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Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height
by tacos 10y ago
Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much.
"He was The Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University from 1960 until his death in 1983. He was the first to record a complete lecture series on History of Science which could serve as a foundation for studies around the world... His entire 1976 lecture series 'Neolithic to Now' is now available on-line and for free at http://derekdesollaprice.org/" http://derekdesollaprice.org/"
[Ignore the site design--the material is amazing.]
- jacquesm 10y agoThe site design is just fine with me. Good content is far more important than eye candy.
- leephillips 10y agoThanks for sharing that link, it is very interesting. But I'm curious - what do you think is wrong with the site design? It's responsive, legible, tasteful, and has no extraneous graphics nor a single thing that uBlock had to block. I wish the rest of the web was this beautiful.
- tacos 10y agoYes, it's the default Wordpress "Twenty Fifteen" template. It contains very important books corrupted by cut and paste into the wonky WordPress editor / blog post renderer. Someone in a hurry might think it was an autogenerated GoDaddy cash parking page, not one of the more interesting sites on the web. Thus my note.
- leephillips 10y agoI get it. I made my comment before looking past the front page to find the corrupted books.
- TruthAndDare 10y ago> Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much. I'm afraid I don't understand, especially not the last sentence. Could you explain?
- jloughry 10y agoFound it, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price#Scientific_contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price#Scient... Price's Law generally predicts the growth of social networks, which is why it's important today, but he discovered it in the context of number of scientific citations.
- tacos 10y agoIn 1951! "The number of scientific papers published each year may be taken as a rough indication of the activity displayed in any general or specialised fleld of research... The growth factor of the exponential portions is such as to double the amount of literature every ten or eleven years in both the general and specialised cases." http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemeasures1951.pdf http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemea... This is 15 years before Moore's Law and he's predicting the growth of science and citation relationships. His books basically lay out PageRank and network effects.
- acqq 10y agoThanks. That has much more sense than "grew in height in a logarithmic curve."
- tacos 10y agoMore detail but less beauty. I'll take a second whack at it. Ignore the details, consider the premise. The university library was under renovation. He wound up in charge of safekeeping a pile of journals. So he stacked them neatly by year and decade: - The 1900s Physics Journals: 1" tall - The 1910s stack: 2" tall - The 1920s stack: 4" tall - The 1930s stack: 8" tall ... I'm reminded of Feynman's tale of the Bell Labs scientists who had a view of suspension bridge construction. Marked the progress week by week on the glass, watching the cable slowly fall into parabolic shape.
- d0mine 10y ago"Logarithmic" is practically a constant. Do you mean "exponential" instead? (as in "double in X years")
- tacos 10y agoA visual log curve, not log growth. Log curve is a reflection of an exponential curve. He stacked the journals on the floor.