Further applications of the principles
"Everything around us is scale dependent...It's woven into the fabric of the universe."
Similar scaling laws seem to apply to the Plant kingdom as well as the animal world.
Conduits that carry blood or sap keep subdividing to carry nutrients into all parts of any living thing. The systems that carry sap to plant extremities not only look like our arterial tree; their smallest parts are the same size as ours, because both have to divide down to near-molecular dimensions.
It is assumed that Kleiber's law, and maybe the other scaling relationships, arose because of the mathematical nature of the networks both animals and trees used to transport nutrients to all their cells and dispose of waste material. A diagram of the human circulatory system and of the roots and branches of a tree look remarkably similar.
A scaling law also seems to apply to single cells and even to the energy-burning mitochondria inside cells. This may be because the mitochondria inside the cytoplasm and even the respiratory components inside the mitochondria are arranged in fractal-like networks.
Simlar scaling principles manifest themselves in the world of subatomic particles. The strong nuclear force, which binds quarks into neutrons, protons and other particles, is weaker, paradoxically, when the quarks are closer together, but stronger as they are pulled farther apart - this is the opposite of what happens with gravity or electromagnetism.
Scaling also shows up in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: the more finely you measure the position of a particle, viewing it on a smaller and smaller scale, the more uncertain its momentum becomes.
Things behave differently at different scales, but there are orderly ways - scaling laws - that connect one realm to another.
The content on this site has been drawn from a wide range of Web & printed resources and edited/summarised to form a single point of reference and overview of the Billion Heart Beats.