Renaissance-get-Richer
Popularity and the rich-get-richer models can be found in a variety of fields, from tracking the popularity of a book on the New York Times bestseller list to the growth of bacterial colonies. From a historical perspective, one can analyze the motives of Renaissance scientists like Galileo through these natural models. As a hungering humanist scholar, Galileo was eager to climb up the academic ladder of the universities by appealing to those with affluent economic and political power, such as the reigning Medici family at its time, and specifically the family’s ruler Cosimo De Medici. One way that Galileo appealed to these Italian aristocrats was to name some of his observational discoveries after his prospective patrons. As such, Galileo named Jupiter’s moons the “Cosmica Sidera” (Cosimo’s stars), which resulted him gaining favor from the Medici and earning their institutional patronage. This tactic of upward sycophancy wasn’t limited to Galileo, practiced by a number of budding scientists during the Renaissance eager to gain institutional approval such as Copernicus and Vesalius, who both appealed to the Catholic Pope during their respective time periods.
These situations are good examples of how those with influence are able to naturally compound that influence. If we imagine each of these scientists and institutional leaders as nodes, we can easily see the natural phenomenon of preferential attachment, where nodes are more inclined to make links to nodes that already have high popularity. In this case, eager scientists attempt to create links to patrons such as the Medici family in order to gain their valuable support, while at the same time these patrons are able to benefit off the discoveries of their beneficiaries through gaining more prestige or wealth. This phenomenon can also link to the idea of power laws, where few scientists become immensely popular, like Galileo or Copernicus, while there is a “long tail” of many less recognized scientists. By analyzing history through these models of natural phenomena, one is more able to deeply understand how influences and people interact in order to create potentially groundbreaking developments.
Sources:
http://galileo.rice.edu/gal/medici.html
http://galileo.rice.edu/gal/urban.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_moons