, and of course transportation is also a key factor that enables us to travel to places that people of the first century would have never even imagined in going to in an unbelievable amount of time.
3. New kinds of maps made of our interconnectivity include things such as trade/ownership maps, internet maps, ecosystem maps, gene maps, and so on.
4. The “real surprise” is that these new maps have a common blueprint, and laws govern the structure and evolution of all the social networks around us.
5. The author defines the nature of the most scientific research in the 20th century as reductionism. People assumed that it was necessary for them to understand the nature’s individual components before grasping nature as a whole. However the problem that we run into this century is that there is more than one way of putting nature’s puzzle together; in other words, comprehending individual parts does not necessarily lead us to comprehending the whole. Nature seems to be much more complex than that, because we now have discovered that everything is connected and interacting with each other, and nothing exists individually.
6. Barabasi predicts that the new science of networks will be the focus of scientific research in the coming era. In other words, it will be essential for people to move away from the idea of reductionism and start thinking of society as a complex social network in which everything is linked with everything. In my opinion, I feel that it is important to be able to view things both individually and as a whole.