While studying lifespans, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West learned about "all these scaling laws that people had extracted from biological data":
There was one law showing that heart rate decreases as mass raised to the one-quarter power, meaning larger animals have predictably slower heartbeats than small animals. … The whale is a hundred million times bigger than a shrew, but its heart rate is just a hundred times slower. There was another law showing that life span increases as mass raised to approximately one-quarter, which translates into larger animals having a longer life span than smaller animals. These two laws together say, essentially, that there are the same number of heartbeats in your lifetime whether you are a shrew or a whale. It gives rise to the idea that big animals live very long but very slowly, and little ones live very fast but over a very short period of time.
Amazingly, a similar pattern is at work in cities:
You tell me the size of any city in the United States and I can tell you with 80 to 90 percent accuracy almost everything about it. The scaling laws tell you that despite all of the efforts of planners, geographers, economists, architects, and politicians, and all of the local history, geography, and culture, somehow cities end up having to obey these scaling laws. We need to be aware of those forces when we design and redesign cities.
The Dish 