Most of us have had the experience of running into a friend of a friend far away from home - and feeling that the world is somehow smaller than it should be. We usually write off such unlikely encounters as coincidence, even though they seem to happen with uncanny frequency. According to some physicists, it turns out that this 'small-world' phenomenon is no coincidence at all. Rather, it is a manifestation of a hidden and powerful design that binds the world together. The Internet, the brain, power-grids and the global economy are all networks that seem to have evolved a 'small-world' geometry - with properties independent of the nature of the things themselves. SMALL WORLD argues that this underlying pattern may be one of nature's greatest design tricks, and the book shows us how scientists are putting this new insight to work.
- ISBN10 075381689X
- ISBN13 9780753816899
- Publish Date 1 May 2003 (first published 13 June 2002)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 February 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Orion Publishing Co
- Imprint Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 240
- Language English