Scale

Even more striking is that if all the arteries, veins, and capillaries of your circulatory system were laid end to end, their total length would be about 100,000 kilometers, or nearly two and a half times around the Earth or over a third of the distance to the moon . . . and all of this neatly fits inside your five-to-six-foot-tall body.

less able to respond to significant change.

The important lesson that we learn from these investigations is that in many such systems there is no central control.

The open-ended exponential growth of cities stands in marked contrast to what we see in biology: most organisms, like us, grow rapidly when young but then slow down, cease growing, and eventually die.

Only when it was possible to probe very small distances on the atomic scale or very large velocities on the scale of the speed of light did serious deviations from the predictions from Newton’s laws become apparent. And these led to the revolutionary discovery of quantum mechanics to describe the microscopic, and to the theory of relativity to desc

Success in designing and building ships had been achieved by the gradual accumulation of knowledge and technique via a process of trial and error, resulting in well-established rules of thumb passed on, to a large extent, by the mechanisms of apprenticeship and learning on the job. Typically, each new ship was a minor variant on a previous one, wit

It is important to recognize that the three postulates enunciated above are to be understood in a coarse-grained average sense.

Being diverse and having many interchangeable, adaptable components is another manifestation of this paradigm.

These are examples of what is called self-organization. It is an emergent behavior in which the constituents themselves agglomerate to form the emergent whole,