What are Scaling Laws?
Scaling laws are a concept in science and engineering. It refers to variables which change drastically depending on the scale (size) being considered. For example, if you tried to build a 50-ton mining vehicle using the same engineering assumptions as a 2-ton car, you would probably end up with a vehicle that doesn’t even run. The term “scaling laws” often appears when considering the design of a construct that is unusually large or small, so that careful thought is necessary to extend principles of typical-sized constructs to unusually-sized constructs. Some scaling laws are simple. For instance, “for a three-dimensional construct, volume increases with the cube of linear dimensions.” This simply means that for every 10 times increase in linear dimensions, the construct’s volume increases by a factor of 1000. This is significant for designing machines or structures: if you wanted to double the capacity of a water tower, you’d only increase its linear dimensions by a few dozen percent,
