Size matters | 29 June 2017

Trust scientists to ruin all our fun. The spectacularly beautiful 2014 film reboot of Godzilla, it turns out, is anatomically misleading. At 350ft tall, such a beast would simply collapse under its own weight, because an animal’s mass cubes with a doubling of its size, while the strength of its supporting limbs only squares. The basic principle was known to Galileo, and it turns out that the simple observation that things do not scale linearly can tell us much else besides, as this quite dazzling book amply demonstrates.

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist who became interested in biology and then in cities, and (with colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute) developed ways of looking at such apparently disparate subjects that uncovered surprising similarities in the mathematics of the networks involved. The branching of the blood-circulatory system in humans obeys the same rules as the branching of trees. Cities have a quantitatively predictable ‘metabolism’, in terms of how they process energy, just like living things do.