Difference between revisions of "Book/Patterns in Network Architecture"
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A field cannot consider itself a science until it can progress beyond natural | A field cannot consider itself a [[science]] until it can progress beyond natural history; moving from describing what is, to positing principles or theories that make predictions and impose constraints.1 And it shouldn’t be just any [[theory]]; we need a theory that has the fewest assumptions and the greatest breadth: a theory with the fewest concepts, the fewest special cases, that includes the extremes as degenerate cases of a more encompassing model. | ||
|sign=[[John Day]] <ref name=JD-Architecture>{{:Book/Patterns in Network Architecture}}, Chapter 1, Page 1</ref> | |sign=[[John Day]] <ref name=JD-Architecture>{{:Book/Patterns in Network Architecture}}, Chapter 1, Page 1</ref> | ||
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Revision as of 10:08, 21 May 2023
Day, John (2008). Patterns in Network Architecture - a return to fundamentals. local page: Prentice Hall. ISBN 9780132252423.
What can be considered science?
A field cannot consider itself a science until it can progress beyond natural history; moving from describing what is, to positing principles or theories that make predictions and impose constraints.1 And it shouldn’t be just any theory; we need a theory that has the fewest assumptions and the greatest breadth: a theory with the fewest concepts, the fewest special cases, that includes the extremes as degenerate cases of a more encompassing model.
Architects' Motto
On the first page of this book, Mr. Day spelled out the essence of being a Network Architect:
- Architecture is doing the algebra, before doing the arithmetic.
- A good (network) architect suffers from the topologist’s vision defect. He can’t tell a coffee cup from a doughnut.
- Architecture is maximizing the invariances and minimizing the discontinuities.
Naming and Addressing
Starting on Chapter 5Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; invalid names, e.g. too many of this book: Naming and Addressing, the notion of naming, and its history has been explicitly described in the chapter. On Chapter 8, the notion of Name and Addressing is formally defined and related to logic and topology again.
China had no Euclid
There was essentially no tradition of theory in Chinese science, and certainly not axiomatic theory, of systematizing the results. Needham points out that the body of knowledge represented by Chinese science was more a set of individual techniques than an organized corpus of knowledge.
...
Without a unifying theory to simplify knowledge, the amount of information was eventually overwhelming. But theory is much more than just a mnemonic. A theory, even a partial one, leads to deeper understanding of the phenomena being studied and to further insights. Proposals of a unifying theory (even if unsuccessful) raise questions relating disparate phenomena that would not otherwise arise. When there is a theoretical framework, results can be derived that were far from obvious before. Theory not only provides a simpler, more logical explanation, but it also has a tendency to simplify individual techniques (making them easier to understand and apply). Many techniques coalesce to become degenerate cases of a more general method. To see this, one only need read accounts of electricity and magnetism before Maxwell, chemistry before the periodic chart, or geology before plate tectonics.
— John Day Cite error: Invalid<ref>tag; invalid names, e.g. too many
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Day, John (2008). Patterns in Network Architecture - a return to fundamentals. local page: Prentice Hall. ISBN 9780132252423. , Chapter 1, Page 1
Related Pages
Authored by:John Day