Size Quotes

“As we have seen, distributions centered on their means are omnipresent in nature—in plants, animals, and humans—and they are encountered in the sizes of entire organisms or their organs and parts as well as their functions (the brains of impala antelopes; grains of wheat harvested in Turkey; heart rates of elite athletes). In contrast, asymmetric distributions in nature prevail where physical (tectonic, geomorphic, atmospheric) forces dominate.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“A study of emissions from US metropolitan areas between 1999 and 2008 found that, contrary to expectations, CO2 emissions scale proportionally with city size, and that larger cities are not metabolically more efficient than smaller ones.38 The scaling coefficient was only 7 percent lower than 1.0—that is, every 1 percent rise in population led to a 0.93 percent rise of emissions.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“But how does metabolic scaling work when we look beyond mere individuals? Cities are the most obvious entity to investigate as they account for a disproportionately large share of global energy use: they house about 55 percent of humanity but consume nearly 70 percent of all energies and generate more than 70 percent of greenhouse gases.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Isometric scaling makes the multiples simple: doubling the maximum force output requires doubling the motor mass, no matter if the motors are a bird’s or bat’s muscles, reciprocating engines, or large turbofans. If you want a jet engine whose maximum takeoff thrust is twice as large, you must make it at least twice as massive.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“In the early 1980s, two American scientists, Thomas McMahon and John Tyler Bonner, looked at nearly 40 engines of all kinds (automotive, air, marine) whose power and weight ranged, respectively, from about 330 watts to 21 megawatts and from 135 grams to 102.3 tons, and found that their maximum power output scaled at nearly the same rate as engine mass.32 A recent study of four-stroke car engines, including Ford, Honda, Kawasaki, and Subaru designs, confirmed this scaling by finding that their peak power output scales with 0.95th power of the engine size.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“The replacement of engines by more efficient electric motors has been limited by the performance of batteries: even today’s best batteries (with about 300 kilowatt-hours per kilogram) have an energy density equal to only about 1/40 of hydrocarbon fuels (>12,000 kWh/kg).”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Pigs, whose sizes are similar to humans (mostly between 75 and 150 kilograms), have the ideal weight, and nearly 1.5 billion of them are now slaughtered every year around the world (about half of those in China). As always, size matters.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“This led them, via a complex mathematical derivation, to conclude that the metabolism of entire organisms must scale with the 3/4 power of their mass, and they proclaimed that they had formulated a universal scaling law and laid the foundation of a unifying theory of biological structure and organization of all living species, be they plants or animals.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Oil became so dominant because it is easy to transport and because it is so versatile. The extraordinary concentration of its deposits in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE) means that its exports must rely on large tankers: they carry about two-thirds of recent crude oil exports; the rest moves through pipelines.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Among its notable material innovations are the coral skeletons of calcium carbonate that create massive reefs; lignin (complex organic polymer), which makes up about a quarter of all tree trunks; feathers composed of twisted and cross-linked protein strands, which enable avian flight; and human skin, whose tear resistance, thanks to the ability of collagen fibrils to slide past each other, is (depending on the strain) as high as 15–21 megapascals—compared to just 2–5 megapascals for concrete.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“The largest steam turbines used to generate electricity have a power of more than 1,000 megawatts (the record size is just over 1,700 megawatts); common sizes are 500 megawatts and more. The largest stationary gas turbines now also rate more than 500 megawatts—that is, 100,000 times the size of small early waterwheels!”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“The largest marine diesels now have a power of 80–90 megawatts and, similarly, a Boeing 747 needs about 90 megawatts for takeoff (when cruising, energy needs are much lower).”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“As with so many analytical observations, the golden ratio has its origins in ancient Greece but we cannot be sure who identified it first—possibly many generations before Euclid of Alexandria defined it in the sixth book of his Elements: “A line is divided in extreme and mean ratio” if a + b is to a as a is to b.75 In plain English, divide a line in such a way that the ratio between the line and the longer of the two pieces will be the same as the ratio between the longer and the shorter piece. Restated in a more rigorous way, a line segment of length 1 is divided in two pieces whereby (1 / x) = x / (1 – x) or (x2 + x) – 1 = 0. Solving this equation means that x equals approximately 0.618033988.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“But there is one art where symmetry has been conspicuously absent: painting. There are a few highly symmetrical famous paintings, above all Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (and Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper) and Perugino’s Christ Giving the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter in the Sistine Chapel, but symmetry was never a dominant concern of any genre of painting,”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Among invertebrates, only sponges are not built on any symmetrical plan; all cnidarians (polyps, jellyfish, sea anemones) have radial symmetry; molluscs, arthropods (insects, crustaceans, centipedes, etc.), and all vertebrates have bilateral symmetry, with only some subtle, or hidden asymmetries. Differences in facial features, which hand we prefer to use (very few people, no more than about 1 percent, are ambidextrous), and the placement of internal organs are the most obvious examples of asymmetry in humans.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Tall individuals are more likely to have been raised in healthy and wealthy settings; in turn, taller and healthier people can work harder, both physically and mentally, and realize higher incomes, and tall males have an easier job of finding partners.86”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“The third benefit of systematic height measurements and analyses came from realizing and confirming a large number of desirable life indicators associated with height. As the anthropometric studies multiplied, it became clear that height—a simple and easily measured variable—is a convincing proxy for quantifying many aspects of human well-being, and a revealing marker of human welfare that correlates with many social and economic variables.84 Tall people are perceived to be healthier, smarter, more confident, better educated, socially more adept, and better liked—and, on average, these qualities make them more accomplished, richer, and more influential.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“This, then, is the size span we have determined using our ingenious technical means and theoretical calculations: from the diameter of a hydrogen atom (0.1 nanometers) to the diameter of the known universe (93 billion light-years). That’s a dizzying difference of nearly 35 orders of magnitude, and it shows to what a truly unimaginable extent we have expanded our search for extremes in size.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“encountering unexpected sizes is one of the key components of human perception.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“As expected, larger houses have larger refrigerators and larger TV screens. Right after the Second World War, the average volume of US fridges was just 8 cubic feet; in 2020 the bestselling models made by GE, Maytag, Samsung, and Whirlpool had volumes of 22–25 cubic feet.71”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“And yet another countertrend involving the shrinking size of American families has been the increasing size of American houses. Houses in Levittown, the first post–Second World War large-scale residential suburban development in New York, were just short of 70 square meters; the national mean reached 100 in 1950, topped 200 in 1998, and by 2015 it was a bit above 250 square meters, slightly more than twice the size of Japan’s average single-family house.69 American house size has grown 2.5 times in a single lifetime; average house mass (with air conditioning, more bathrooms, heavier finishing materials) has roughly tripled; and the average per capita habitable area has almost quadrupled. And then there are the US custom-built houses whose average area has now reached almost 500 square meters.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“These size gains boosted the vehicle-to-passenger weight ratio (assuming a 70-kilogram adult driver) from 7.7 for the Model T to just over 38 for the Lexus LX and to nearly as much for the Yukon GMC.66 For comparison, the ratio is about 18 for my Honda Civic—and, looking at a few transportation alternatives, it is just over 6 for a Boeing 787, no more than 5 for a modern intercity bus, and a mere 0.1 for a light 7-kilogram bicycle.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“meet the demands of a rapidly increasing population. Despite the two world wars and the Great Depression, the world’s population had never grown as rapidly as it did between 1900 and 1970.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“The world of 1800 was closer to the world of 1500 than it was to the mundane realities of 1900.50 By 1900, half of the world’s fuel production came from coal and oil, electricity generation was rapidly expanding, and new prime movers—steam engines, internal combustion engines, steam and water turbines, and electric motors—were creating new industries and transportation capabilities.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Even when expressed in constant (inflation-adjusted) monies, US GDP has increased 10-fold since 1945; and, despite the postwar baby boom, the per capita rate has quadrupled.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Going small (increasing the number of components on a microprocessor) has sustained the post-1965 growth of electronics (I will deal with this trend in the fourth chapter, on size designs). That, in turn, has been a key contributor to the global economic growth of the past two generations, and also (paradoxically) a key enabler of going large.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“And, switching from the personal to the corporate, “large,” “larger,” and preferably “the largest” have become the most desirable adjectives to describe trajectories to success. Some providers of limited-edition luxury items aside, no company has become a global leader by drastically capping its output and aspiring to remain modest in size.35 And there is nothing new about this trend toward larger sizes: the evolution of living organisms has supplied many precedents. What’s new is the ubiquity and the pace of the modern quest for larger sizes. This accelerated trend began during the latter half of the 19th century, powered by industrialization, and its intensification through the 20th century created our modern world of record-breaking sizes and superlatives.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“Obviously, large has always been a byword for importance and grandeur in the human imagination. Large impresses us, it awes us, it frightens us; and, as far as human artifacts are concerned, it also inspires us to go further, to set new limits, to design larger structures (taller skyscrapers), larger transportation machines (be it jetliners or cruise ships), and, alas, larger political and economic empires. We set much-welcomed records (larger industrial facilities making consumer products more affordable by lowering their unit costs) as well as pursuing many dubious accomplishments”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“The second, much larger group of “motors” includes all organic or mechanical arrangements that move bodies in a more complex fashion than the “motors” of the first category, which simply push or pull loads linearly. Although this second category ranges across ten orders of magnitude—from flying insects and bats, through birds and running and swimming mammals, to electric motors and piston and jet engines—the maximum force output of all of these motors scales at an almost perfectly isometric rate (M1.0), with exponents of 1.08 for electric rotary motors and bats, 0.96 for flying birds and aircraft turbines, and 0.95 for running animals!”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges

“the scaling of piston aircraft engines is also nearly isometrical. Data for more than 50 engines, from the one powering a 1.5-kilogram micro air vehicle to the four turboprops of the Antonov An-22 (an old Soviet heavy transporter weighing 250 tons) showed that their power is proportional to the 0.9th power of mass and 0.8th power of speed.”
― Vaclav Smil, Size: How It Explains the World – Understanding Scale and Measurements from Microbes to Civilizations and Modern Challenges