This is part of a series of examples that describe the basic operation of the D3.js force layout. Eventually they may end up in a blog post that wraps everything together. If you missed the beginning of the series, here's a link to first example.
Before digging into the properties and options of the force layout, it's helpful to understand how the layout works more generally. And although there's some serious mathematics going on under the hood, the principle is pretty simple: The layout moves the graph nodes around a little bit