No small feat

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/06/2023 (821 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Is there anything about the material world that Vaclav Smil does not know?

That is a fair question about the highly regarded Winnipeg scientist’s latest book, Size: How It Explains the World, a fearsomely erudite and occasionally pedantic exploration of the role physical size, or lack of it, plays in the evolution and development of our planet and the millions of living species and inanimate objects on it.

Want to know how long it took for single-cell microbes to evolve into multicellular organisms and then into massive dinosaurs?

Curious about the growth in the dollar value of corporate mergers between 1985 and 2021?

Do you wonder if the imaginary giants in Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century literary classic Gulliver’s Travels could withstand gravity if they were somehow brought to life?

These are among the hundreds of diverse topics covered in this wide-ranging and often brain-breaking work of pop science. From architecture to zoology, and most subjects in between, Smil examines the observable rules governing size and shape in material creation.

Smil’s breadth of knowledge, not to mention his academic style and math-reliant analysis, will be familiar to those who have attempted any of the previous 45 volumes in his collected works.

This one differs by steering clear of Smil’s main expertise, the production and consumption of world energy sources, especially fossil fuels.

Having fled the former Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion Smil, now 79, arrived at the University of Manitoba in 1972 after completing his PhD in geography in Pennsylvania.

These days Smil gets mentioned among such influential science communicators as astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, psychologist Steven Pinker and the late biologist Edward O. Wilson.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is his biggest cheerleader. “I wait for new Smil books,” Gates wrote a few years ago, “the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”

While most of his books have been published in small runs by American university presses, Size is Smil’s third title to be released by a mainstream trade publisher. The first two, Numbers Don’t Lie (2021) and How the World Really Works (2022), were from Penguin Random House.

The 2021 title offers the most accessible introduction to Smil — his hobbyhorses, his rhetorical techniques and the scope of his intellect — given that it collects 71 short essays he wrote for the U.S. electrical engineering journal IEEE Spectrum.

Size comes from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. But this must have been a last-minute switch, because its cover-art theme carries over from the previous two and, in his acknowledgements, Smil thanks a “quartet” of pros at PRH.

Regarding Gates’ endorsement, Size might indeed be best appreciated by computer geniuses who have founded major software dynasties. Mere mortals might struggle with the book’s density and Smil’s refusal to pander to his audience.

In the book’s opening sentence, he quotes the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras’s maxim “Man is the measure of all things” in its original alphabet.

He does not shy away from wielding precise scientific terminology and mathematical equations, which will fly over the heads of even educated laypeople.

He only uses metric measurements, despite this being a U.S.-published book aimed at metric-resistant American readers.

Sometimes Smil’s love for data could be reined in. In a sentence about airplane seats needing to be comfortable for long fights, he can’t help but insert a parenthetical fact: “the longest scheduled direct connection, between New York and Singapore, takes 18 hours and 40 minutes.”

OK, these things are good to know. And readers whose hard drives can store this avalanche of facts — at least 25 per page times 220 pages for a minimum of 5,500 (the closest to a Smilian calculation an English major can manage) — will come away from Size with a much bigger brain.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.