This topic was investigated many years ago and was known as "The Physics of Lill... | Hacker News

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		radley on Feb 5, 2010 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Scaling: Why Giants Don't Exist This topic was investigated many years ago and was known as "The Physics of Lilliput." For those who are only familiar with Gulliver's Travels as a movie, the 18th century book also includes a visit to a land of giants (Brobdingnag) and other places (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels). Thus the physics studied applied to both giants and mini-people (re: @AngryParsley). (only reference I could find: http://www.brookscole.com/physics_d/templates/student_resour...)

jackchristopher on Feb 5, 2010 [–]

The overall field is called allometry. Kleiber's Law is another reason behind our size and shapes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law

"for the vast majority of animals, an animal's metabolic rate scales to the ¾ power of the animal's mass."

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