Visible Colleges: Structure and Randomness in the Place of Discovery

Abstract

The ArgumentVisible colleges, in contrast to the “invisible colleges” familiar to historians of science, are the collective places of science, the places where the “creation of phenomena” and theoretical speculation proceed side by side. To understand their spatial form, we must understand first how buildings can structure space to both conserve and generate social forms, depending on how they relate structure in space to randomness. Randomness is shown to play a crucial role in morphogenetic models of many kinds, especially in spatial forms and in social networks. We argue here that it can also play a crucial role in the advance of science.