A World of Disrupted Networks

Scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth century recognized that the developing urban society was fundamentally different from the agrarian social order it replaced. Much of what the individual had done for himself on the farm was now done through mutual agreement in the newly interconnected social networks of the cities. The change in social order became most apparent for our purposes in the replacement of natural philosophy with quantifiable science in the nineteenth century. The origin of the word ‘scientist’ dates from 1833 and was coined by the philosopher and historian of science William Whewell. This term was first published in Whewell's anonymous 1834 review of Mary Somerville's On the Connection of the Physical Sciences published in the Quarterly Review. Curiously, at that time the term had a partly satirical meaning…