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

by Geoffrey West

“Social Physics is a new way of understanding human

His paper elegantly illustrates the technique with many well-chosen examples, including one that provides the scientific explanation for one of the great mysteries of life that all of us have pondered at some time, namely, why is the sky blue? Using an elegant argument based solely on relating purely dimensionless quantities, he shows that the intensity of light waves scattered by small particles must decrease with the fourth power of their wavelength. Thus, when sunlight, which is a combination of all of the colors of the rainbow, scatters from microscopic particles suspended in the atmosphere, the shortest wavelengths, corresponding to blue light, dominate.

As emphasized in the opening chapter, living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the largest cities and ecosystems, are quintessential complex adaptive systems operating over an enormous range of multiple spatial, temporal, energy, and mass scales. In terms of mass alone, the overall scale of life covers more than thirty orders of magnitude (1030) from the molecules that power metabolism and the genetic code up to ecosystems and cities. This range vastly exceeds that of the mass of the Earth relative to that of our entire galaxy, the Milky Way, which covers “only” eighteen orders of magnitude, and is comparable to the mass of an electron relative to that of a mouse.

Order of magnitude: in earth as well as in universe

All of life functions by transforming energy from physical or chemical sources into organic molecules that are metabolized to build, maintain, and reproduce complex, highly organized systems. This is accomplished by the operation of two distinct but closely interacting systems: the genetic code, which stores and processes the information and “instructions” to build and maintain the organism, and the metabolic system, which acquires, transforms, and allocates energy and materials for maintenance, growth, and reproduction.

Role Energy firm and life processes

Death is an essential feature of life. Indeed, implicitly it is an essential feature of the theory of evolution. A necessary component of the evolutionary process is that individuals eventually die so that their offspring can propagate new combinations of genes that eventually lead to adaptation by natural selection of new traits and new variations leading to the diversity of species. We must all die so that the new can blossom, explore, adapt, and evolve. Steve Jobs put it succinctly3:

Essential feature if life : Death !

Steve Jobs on Death :

Thompson begins his book with a quote from the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who had remarked that the chemistry of his day was “eine Wissenschaft, aber nicht Wissenschaft,” which Thompson translates as: chemistry is “a science, but not Science,” implying that “the criterion of true science lay in its relation to mathematics.”

Ron Wissenschaft ...

Out of this melting pot, each species evolves with its suite of physiological traits and characteristics that reflect its unique path through evolutionary time, resulting in the extraordinary diversity and variation across the spectrum of life from bacteria to whales. So after many millions of years of evolutionary tinkering and adaptation, of playing the game of the survival of the fittest, we human beings have ended up walking on two legs, being around five to six feet high, living for up to one hundred years, having a heart that beats about sixty times a minute, with a systolic blood pressure of about 100 mm Hg, sleeping about eight hours a day, an aorta that’s about eighteen inches long, having about five hundred mitochondria in each of our liver cells, and a metabolic rate of about 90 watts.

Average human being

degree,

If you

Scaling relationship

Optimisation and Grand Unified Theory

Action minimisation

LIFE Growth, Aging, and Death

But read what the great German poet, writer, scientist, and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said on the subject almost two hundred years ago in 1825, soon after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution1: Everything nowadays is ultra, everything is being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp the element in which he lives and works or the materials that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires. . . . Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and thereby persists in its mediocrity. It is, moreover, the result of universalization that a mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture]. . . . Although it’s a curious mixture of comments on the accelerating pace of life and the resulting erosion of culture and values, expressed in a slightly archaic language, it sounds hauntingly familiar.

Water