Biology

The Hidden Order of the Universe

Generic mathematical laws transcending biology, history, culture, geography and socio-economy

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Seven letters put together — B I O L O G Y. My younger self would have laughed if someone had told him that he would be going down this lane for higher studies. And here we are.

Lately, Mathematical Biology has been revving up my engines, making me lap around the mysteries of life on Earth.

There have been a lot of topics that I have stumbled upon, responsible for siphoning off the sleep that I had so promised my body, recently.

My hyperactive trying-to-read-everything-in-one-go mode was forced to a halt, grabbed by the shoulders and offered a comfy seat by the Kleiber’s law.

It states that when the metabolic rates of various species are compared against their body masses on a logarithmic scale, all the points fall on a straight line with a slope of 3/4.

Metabolic rate of organisms plotted against their body size (Author’s own image)

If this isn’t surprising enough, the scale holds good from the smallest bacterium to the largest whale. That’s 20 orders of magnitude.

You need to multiply 10 twenty times in order to get from the smallest bacterium to the largest whale.