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!

[CosmicRocker]

Wow, this is really interesting. Thanks for posting that, ustrax. Ages ago I thought it would be interesting to try to draw a picture of science. I had a vague idea of sort of a scaffolding structure that reached out and linked up with other centers of knowledge, but it never occurred to me that this could be done in a somewhat rigorous way. Having no artistic talent whatsoever, the thought never went beyond that.

It wasn't apparent to me at first, but the map at http://mapofscience.com/ is interactive, allowing one to highlight it's parts. Computer science is apparently lumped in with engineering as an applied science. That whole segment provides a lot of scaffolding for the overall structure, and that makes abundant sense, since engineers and computer scientists are tasked with solving a wide range of problems. It is interesting to highlight the various scientific disciplines and see their individual contributions. There is a strong tendency to make close connections that reach out to neighbors, but sometimes you see outliers where a node from one discipline sprouts up from unfamiliar territory, in a manner reminiscent of the panspermia theory.

I think there might be more interesting details in the database they tapped. It sounds like it would be fun to slice and dice it with that Sandia software they cite.
"Visualization uses VxInsight, a proprietary software package from Sandia National Labs."

In the end, I guess one could argue that it is all physics.