Scale Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Scale

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Zusammenfassung von Scale

Name: Scale
Rating: 4 (61 reviews)
Author: Geoffrey West

Geoffrey West

The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies and Companies

4 (61 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

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Mathematics Innovation

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Scale
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What’s in it for me? Get insight into the complex relationships of size and scale.

Imagine that you have a cube with sides measuring 10 cm, and therefore a volume of one liter. Now imagine a second cube next to it, with sides measuring 20 cm, or twice that of the first cube. What’s the volume of the second cube? Easy, it’s twice that of the first cube, right? Wrong. It’s actually eight times greater!

As you’ll see in these blinks, when it comes to size and scaling, our intuition often leads us astray. Luckily, we can make up for this by studying what are known as scaling laws, the laws that govern relationships between various phenomena as they scale. Let’s have a closer look at these laws and see what they can tell us about the world.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why Godzilla can’t exist;
why steamships were considered unprofitable in the early 1800s; and
what scaling laws can tell us about our future on Earth.

A hidden pattern sustains all life and culture.

Earth is home to over 8 million different species, from microscopic bacteria to enormous blue whales, as well as an incredible diversity of social life, cultures, cities and traditions.

It can be quite overwhelming to think about. But the truth is that there are some surprising systematic patterns behind the complexity of biological and socioeconomic life. For instance, if you plot a graph of the metabolic rate of animals – that is, the amount of energy they spend per unit of time – against the body mass of those animals, you’ll see a perfectly straight line.

That’s right; the metabolic rate of any animal from a mouse to an elephant is perfectly fixed relative to its body mass. Not only that, but if in the same equation you substitute the metabolic rate for the total number of heartbeats in an animal’s life, you’ll get another straight line!

There is, however, one trick at play. To get this result, the scales need to be logarithmic, meaning the units on each axis need to increase by factors of ten, so from one to ten to 100, and so on.

Take an example from the world of economics: if you plot out the number of patents registered in a city against that city’s population, you’ll find that the number of patents will increase 15 percent faster than the population, also producing a straight line.

Are these incredible correlations mere coincidences?

Hardly. What you’re actually observing are called scaling relationships. The examples above are just a peek into the ways organisms and cities scale with size, and understanding this phenomenon can illuminate much about the world.

For instance, new drugs are often tested on mice to model the way they’ll impact the human body. However, mice are of course much smaller than people – so how can scientists draw conclusions about humans from tests on rodents? Well, scaling can explain the answer. In the following blinks, you’ll learn about other incredible ways scaling can explain organisms, cities and even companies.

Scaling laws are rarely linear, and this has important implications.

Crowds go wild for mega monsters in movies like Godzilla. But could such beasts actually exist in real life?

Most people would tell you such an idea is pure science fiction and, in the seventeenth century, the Italian physicist and mathematician Galileo Galelei already knew they were right. After all, scaling laws rarely work in a linear fashion.

Biological scaling laws can be explained by a network-based theory.

By now, we know how the relationship between the metabolic rate and body mass of nearly all animals abides by a simple scaling law.

However, we can be even more precise. We can also say that an increase of body mass by the factor 10⁴, or by four orders of magnitude, will result in an increase of the metabolic rate by a factor of 10³, or three orders of magnitude.

Biological networks extend toward a fourth dimension, explaining why humans stop growing.

If you look closely at the mathematical details behind scaling laws, there’s yet another surprise to be discovered: in most cases, biological scaling factors involve the numbers ¼ or ¾.

For instance, the number of leaves taken as a function of a plant’s mass increases by a factor of 2 to the power of ¾. So, what explains the mysterious prevalence of the number four?

Scaling reveals surprising similarities between seemingly different cities, while biological networks are analogous to urban centers.

Consider the cities of New York, Paris and São Paulo. They might not appear to have much in common; after all, they’re in disparate corners of the world and are homes to highly divergent cultures.

Even so, there are a number of hidden similarities in these metropolises, and scaling relationships can make them plain to see.

The speed of life, social interaction and economic activity all scale with the size of a city.

Modern life has become so tied to the city that the author feels a new human era is upon us. In his opinion, it began with the Industrial Revolution of the late-eighteenth century and can be called the Urbanocene. So, what can scaling laws tell us about this new period in human history?

Well, in biology, the pace of life slows down as size increases. For instance, an elephant metabolizes energy much more slowly than a mouse and also lives for a much longer time. In cities, however, life appears to accelerate with size.

Scaling reveals universal dynamics that correspond to a company’s size and age.

You just learned how the number and diversity of businesses scales relative to city size. But what about the scaling that occurs within a business itself? How do sales, expenses and profits scale with size?

Actually, there are surprisingly common scaling patterns for all of these metrics. For instance, net income, gross profit, total assets and sales all scale up with incredible regularity relative to company size as measured by the number of employees.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has witnessed a population explosion, raising questions about sustainability.

You’ve learned a number of rules of scale and how they correspond to all manner of circumstances. But what do these laws mean for human life in general?

Well, they can tell us a great deal about the human population. For instance, since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s population has been growing at an incredible rate. This boom has marked an unforeseen shift since, for 2 million years, the human population had been growing at a steady, albeit much slower, rate.

It’s unlikely that the earth can sustain such rapidly accelerating population and economic growth.

So, the human population exploded with the Industrial Revolution and has been increasing exponentially ever since. People have been warning about the impacts this sustained growth will have and it’s becoming increasingly clear that such growth is straining the relationship between human society and nature.

This begs the question: Can we sustain a global population of over 10 billion and continue increasing levels of consumption without destroying the biosphere?

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Worum geht es in Scale?

Scale (2017) is a glimpse into the hidden and fascinating world of the mathematical relationships that tie the world together. The blinks describe how such laws connect everything from microscopic organisms to international metropolises, and what they can tell us about the behavior of complex systems.

Bestes Zitat aus Scale

Godzilla could not exist. Still, scaling laws allow a few calculations: Godzilla would pee some 20,000 liters of urine per day and poop three tons of feces.

—Geoffrey West

Wer Scale lesen sollte

Physicists, biologists, mathematicians and economists
City planners, company owners and innovators
Environmentalists and anyone interested in sustainable development

Über den Autor

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose interests range from the fundamental questions of physics to biology and global sustainability. He is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a visiting professor at Oxford University, Imperial College and Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. He was listed on Time magazine’s 2006 list of the “100 Most Influential People In the World.”

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Science Nature & the Environment Economics

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