Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means

Barabasi's gift for concrete, nonmathematical explanations and penchant for eccentric humor would make the book thoroughly enjoyable even if the content weren't engaging. But the results of Barabasi's research into the behavior of networks are deeply compelling. Not all networks are created equal, he says, and he shows how even fairly robust systems like the Internet could be crippled by taking out a few super-connected nodes, or hubs. His mathematical descriptions of this behavior are helping doctors, programmers, and security professionals design systems better suited to their needs. Linked presents the next step in complexity theory--from understanding chaos to practical applications. --Rob Lightner

Book Description
A cocktail party. A terrorist cell. Ancient bacteria. An international conglomerate.

All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. Albert-Lászlo Barabási, the nation's foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick brought the discovery of chaos theory to the general public, Linked tells the story of the true science of the future.

It is important for those multitudes who have no taste for math to know that this is not a book full of equations; Barabasi knows that for most of his readers, doing the math is not as important as getting a feel for what the math does. He explains the basic history of network theory, and then shows how his own work has turned it into a closer model of reality, a model that most of us will recognize. Networks are all around us, and they are simply not random. Some of our friends, for instance, are loners, while others seem to know everyone in town. Some websites, like Google and Amazon, we just cannot avoid clicking on or being referred to, but many others are obscure and you could only find them if someone sent you their addresses. Barabasi calls these "nodes" with such an extraordinary number of links "hubs," and he and his students have found laws of networks with hubs, showing such things as how they can continue to function if random nodes are eliminated but they fragment if the hubs are hit. Barabasi is currently doing research to show what intracellular proteins interact with other proteins, and true to form, some of them are hubs of reactions with lots of others. Finding the hubs of cancerous cells, for instance, and developing ways of taking them out, show enormous promise in the fight against cancer. And finding the hub terrorists in Al Queda in order to take them out would be the best way to eliminate the network.

Barabasi obviously enjoys drawing examples from all over, and because of his ability to link them, his book is a pleasure to read. He also shows how this type of mathematics is being done, by conference in obscure European locales and by e-mail. He shows how "eureka" insights by his students have propelled the new science, and he is full of good stories from a teacher. In fact, he is a good teacher, and those who follow along here will have reason to be glad to join, if only in the role of isolated nodes, into this network of mathematical thought.


Book's Audience: Who should be linked to this book.   July 23, 2003
K. Sampanthar (Boston, MA)
30 out of 36 found this review helpful

I have focused this review on the audience of the book, since other reviews have quite adequately summarized the material.

There have been a lot of books recently that have been published on the new science of networks. Network theory and how it applies to many different fields from technology, marketing, biology, social science, terrorism, disease control etc. (Six Degrees by Duncan Watts, Nexus - Mark Buchanan, Smart Mobs - Howard Rheingold, Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell etc..).

Barabasi's is a welcome addition to the field and has a nice niche, which isn't filled by the other books. As some other reviewers have pointed this book is a popular science book, which means it covers scientific and mathematical theories at a very high level and makes these theories accessible to a wide audience. The niche lies somewhere between Gladwell's Tipping Point and Watt's Six Degrees. It is very well written and draws you in with stories that explore the theories. Some of the other reviewers have complained that Barabasi has done a disservice to the theories that he explains by making them too simplistic. I disagree, I actually found this book to be very rewarding, and a quick read, which is a sign of a well-written book. I have never been a fan of scientific and academic books that pride themselves on being totally incomprehensible. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, once said that if someone truly understands a subject they should be able to explain it to a general audience without resorting to technical jargon (Feynman's Lectures on Physics Vol 1,2,3 are a perfect example). To be able to explain a complex subject you need to resort analogies, examples and stories. Stories give a framework for the general reader to absorb the complex material. Barabasi has managed to explain the science of networks using all three. I am not sure how this can be seen as a bad thing. This exposes a wider audience to a very interesting subject; this has to be good thing.

Summary:
Anybody who loved Gladwell's Tipping Point and was looking for a book that explains some of the theories behind the phenomena will love this book. It's a little bit more technical than Gladwell's book, but it is well written and it will appeal to a wide audience. As popular science books go, this is definitely on par with Ed Regis's Nano and Steven Levy's Artificial Life, but not quite at the level of Gleick's Chaos. If you are looking for a technical book, you should look at Duncan Watt's Six Degrees, or Small Worlds.


Dimensions and Implications of Global Interconnectedness   June 14, 2003
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful

Frankly, I found this to be an unusually challenging book to read the first time and therefore re-read it before organizing my thoughts for this review. The Five Star rating correctly indicates my high regard for what Barabasi has accomplished as he attempts to help his reader to think in terms of networks in new and different (probably unfamiliar) ways. His book "is about how networks emerge, what they look like, and how they evolve." With meticulous care, he presents "a Web-based view of nature, society, and business, a new framework for understanding issues ranging from democracy on the Web to vulnerability of the Internet and the spread of deadly viruses." Along the way, Barabasi challenges the concept of "The Random Universe," asserting instead that everything is connected to everything else. He devotes most of his book to explaining the significance of that global interconnectedness to business, science, and everyday life.

As a non-scientist, I am unqualified to comment on much of the material which Barabasi shares. Perhaps he wrote this book for non-scientists such as I who nonetheless struggle to understand what Barabasi characterizes as the "mystery of life" which begins with the intricate web of interactions and thereby integrates the millions of molecules within each organism. "The enigma of the society starts with the convoluted structure of the social network....[For that reason] networks are the prerequisite for describing any complex system, indicating that complexity theory must inevitably stand on the shoulders of network theory. It is tempting to step in the footsteps of some of my predecessors and predict whether and when we will tame complexity." Given all that has been accomplished thus far with regard to disentangling the networks following the discovery of scale-free networks, Barabasi concludes, "Once we stumble across the right vision of complexity, it will take little to bring it to fruition. When [in italics] that will happen is one of the mysteries that keeps many of us going."

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Mark Buchanan's Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks, Stanley Kaufman's At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity as well as The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, Steven Strogatz' Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Duncan J. Watts' Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age, and Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

I probably should add Ed Regis' The Info Mesa: Science, Business, and the New Alchemy on the Santa Fe Plateau. Regis devotes almost all of his attention to individuals and events who and which, over several decades, had a profound impact on essentially the same subjects as those discussed in the books previously recommended. Also, Regis examines in much greater detail than do the other authors how core concepts about networks and their complexity were introduced to the commercial marketplace by various entrepreneurs.


How well is your home page doing?   April 4, 2005
Alwyn Scott (Tucson, Arizona USA)
7 out of 11 found this review helpful

"Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi should be read by all who would know how intricate systems like the World Wide Web are interconnected for several reasons. First, he writes well, developing in narrative form the emergence of his interest in the subject. This is unusual for a scientist. Second, he thoroughly understands his subject, as is often not the case for science writers. Finally, the author presents several quantitative ideas which the general reader will find useful.

The most important of the ideas he presents is the prevalence of "power-law distributions" of the interconnections in many linked systems that have grown naturally, including movies (by their actors), members of an audience (through auditory cues), social systems (family ties, school ties, friendships, etc.), biological organisms (biochemical signals), the brain (neural interconnections), the WWW (URL links), and so on.

A fascinating fact, which has been determined by those programs that crawl through the internet gathering data on linkage, is that the probability of a site (yours?) having k links is proportional to k raised to the minus 2.1 power. Thus if there are N links to your site, a bit of math shows that you are among the highest M sites, where M equals one over N raised to the 1.1 power. You can estimate N for your home page by picking a key phrase from it and looking on Google. Try it!

Alwyn Scott
http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/


Learn the science of networks from one of the key scientists   May 30, 2002
Alex Iskold (New York)
8 out of 13 found this review helpful

Networks touch all the aspects of our lives from our society to software to genes. Understanding the structure and dynamics of networks is the goal of the recently revived branch of graph theory. Dr. Barabasi brings us lively, concise, and elegant up to-date account of the developments of in the new science. He has been on the forefront for the past 5 years, discovering the scale-free nature of the Internet, food webs and gene regulatory networks. The book is clearly geared towards people with science background; it contains numerous examples of application of the small world networks ideas to economics, biology, genetics, computer science, Internet and www. I highly recommend this book as an introduction to the subject.