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

by Geoffrey West

In fact, he discovered that the finer the resolution, and therefore the greater the expected accuracy, the longer the border got, rather than converging to some specific value! Unlike lengths of living rooms, the lengths of borders and coastlines continually get longer rather than converging to some fixed number, violating the basic laws of measurement that had implicitly been presumed for several thousand years. Equally surprising, Richardson discovered that this increase in length progressed in a systematic fashion. When he plotted the length of various borders and coastlines versus the resolution used to make the measurements on a logarithmic scale, it revealed a straight line indicative of the power law scaling we’ve seen in many other places