Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity, as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly developing into a new discipline: network science.
Eh... Barabasi is really milking the golden cow :)
It seems interesting, even if I don't remember enough from my statistical mechanics classes to truly understand it without a major effort. Maybe you could make a layman's science coffee about it?
We worked on this with Luzi a few years back ... while the analogy is original and interesting it fails to capture the dynamics of a network, e.g. if a network has hubs that grow and shrink .... Luzi worked on an extended model to solve this issue, but, if I remember correctly, he got stuck in a computationally very hard problem .... We intended to develop and use the extended model to define relevant characteristic of the ESA network formed by mail exchanges.....