Abstracting networks to find a true nugget of knowledge.

As human knowledge of our surroundings has increased, so has the level of abstraction of that knowledge. However, the abstractions have led us to some interesting findings:

Detailed maps of the Internet have unmasked the Internet's vulnerability to hackers. Maps of companies connected by trade or ownership have traced the trail of power and money in Silicon Valley. Maps of interactions between species in ecosystems have offered glimpses of humanity's destructive impact on the environment. Maps of genes working together in a cell have provided insights into how cancer works. But the real surprise has come from placing these maps side by side. Just as diverse humans share skeletons that are almost indistinguishable, we have learned that these diverse maps follow a common blueprint. A string of recent breathtaking discoveries has forced us to acknowledge that amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us.

(Barabási: pp. 5-6)

Does that get us any closer to a theory of everything? Perhaps. Network science is still too young to tell. In any case, it is already uncovering certain facts that we completely ignored until we started adopting this new paradigm, just as it happened when the structuralists renewed the social sciences back in the 1960s. For the time being, all we see is the correlation between disparate fields. We still don't understand the real reasons why they behave in such similar ways. That's precisely the challenge now.