Physics of Cyberspace

Today, social media has a tremendous share of human life and human society. Other rules of education in the style of yesterday guarantee a successful man and society for tomorrow.
A successful citizen and having a vibrant 21st-century community needs new skills to get.
The twenty-first-century global relations are even more complicated every day than ever before. Yesterday’s answers to some questions are not a good answer for the same questions today. We even see conflicting answers, both for some reasons, are correct answers to the same problems, and the concept of opposites answers is not false. Every day, new information changes our understanding of our society. The complexity of matters means that we need to learn new skills to become successful citizens on a global level.

Communication and experience of social life I was able to share ideas and understanding of the phenomena. Culture, laws, beliefs, and many of the human concepts that result from our social life. It was once the only environment that shaped our communication and social life. But with the onset of the 21st Century, cybercrime made our communication global, and our understanding and understanding of the world around us transformed. The result of these connections has led to the formation of complex patterns that mysteriously created a clear and secret role in guiding our lives, which we sometimes do not even know about.

Cyberspace physics is looking for new patterns emerging in our virtual life. Looking for answers to questions like how people think about the world and what kind of human future will be needed? How do we understand the complex social environment around us and in our new order, we know our position and promote our society? Are there hidden mechanisms in our minds and in these social networks that dictate our judgment about the society and the world around us? What if there are, for sure, how does it work? Can we understand different mechanisms of the world through knowing these hidden mechanisms? What is the process of categorizing this information in this cyberspace and how it is accessed? How can we increase the capabilities and productivity of a community and even an individual by knowing more of this cyberspace? How to capture personal, social and even human knowledge?

The scientific and social realities in our minds are created based on our information and understanding of our surroundings. In fact, these personal beliefs, and even science, may not even have any relation with reality.


To be continued…

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Balance Theory: From Psychology to Cancer Dynamics

Social Balance Theory

Imagine Alice and Bob have just gotten married and they have a mutual friend called Chris. In this scenario, they form a triangle of husband-wife-friend relationship which every edge of this triangle is a friendship link. Obviously, in this triplet of relationships people like each other and they can spend a lot of time together without any conflicts! So this triplet is said to be balanced because everything is fine there and people enjoy their current states. But If something goes wrong between Alice and Bob and they decide to get divorced then the link between the husband and wife in the triangle turns into enmity and from now on, this change makes Chris to rethink about his relationship with this ex-couple because he cannot simultaneously be friend with these guys who are enemy of each other! Chris has to change his attitude towards Alice or Bob, at last he must decide to be in a friendship status only with one of them. The triplet of relationship is now imbalanced and Chris finally decides to turn his relationship with Alice or Bob into enmity (turing a positive link to a negative one) which leads to another balanced state for this triangle of relationship after experiencing an imbalance . The dynamics of this change is mimicked in the picture below.

Evolution of a married couple plus friend triplet. After a divorce the triangle becomes imbalanced, but balance is restored after another relationship change. Full and dashed lines represent friendly (+) and unfriendly (-) relations respectively. REF: arXiv:physics/0605183

So as you may guess, in a triplet of relationships if odd numbers of the links are positive (friendship) the triangle is said to be balanced and otherwise, it is imbalanced. A balanced triangle, therefore, fulfills the adage that: (i) a friend of my friend is my friend, (ii) an enemy of my friend is my enemy, (iii) a friend of my enemy is my enemy, and (iv) an enemy of my enemy is my friend. This notion of balance in social systems was firstly introduced by Heider (1946) an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school.

The Energy of Social Networks

The key concept in Heider Balance Theory is that “We adjust our relationship based on reducing the psychological stresses”. On the other hand, an imbalanced triangle is analogous to a frustrated plaquette in a random magnet. Physicists know how to assign energy to a system based on the interactions of its constituents. Therefore, inspiring by a random magnet, we can assign energy to a triplet of relationships by just multiplying the strength of each link in the triangle of relationships. So in the case of husband-wife-friend triangle, the energy is:

$$E = -R_{hw}R_{wf}R_{fh}$$

which $R_{hw}$ is the strength of the relationship between husband and wife. For a friendly relationship $R_{hw}$ is a positive number and for an unfriendly relationship $R_{hw}$ is a negative number. The minus sign is to make the analogy between the concept of social balance and stability in physics. In physical terms, the imbalanced triangles must have higher energy because the dynamics is toward more stable states with lower energy levels. The same reason that an apple falls off from a tree and going from a higher energy level at a higher altitude to lower energy levels toward the ground.

Now with this mechanism, calculating the energy of triangles formed in a social network is handy, we can just simply find the energy of each triangle and by aggregating them come to the energy of that network! The higher energy of a network, the more tendency toward attitude change is expected in that network!

The Cancerous Cell Has Less Energy!

When we look at the the social life of the genes in the cell, we see that genes make dialogue with each other. It means that genes form a social network in a cell that the relationships between each pair of the genes can be positive or negative, in a sense that genes can alter the state of other genes through the so called regulatory effects. So, again if the strength of the relationship between each pair of the genes is known we can find the energy of the cell. For the case of Breast Cancer, Abbas Karimi et al. at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran have inferred the strength of the relationship between each pair of the genes and showed that the energy level of the normal cell is higher than the cancerous one, meaning the normal cell has more tendency to change its attitude and therefore it can tackle more challenges it experiences through its life cycle.

This is how interdisciplinary research is done nowadays in the field of complex systems. The point is to be open to ideas from different disciplines and to be creative enough to construct a pathway to solve real-world problems. From a psychological theory from 1946 we have come to a question in 21st century systems biology with a resolution equipped with the toolbox of physics!

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Complex Networks

In the context of network theory, a complex network is a graph (network) with non-trivial topological features—features that do not occur in simple networks such as lattices or random graphs but often occur in graphs modelling of real systems. The study of complex networks is a young and active area of scientific research (since 2000) inspired largely by the empirical study of real-world networks such as computer networks, technological networks, brain networks and social networks.

Wikipedia

  • ‘The Emergence of Network Science’

Documentary unfolding the science behind the idea of six degrees of separation. Originally thought to be an urban myth, it now appears that anyone on the planet can be connected in just a few steps of association. Six degrees of separation is also at the heart of a major scientific breakthrough; that there might be a law which nature uses to organize itself and that now promises to solve some of its deepest mysteries.

  • Do your proteins have their own social network?

Networks guru and author Albert-László Barabási says diseases are the results of system breakdowns within the body, and mapping intracellular protein networks will help us discover cures.

 

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