What is the name of this field of science please?

[Jamesgough007]

Hi,

I'm sorry if this isn't explained very well, but I'm hoping someone can remind me of this field of what I think was maths or physics.

I read that people had calculated that things in nature like the amount of blood in our bodies and the length of all the arteries and capillaries for instance. correspond to the equivalent on a larger sale - the veins equal the length of roads in a city or the rivers in the world. And the amount of blood on a larger scale equals the amount of water in the rivers. That we have heartbeats and the cities have heart beats but only two a day which is rush hour and more recently, NASA has released videos of what they call the Earth breathing as it goes through the seasons in the year.

This can then be taken further to include the solar system and universe.

I remember that some clever people had calculated the maths for this and it seemed to be demonstrated in many areas of nature.

Can anyone tell me what that is called and point me to a page.

You'll see by my description so far that the mighty Google might fail in serving me the correct links with this one. But then I couldn't really blame it.

Thanks,

James

 

[Asymptotic]

Scale invariance and self-similarity, perhaps?

 

[Nidum]

Similitude ?

 

[Jamesgough007]

Thanks, but none of those are the exact field I'm referring to.

 

[Bystander]

https://cosmosmagazine.com/mathematics/fractals-in-nature ?

 

[Jamesgough007]

No, not fractals, sorry, but thanks for posting.

 

[berkeman]

I read that people had calculated that things in nature like the amount of blood in our bodies and the length of all the arteries and capillaries for instance. correspond to the equivalent on a larger sale - the veins equal the length of roads in a city or the rivers in the world. And the amount of blood on a larger scale equals the amount of water in the rivers. That we have heartbeats and the cities have heart beats but only two a day which is rush hour and more recently, NASA has released videos of what they call the Earth breathing as it goes through the seasons in the year.

This can then be taken further to include the solar system and universe.

Numerology?

Pseudoscience?

 

[Jamesgough007]

Numerology?

Pseudoscience?

Guffaw!

 

[BillTre]

Perhaps you mean:
biological scaling
or
allometric scaling
Among other things, these compare sizes and function of things like blood vessels.

 

[Mark44]

Self affinity?
Some of the things you've listed are discussed in the book, "Chaos: Making a New Science," by James Gleick. In it he talks about self similarity of various structures, such as the branches of rivers, the bronchial structure of lungs, the arteries and veins in animals, veins in plant leaves, and the shapes of coastlines at different scales. He also makes a distinction between chaotic systems versus random behavior.

He also discusses things with fractional dimension (Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term "fractal" out of this), such as Koch snowflake, Sierpinski sponge, and others.

 

[epenguin]

I think the name of this Science is Allometrics or Allometry.

E.g. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/allometry-the-study-ofbiological-scaling-13228439