Still, there are places where he oversteps. The task of writing a popular book on science is to simplify and generalize, while at the same time not over-simplifying or over-generalizing. Yet I find his worldview a bit too mechanistic. I agree with him that energy is the basis of human society. West is weakest when discussing social systems. Like most physicists, he identifies the flow of energy as the root driver of complexity. Trained as a physicist, West is at his best when talking about physical processes. To have merit, Einstein implies, logical propositions must be tested against evidence.
Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. On that note, hidden in one of West’s footnotes is this gem from Albert Einstein: (That’s a fun fact I would like to have included in my recent essay, The Evolution of ‘Big’.)Īnother strength of the book (in my mind) is that West is an unabashed empiricist.
(I think I first encountered this idea in Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage.) Reading Scale, I was surprised to find that this idea was first articulated by Galileo in the 17th century. That’s because the volume of the object (which determines mass) grows faster than its cross-section area (which determines strength). For instance, it is common knowledge among physicists that when you scale up the size of an object, its properties change. And he does a good job of tracing the origins of his ideas. All told, Scale packs a whopping 81 figures.Ĭontinuing with the strengths of the book, West’s writing is clear and accessible. I can’t think of another popular science book that presents so much data. On that front, the book is worth reading for the data alone. (Unfortunately, as we’ll see below, it’s not actually a universal law.)Īs the name suggests, Scale is full of these scaling relations. This metabolic scaling is called Kleiber’s law, and it’s one of the key elements of West’s book.
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