Map of relationships among scientific paradigms, From Seed Magazine Options

[ustrax]

"This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers".

From here.

Just see the new branches of the tree of knowledge expanding...
Very interesting and quite a beautiful work of art!

[nprev]

Hmm...very perceptive observation, ngunn.

To me, the hole indicates a sort of serial (spiral?) approach to science (yet another artifact of our tendency to categorize nature al a the Pluto debate?... )...physics begets chemistry, chem begets biology, biology feeds biochemistry and thereby medicine, and the social sciences are hooked in via the psychiatric branch of medicine. Maybe there are indeed missed connections, but a direct reachback to physics from the social sciences seems unlikely...perhaps via chaos theory and/or nonlinear systems behavior? If this is considered as a separate discipline, it may well occupy the center.

I find it interesting that engineering seems to 'ride' along physics. Although definitions may vary, it seems surpising that engineering is under-represented in biology and medicine. Maybe this explains why, for example, artificial heart technology seems to be lacking. I've always wondered why a variable-response pump should be so hard to build...

EDIT: Re the center: Shouldn't this at least symbolically be occupied by mathematics?

[AndyG]

EDIT: Re the center: Shouldn't this at least symbolically be occupied by mathematics?

I'd rather see mathematics as the quantum vacuum underlying this whole structure. ;-)

Andy G