"It gradually became clear that bits and pieces of a unified theory were surfacing, but that a crucial element capable of tying them all together in a quantum-mechanically consistent manner was missing."– Greene, The Elegant Universe
Is this not an accurate description of the current state of the web?
My rendition of Zawinski's law for the web.
ReplyDeleteKartik - Nice one. I guess the corollary is that there is a formal equivalence between email and social networking.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we may go further and conjecture that there is a set of operations Å by which any email thread T can be smoothly transformed into a social network N. We call Å an agaram manifold and denote it Å: T ⇒ N.
It is not known at present whether the converse (N ⇒ T) is true; that important question is the subject of current research. If social-network theorists determine that the converse is indeed true, that will be truly remarkable, for it then follows that agaram manifolds are operation-preserving isomorphisms; that is to say, Å(N)◊Å(T) = Å(N●T).
Hi Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteIntriguing concept but before it is useful we need to define the end points better.
How do you define an "email thread",
how do you define a "social network" both at the same level of mathematical sophistication as "manifold", "isomorphism", "smoothly transformed" ...
Otherwise the question arises - what is the initial structure of the thing we are transforming? What is the structure of the thing to which we are transforming it?
Hi Nitin - heh - actually my "mathematical" theorem was just a joke, authentic-sounding mathematical babble.
ReplyDeleteThough who knows - perhaps there is an unwitting kernel of truth in it?