Excerpt

The concepts of scale, dimension, and geometry have a long and intertwined history at the root of both essential synthesis and revolutions in the history of science. From the “closed world of the ancients to the open world of the moderns” (Koyre 1957), they can be found in Galileo’s geometric analysis of Dante’s inferno (Peterson 2002), the design of ships and other structures, Einsteinian space-time, and Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry (Mandelbrot 1975). A brilliant example in the science of complexity, this paper by Geoffrey West, James Brown, and Brian Enquist (WBE hereafter) falls into the same tradition, using scale, dimension, and geometry to provide a synthetic and holistic theory—in this case, a theory of life dynamics.

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