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

by Geoffrey West

Optimization principles lie at the very heart of all of the fundamental laws of nature, whether Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the grand unified theories of the elementary particles. Their modern formulation is a general mathematical framework in which a quantity called the action, which is loosely related to energy, is minimized. All the laws of physics can be derived from the principle of least action which, roughly speaking, states that, of all the possible configurations that a system can have or that it can follow as it evolves in time, the one that is physically realized is the one that minimizes its action. Consequently, the dynamics, structure, and time evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, everything from black holes and the satellites transmitting your cell phone messages to the cell phones and messages themselves, all electrons, photons, Higgs particles, and pretty much everything else that is physical, are determined from such an optimization principle.