Yesterday I began reading Murray Gell-Mann’s classic book The Quark and the Jaguar. I am thrilled that I am at last understanding (having failed before). My new prowess comes from watching Professor Steven Pollock’s DVDs on Particle Physics. I am reading the book because I think Gell-Mann’s subject for the book is a powerful metaphor (or an actually explanation) for the internet.
Gell-Mann tells us that the book is about “the study of the simple and the complex.” This is a quotation from the first page of the Preface of The Quark and the Jaguar:
[The study of the simple and the complex] . . . has started to bring together in a new way material from a great number of different fields in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences and even in the arts and humanities. It carries with it a point of view that facilitates the making of connections, sometimes between facts or ideas that seem at first glance very remote from each other.
Surely, the social networking of the internet is a huge new cultural and sociological force that is changing the ways of human life. I would bet a lot that our changing relationship with what humankind knows will have a more profound — and certainly a beneficial — impact on the human future. Let me just change a few words in the Gell-Mann quote to tell you why:
The open internet has started to bring together in a new way information and ideas from a great number of different fields in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences and even in the arts and humanities. It carries with it operations that facilitate the making of connections, sometimes between facts or ideas that seem at first glance very remote from each other.
