Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

To maintain order and structure in an evolving system requires the continual supply and use of energy whose by-product is disorder.

Scaling simply refers, in its most elemental form, to how a system responds when its size changes.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

Scaling up from the small to the large is often accompanied by an evolution from simplicity to complexity while maintaining basic elements or building blocks of the system unchanged or conserved.

Growth can be viewed as a special case of a scaling phenomenon.

To varying degrees, all theories and models are incomplete. They need to be continually tested and challenged by increasingly accurate experiments and observational data over wider and wider domains and the theory modified or extended accordingly. This is an essential ingredient in the scientific method. Indeed, understanding the boundaries of their applicability, the limits to their predictive power, and the ongoing search for exceptions, violations, and failures has provoked even deeper questions and challenges, stimulating the continued progress of science and the unfolding of new ideas, techniques, and concepts.

The challenge at every level of observation is to abstract the important variables that determine the dominant behavior of the system.