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

by Geoffrey West

finite time singularity simply means

becomes infinitely large at some finite time,

that’s why something has to change.

Simple power laws and exponentials are continuously increasing functions that also eventually become infinitely large, but they take an infinite time to do so.

It is simply not possible to supply an infinite amount of energy, resources, and food in a finite time.

singularity is a point at which a mathematical function is no longer “well behaved” in some specific way, such as becoming infinite

The clock by which we measure time on our watches and digital devices is very misleading; it is determined by the daily rotation of the Earth around its axis and its annual rotation around the sun. This astronomical time is linear and regular.

in parallel with the quest for the Theory of Everything, we need to embark on a similar quest for a grand unified theory of complexity.