IS NOKIA destined to dominate the mobile phone industry? Clues to questions
like this may lie in the behaviour of ultra-cold gases.
Networks such as business markets are mathematically identical to gases of
certain atoms, says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi from the University of Notre Dame in
Indiana. So the quantum behaviour of these gases could help explain the
emergence of industrial monopolies.
When cooled to near absolute zero, atoms such as rubidium crowd into the
single lowest-energy quantum state, a process called Bose-Einstein condensation.
Barabasi and his colleague Ginestra Bianconi say that this is analogous to a
single node dominating a…
