Scale and the Square-Cube Law

As a thing grows, volume rises with the cube of length while surface area rises only with the square, so what works small breaks large. Biology answers with sublinear metabolic scaling; organisations answer with hierarchy, and cities with superlinear returns. The investment use is to ask which of a company's advantages actually survive being ten times bigger.

6 books · 4 resources

Start here

  1. ScaleGeoffrey West, 2017
  2. Why Size MattersJohn Tyler Bonner, 2006
  3. On Growth and FormD'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1917

Resources 4

Books 6

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson · 1917
J. E. Gordon · 1981 · Why materials and structures hold; engineering reasoning made intuitive