No. 111/2020

13 HUMBOLDT KOSMOS 111/2020 W hen Alexander von Humboldt contem- plated the view of the Andes from Chimborazo in June 1802, he started to see the world through different eyes. “The Earth seemed to him like a huge organism in which everything was linked with everything else,” is the way in which the Humboldt biographer, Andrea Wulf, describes it. Humboldt’s holistic view of nature revolutionised sci- ence; today, we know indisputably that individual cells are connected – they interchange and communicate with one another via subterranean mycelia, creating networks of entire ecosystems. Since then, the notion of the network has established a unique place for itself. Whether we think of neural net- works, the internet or social networks, in the second half of the 20th century, the network became a universal met- aphor. According to the cultural scholar, Hartmut Böhme, from Humboldt-Universität of Berlin, this was a result of “the paradigm shift from physics to biology and from soci- ology to computer science that caused not just living bio- logical systems but, above all, information-based control and communication networks to become the focus of sci- entific attention.” Networks can cross borders and break open supposedly hermetically sealed entities. As the Humboldt Foundation’s global academic network shows, they forge connections across disciplines, institutions and nations. On this point, encounters with people from cultures other than our own are particularly fruitful. At the latest since the publication of the influential essay, “The Strength of Weak Ties”, by the American sociologist and network theoretician, Mark Granovetter, in the 1970s, we know that in networks, the especially productive contacts are those that come about between people who previously had little or nothing to do with each other. Whilst proximity means that we tend to share the same information within our inner circle, which leads to uniform ways of thinking, outside influences generate new ideas. WEAK TIES, STRONG IDEAS There are plenty of examples of the strength of these “weak ties” in the Humboldt Network, too. Holger Schönherr, for example, professor of physical chemistry at the University of Siegen, got talking to the junior researcher, Nowsheen Goonoo, from Mauritius at a conference in South Korea in 2013. Both researchers discovered that they were using similar classes of materials and methods. “We were both immediately struck by the very promising synergic effects of combining polyesters with polymers on the basis of indigenous renewable raw materials for biomedical appli- cations,” says Professor Schönherr. This personal encoun- ter engendered several research collaborations during › The benefits of academic networks and how they need to keep developing Text  ANJA REITER and MAREIKE ILSEMANN  Illustrations  MARTIN RÜMMELE TOMORROW’S NETWORK