TY - JOUR
T1 - The power of a good idea
T2 - Quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological models
AU - Bettencourt, Luís M A
AU - Cintrón-Arias, Ariel
AU - Kaiser, David I.
AU - Castillo-Chavez, Carlos
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Gerardo Chowell, Ed MacKerrow, Miriam Nuño, Steve Tenenbaum and Alun Lloyd, for discussions and comments. A. Cintrón-Arias acknowledges financial support from Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute and Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Collaboration was greatly facilitated through visits by several of the authors to the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), Research Triangle Park, NC, which is funded by NSF under grant DMS-011209. The authors thank the hospitality of Santa Fe Institute, where portions of this work were undertaken.
PY - 2006/5/15
Y1 - 2006/5/15
N2 - The population dynamics underlying the diffusion of ideas hold many qualitative similarities to those involved in the spread of infections. In spite of much suggestive evidence this analogy is hardly ever quantified in useful ways. The standard benefit of modeling epidemics is the ability to estimate quantitatively population average parameters, such as interpersonal contact rates, incubation times, duration of infectious periods, etc. In most cases such quantities generalize naturally to the spread of ideas and provide a simple means of quantifying sociological and behavioral patterns. Here we apply several paradigmatic models of epidemics to empirical data on the advent and spread of Feynman diagrams through the theoretical physics communities of the USA, Japan, and the USSR in the period immediately after World War II. This test case has the advantage of having been studied historically in great detail, which allows validation of our results. We estimate the effectiveness of adoption of the idea in the three communities and find values for parameters reflecting both intentional social organization and long lifetimes for the idea. These features are probably general characteristics of the spread of ideas, but not of common epidemics.
AB - The population dynamics underlying the diffusion of ideas hold many qualitative similarities to those involved in the spread of infections. In spite of much suggestive evidence this analogy is hardly ever quantified in useful ways. The standard benefit of modeling epidemics is the ability to estimate quantitatively population average parameters, such as interpersonal contact rates, incubation times, duration of infectious periods, etc. In most cases such quantities generalize naturally to the spread of ideas and provide a simple means of quantifying sociological and behavioral patterns. Here we apply several paradigmatic models of epidemics to empirical data on the advent and spread of Feynman diagrams through the theoretical physics communities of the USA, Japan, and the USSR in the period immediately after World War II. This test case has the advantage of having been studied historically in great detail, which allows validation of our results. We estimate the effectiveness of adoption of the idea in the three communities and find values for parameters reflecting both intentional social organization and long lifetimes for the idea. These features are probably general characteristics of the spread of ideas, but not of common epidemics.
KW - Epidemiological models
KW - Rumor models
KW - Scientific idea-diffusion
KW - Transition parameter estimation
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U2 - 10.1016/j.physa.2005.08.083
DO - 10.1016/j.physa.2005.08.083
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33645136546
SN - 0378-4371
VL - 364
SP - 513
EP - 536
JO - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
JF - Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
ER -