Size: How It Explains the World

Vaclav Smil

May 2023 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

From the New York Times bestselling author of How the World Really Works, a wide-ranging look at the most fundamental governing principle of our world: size, whose laws, limits, and peculiarities offer the key to understanding health, wealth, and even happiness

“No one writes about the great issues of our time with more rigor or erudition than Vaclav Smil.” — Elizabeth Kolbert

To answer the most important questions of our age, 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: the rise of the West, for example, was a direct result of ever more accurate and standardized measurements.

Using the interdisciplinary approach that has won him a wide readership, Smil draws upon history, earth science, psychology, art, and more to offer fresh insight into some of our biggest challenges, including income inequality, the spread of infectious disease, and the uneven impacts of climate change. 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). This book about the big and the small, and the relationship between them, answers the big and small questions of human existence:

• What makes a human society too big? What about a human being?
• Which alternative energy sources have the best chance of scaling and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels?
• Why do tall people make more money?
• What makes a face beautiful? How about a cathedral?
• How can changing the size of your plates help you lose weight?

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

Ratings and reviews

What role does size play in determining the qualities of organisms and other complex systems? This book sets out to answer that question, exploring such diverse topics as art, income inequality, and climate change. There's a lot of interesting information in this easy-to-read book. Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

About the author

Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the New York Times bestselling author of How the World Really Works, as well as more than forty other books on topics including energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he has been named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.