The study, led by Professor Vito Latora from Queen Mary University of London, introduces a new mathematical framework that correctly reproduces the rate at which novelties emerge in real systems, known as Heaps’ law, and can explain why discoveries are strongly correlated and often come in clusters.
It does this by translating the theory of the ‘adjacent possible,’ initially formulated by American theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in the context of biological systems, into the language of complex networks.
The adjacent possible is the set of all novel opportunities that open up when a new discovery is made.
Networks have emerged as a powerful way to both investigate real world systems, by capturing the essential relations between the components, and to model the hidden structure behind many complex social phenomena.
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