Scalability

A friend was talking to me yesterday about the challenges of scaling technology. His example was the wind turbine, a fairly environmentally friendly means of generating electrical power. How much electricity would you get if you broke that wind power machine down into 10,000 machines instead? If it was perfectly scalable you would get the same amount, but as you go smaller and smaller, you run into manufacturing problems (you need to use lasers for cutting and the materials behavior becomes a larger issue), simple mechanical challenges in overcoming friction effects (bearings and driveshafts), and I guess if you go small enough you have to deal with (like in the movies Fantastic Voyage) Brownian motion. Nevertheless, the ability to scale up and down presents surprising opportunities for engineers.

 Physicists have always been arguing about the limits at which “man the builder” could scale his creations. Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture, There’s plenty of room at the bottom, sets out the basics for what we today call nanotechnology, and includes the interesting insight that smallness makes quality control easier. In that same year, Feynman’s cohort, Freeman Dyson came up with the notion that we might be able to identify advanced civilizations by their ability to make Dyson spheres, megaengineering projects designed to take full advantage of the light from a star (most likely a red dwarf). Ironically, these thoughts arose at the end of an era when architects had been pushing to keep our living at the “human scale.” For Alvar Aalto and Frank Lloyd Wright, it meant shoving their well-heeled clientele into fairly cramped sleeping spaces.

My sense is that these two trends are still colliding. Our children are now expected to go to work in factories the size of a matchbox, live in huge sprawling metropolises and somehow behave ethically in the meatgrinder of the global economy. At the same time, they should be experiencing a sense of community and the same connection with nature our ancestors enjoyed. As we scale our technologies up and down, we should remember that our ventures into new scales will expose not just new strengths, but also our frailties. Joan Didion’s observation that “everything can change in a moment” suggests there is a danger in getting too comfortable with a moment or a certain scale of thought. Architects that break expectation are in fact doing us a great service. Steve Holl’s Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art comes to mind here. (There is an interesting discussion of his latest work in China here and here.)    

Finally, both Dyson and Feynman worked in the early years of nuclear power. Dyson was on a team that came up with the “safe” nuclear reactors used in submarines. To my knowledge, the idea of distributed nuclear power (say, four of five little nukes per household) died with the atomic train. Yet if we can consider putting a half-million little windmills on the skins of buildings, why not? And if we can imagine engineering to any scale, why not come up with criteria for optimal scale that could please scientists and artists alike?