El Tamao de Las Cosas / Size: How It Explains the World

Pueden las medidas explicar el mundo? Para responder a esa colosal pregunta ha dedicado Vaclav Smil las ms de trescientas pginas de El tamao de las cosas. El cientfico canadiense despliega un ambicioso anlisis del principio rector ms fundamental de nuestro planeta: el tamao, cuyas leyes, lmites y peculiaridades son clave para entender la salud, la riqueza e incluso la felicidad. Medir la escala, las proporciones y las simetras es todo un reto, en especial cuando se trata de sistemas tan complejos como las economas, pero comprenderlas ofrece ricas recompensas.

Con el enfoque interdisciplinar que caracteriza su prolfica obra divulgativa, Smil recurre a la historia, las ciencias de la Tierra, la psicologa y el arte, entre otras reas, para ofrecer una nueva visin de nuestros mayores retos, como la desigualdad, la propagacin de enfermedades infecciosas y los estragos del cambio climtico.

Este libro sobre lo grande, lo pequeo y la relacin entre ambos nos entrega una innovadora respuesta a las grandes preguntas sobre la existencia humana. El tamao no es solo una propiedad ms de lo que nos rodea, sino que puede cambiar nuestra forma de verlo absolutamente todo.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.