Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > Size: How It Explains the World

Picking up a Smil book is always intimidating. His books are veritable encyclopedias - dense forests teeming with data and details. A book titled "Size" scared me more. Now, one was facing more than exhaustive research and voluminous content: there was an enormous, all-encompassing topic, too. Still, I was curious to see how Smil would weave together the vast tapestry of how size matters across different disciplines.

True to his reputation, Smil unleashes a flood of facts and measurements about size and scale in the natural and man-made worlds. Smil covers size extremes across physics, biology, engineering, and more, from tiny quarks to blue whales, bacteria to skyscrapers. The breadth leaves the reader gasping at the richness of information.

Given the sprawl of information, seeing the author developing compelling themes throughout the book is heartening. He develops compelling themes and threads, tying together the gargantuan and the minuscule, the living and the inanimate, into a coherent, captivating narrative, particularly in allometric and metabolic scaling topics. One learns about fundamental models like Kleiber's Law and the Square-Cube Law to explain growth patterns and limitations across size scales from cells to cities.

The book is at its best when it goes about dismantling our preconceived notions and debunking widely accepted principles. The Golden Ratio, apparently, does not exist anywhere. Even the laws we learn from the book turn out to be barely useable approximations, roiled often by the small, like Barro Colorado Island ants that break the Square-Cube Law, as much as by the large, like larger plants who do not have higher metabolic rates per unit mass compared to smaller plants. The author loves to reinforce how in nature, the devil is in the details - and in those wonderful, never-ending exceptions that make life so fascinatingly diverse and intricate, and his books full of surprises.

Later sections teach us about the modern implications of size - technologies, cities, and the author's favorite topic, energy use. He brings his engineering perspective to analyze trends and challenges related to humanity's increasing scale.

Despite the theme focus, there is no running away from the flood of information. The academic tone of the prose is not light. In the end, "Size" lives up to Smil's reputation with an exhaustive and enlightening look at a topic of importance. Persistent readers will be rewarded with insights into the principles of biology, engineering, and more.