The Problem Is Older Than the Factory
“Dad, if ants are so strong why can’t we just make really big machines that are built like ants and can carry heavy stuff for us?” Joel asks me.
Being a first-grader, I struggle with how to teach the difficulty of scalability.
“Sometimes things that work in small spaces don’t work when they get too big,” I tell him.
“Show me,” he dares.
So we build a small Lego structure that works wonderfully as at four inches tall. However when we attempt to create a human-size version it collapses.
“That’s the problem,” I tell him.
I don’t get into the formulas involved, but he’s able to grasp in a very tangible way that small things when scaled to larger spaces don’t always function as well.
I’ve been re-reading Socrates lately. I find it interesting that the same man (presumably) who had engaged in
