Whales live in the ocean, elephants have trunks, giraffes have long necks, we walk on two legs, and dormice scurry around, yet despite these obvious differences, we are all, to a large degree, nonlinearly scaled versions of one another. If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the
...more
