Sublime

conservation of information. This principle was implicit in Newton’s laws of classical mechanics, but it wasn’t brought out into the limelight until the work of French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace around 1814.

In the 1930s, Max Kleiber, a Swiss agricultural biologist, observed that, across mammal species, from shrews to elephants, the energy required to maintain basic metabolic function is closely correlated with an organism’s body size.

Riemannian geometry, which allows spaces to be arbitrarily curved and studied from the inside, rather than requiring them to be embedded in some higher-dimensional space.

in all, the model contains about twenty parameters, key numbers such as particle masses and force strengths, whose often surprising values are not predetermined by the theory but must be measured experimentally and inserted into the formulas by hand. Physicists usually refer to these parameters as constants of nature,