Doing a bit of half-serious family history,
I’m struck by the way people got together in the 19th century –lets say in the
period from about 1850 to about 1950. I’m talking about country properties:
they didn’t interact much with nearby towns, but people travelled from property
to property – to siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins – and in the process visited those people's friends – all the time. Each family
had a network, in other words, and the result was that marriages were usually within the network, and families often developed
multiple links over time, as cousins married brothers, and so on. In my own family
there are at least three such connections in a hundred years.
Mothers and daughters travelled to see
their extended families (and perhaps in the case of mothers to take a break
from childbearing); sons travelled for work experience in places where, though
the environment might be demanding it would not be unfriendly; people travelled to parties, weddings and celebrations. In my mother’s
family’s case the path stretched from Wangaratta to Wentworth to Menindee to
Wilcannia to Thargomindah to Longreach – they were all on the circuit, and
people were coming and going all the time.
The result, it seems to me, was that the
likelihood of marriage between two nodes in this network would be simply (in
the ideal case) the product of the number of available partners at the two
places irrespective of the distance between them – whereas townspeople
stereotypically married the girl next door.
We know from geographers that the mutual
intercomprehension of two places is a function of the product of their
populations divided by the distance between them, and Newtonian gravity, of
course, is proportional to the products of two masses divided by the square of
the distance between them.
It seems to me that these relations are all
the same phenomenon, but applied to a one-dimensional, a two-dimensional and a
three-dimensional frame of reference respectively – so for the one-dimensional
case we have N1 x N2 / D0, for the
two-dimensional N1 x N2 / D1, and so forth.
Then I’m led to wonder whether we mightn’t
see the same sort of effect at work in the outer reaches of giant galaxies,
where gravitation, as I understand it, can be anomalously strong.
Just a thought.
