UrSci

From other flavor networks like this we can infer that Asian cuisine is vegetable-based and diverse, whereas North American cuisine is animal-based and limited to basically cow meat and butter. As for this flavor network, it shows us that cashew nuts are more like cheese than nuts.

Ur was an ancient city in Mesopotamia and the birthplace of Abraham, who is the birthperson of the Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim). Because of its potent origin-inducing prowess, it has become a word that means 'the beginning of,' for example, an urtext is the original version of a text.

Every time I hear about network science, I think of the word ur-science, because it sure seems like it's underneath all the rest. If physics is the underlying science from which all else follows, then network science must go beyond even that. It's like the link between math and science, that's another way to look at it. Math is all meta, totally disembodied, no physicality involved. And it's more like a language than a science, a perfect language, God's language if you will. Network science, however, seems to reach in-between this space, in-between the body and the void.

As anyone even slightly interested in science would already know, there's some problems with physics, like finding a universal theory that explains both gravity and quantum mechanics. Although the theories used in both these phenomena are mature and useful, they don't overlap enough to make one single theory.

Then there's other problems, particularly with quantum phenomena, like 'spooky action at a distance,' also called non-locality, and also called teleportation, where a change to one particle that had been entangled with another but then separated by space and yet still entangled, will immediately change the other entangled particle, no matter how far away they may be, and instantaneously, he says again for effect to remind you, the reader, that Einstein's Relativity says that nothing happens "instantaneously" but as a result of its relationship within the greater context of spacetime. (This goes against all intuitive thought in the classical physics mindset, and is the reason Einstein called it "spooky.")

So we know that there's some work that needs to be done in terms of making Science into one thing, and to explain some of the things that we know to be true, yet we still cannot believe, albeit because of our feeble limbic-driven wetware.

***
This brings us to Network Science, this thing that became real popular with the advent of the Internet, although it's been around for quite awhile. My own introduction to this came from the book Linked by Albert-László Barabási which came out just before The Social Network (the thing not the movie) in 2002*.

In it, Barabási gives a rudimentary exploration that even a non-scientist can understand. There's hubs and there's spokes. And although The Internet looks like a mess, there is some order to it, and there are some rules to how networks form, how long they last, what kind of information gets passed through it and between who.

Plenty of work has been done on the subject of Network Science, both since Barabási 's 2002 book and long before it. Granted there is always a draw to something new. But there are also these moments that happen when a phenomena has been sitting around doing its thing for ages, and then all of the sudden an example comes to life so that everyone can see it and use it and think about it (and even write books on it). And that would be the dynamics of the social network that we now use to explain and understand everything from fundraising to depression.

When a thing becomes this pervasive in society, we can talk about it and wrestle with it in common language. And we can see anew a thing that once before we never even noticed. I guess this is similar to how we used to think the nervous system was like a bunch of pipes filled with a fluid that behaved according to laws of pressures etc., and then electricity comes along, and all of the sudden there's a new way of looking at the nervous system.

So perhaps it's possible that Network Science is a new analogy for things we have yet to understand. And then again, maybe it's just another one of those - when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail - and the Network is just the hammer of our day. 

*Physicist Mark Buchanan also wrote about networks in his 2002 book Nexus


Notes:
The dimension of a space can be inferred from the abstract network structure
Sep 2018, phys.org

Post Script:
Network Science is the Ur-Science
Network Address, 2015

URSCI - Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Investigations at Dominican University in Illinois

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-László Barabási
Scientific Reports volume 1, Article number: 196 (2011)