3 ms·
Why are cells mostly the same size across all organisms? Well some things get better with area and some things get worse with volume, and since those grow at d
by pvillano 4y ago
Why are cells mostly the same size across all organisms?
Well some things get better with area and some things get worse with volume, and since those grow at different rates, there's an optimal size for which the difference is maximized.
Pretty much any emergent constant size can be explained by the intersection of two functions.
Snowflakes fly up from area and fall down from volume, so there's a maximum size they can stay in a cloud
- Rayhem 4y agoI think this analysis is great and I like it a lot, but it's not quite what I was going for. Here, the size of a cell works against an independent measurement of length like "one meter". But, at a much more fundamental level, I kind of meant why is a meter a meter? If everything in the universe doubled in length overnight, how would we know since our meter sticks would double, too, which admits two possibilities: 1) If lengths are absolutely fixed, why are they fixed at that scale? Why *didn't* things end up doubled (assuming an external absolute to measure against). 2) If they're *not* absolutely fixed, the "fundamental length" appears pretty fixed to us as humans because things kind of look the same day-to-day. Is there a variation we just don't perceive? Is the fixedness we see just us imposing part of our perception on the world? It's sort of like this illustration of gauge fixing[1] -- just like "how do you know the cylinder is twisted?", you can ask "how do you know your fundamental lengths?" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_fixing#An_illustration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_fixing#An_illustration