The rhythm can follow the index slightly, and the increase of entropy is helpless and harmful.
The pace of small cities is more leisurely, and the reputation of big countries is innovating.
Vast sadness, like fiery silence, finally leaves fall to the roots.
More than 65,438+00 years ago, American physicist Geoffrey West and others found that simple mathematical laws govern various attributes of a city-wealth, crime rate, walking speed and other aspects of the city can be calculated from one number: the population of the city. By showing the principle, he expounded the similarity law between biology and enterprise.
The horizontal axis is the population of millions of cities in Europe, and the vertical axis is the average walking speed. Whether people live in a big city or a small city, people spend an hour walking every day, but in big cities, people have to walk a lot, so they need to walk faster.
Similarly, the number of heart beats in mammals also follows this simple law of almost linear relationship. Whether it is a blue whale that can live for 75 years and weighs dozens of tons, or a small hamster that weighs only 2 grams and can live for up to 3 years, it is fixed at around/kloc-0.5 billion. The speed of blood flow to capillaries is also fixed. If it is too fast, the oxygen in the blood cannot be completely transported to the cells. This constant blood flow velocity determines the number of beats per minute of the heart. Thereby determining the life span of animals of different sizes. By the same logic, back to the cellular level, the mechanism of DNA repair is the same in different animals, and the cells in the human body are completely updated every seven years. When updating cells, it is inevitable to accumulate some replication errors in DNA, which determines that each individual will decline. However, in order to delay the systematic accumulation of mistakes, the effective method known at present is dieting. With less calories, the tolerance of cells containing errors will decrease.
According to Geoffrey West's formula, all measurable socio-economic variables in cities, from the number of patents to per capita income, follow the exponential growth of about 1. 15. The size of this index is interesting because it is larger than 1. This means that if a person lives in a metropolis with a population of one million, compared with a city with a population of 500,000, he will make 15% more patents and earn 15% more money (and there will be more restaurants and more 15% trademarks nearby).
This correlation also exists in education, work experience, IQ and so on. "This magical equation explains why people flock to big cities." West said, "Because the same person, as long as he moves from a city of 50,000 people to a city of 6 million people, he will do more than three times at once. No matter which city you are in, you can't escape this law. "
In urban life, the relationship between human inventions and population also follows the positive 5/4 exponential scaling rule: if the population of one city is 10 times that of another city, then the total amount of inventions and creations is five-quarters of the latter 10, that is, 17.8 times.
Theoretically speaking, other things being equal, the more population a country has, the more innovations it has, and the faster its technological progress will be. In addition, the ratio of innovation to population is exponential, not simple proportional. There are two reasons: first, knowledge has important economies of scale and spillover effects in production; Second, knowledge is not exclusive in use.
The population of China is four times that of the United States, 10 times that of Japan, 20 times that of Britain and 165 times that of Switzerland. According to the exponential scaling law of knowledge creation, China's invention should be 5.6 times that of the United States, 7.8 times that of Japan, 42.3 times that of Britain and 59 times that of Switzerland.
But the reality is that in the past 500 years, China's contribution to the world in terms of invention and innovation is almost zero, not to mention that compared with the United States and Britain, we can't even reach a fraction of the Swiss. The Swiss also invented surgical forceps, electronic hearing AIDS, safety belts, plastic surgery, liquid crystal displays and so on.
According to the statistics of Jack Chalona, a scholar at the British Science Museum, 100 1 was a major invention that changed the world from the Paleolithic Age (2.5 million years ago) to the year 2008, among which there were 30 in China, accounting for 3%. These 30 items all appeared 1500 years ago, accounting for 18.4% of the world's 163 major inventions/500 years ago, and the last one was the toothbrush invented by 1498, which was also the only major invention in the Ming Dynasty. In the 500 years after 1500, none of the 838 major inventions in the world came from China.
In the past 30 years, every important technology and product that supported China's rapid economic growth was invented by others, not by ourselves. We are just arbitrageurs, not innovators. We just built a small attic above someone else's building. We have no reason to be arrogant!
It took Newton 30 years to discover gravity, and it took me 3 months to understand the law of gravity. If I claim that I have covered Newton's 30-year journey in three months, you must find it ridiculous. If I laugh at Newton again, it only shows that I am too ignorant!