Size: How It Explains the World

From the polymath and New York Times bestselling author of How the World Really Works, a look at the notion of size and how it determines the world around us.

“Vaclav Smil is my favorite author.” —Bill Gates

Is bigger always better? Can something keep growing indefinitely, or be too big to fail? In Size, Vaclav Smil tackles this goliath subject—and it will change the way you look at absolutely everything.

To answer the most important questions of our age, and secure our future, we must understand size. Neither bacteria nor empires are immune to its laws. Measuring it is challenging, especially where complex systems like economies are concerned, yet mastering it offers rich rewards.

Grounded in history and drawing on the latest science, with much recourse to art and classic literature, Size explains the regularities—and peculiarities—of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and economies (from cities to wages).

We learn, for example, the rules governing beauty, why a biosphere needs diversity, how to predict the size of a country, why bigger animals need proportionately less food, and why people in hotter climates have longer legs.

The latest masterwork of “an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences” (Wired) this is a mind-bending journey that turns the modern world on its head.