SCALABILITY ________________ I am becoming intrigued with the notion of scalability. One of the simplest ways of describing it in words, is the use of letters, for example in a word processor. Type is measured in points. Here are a few examples: This is 12 point (pt) Times New Roman. (Times New Roman merely describes the font or style of lettering) This is 8 pt This is 18 pt This is 24 pt Now my word processor (and most probably yours) is able to print from 4 pt up to 72 pt. There are limitations based only of the readability and space available in actual usage! Technically it is possible to make these letters much smaller or much larger. Notionally, we have no idea as to the limits of their scalability. There is no 'mean' size, except the first set of letters created by an author but that is an arbitrary decision. We are what we observe but that does not mean that things we cannot directly observe are not able to exist. I am not talking about metaphysical concepts; these are another realm of the human spirit and have no place in this essay. There is no reason, I am supposing, that all things that occur in the universe are not scalable. What intrigues me is that there can be no limits to that scale. There may be limits to any particular species' ability to scale objects (or even ideas) but in the universe-as-a-whole, why should there be any limits? From a humble (?) formula, the Mandelbrot set (for example) is infinitely scalable; the more you 'zoom' in, the more complex it becomes. Things are scalar because they are not linear. They appear to be linear but they are not, the closer we get. This monitor I am looking at appears to show very clear letters, words and so on but the closer you get, the more it appears as smaller squares, since that is the nature of monitors. As far as our eyes are concerned, the smaller the squares, the clearer are the letters and words. The limits are within the range of our visual perception (in this case). Below a certain range, the letters become meaningless. Above a certain range of visual perception, it makes little difference. Sound is a better example but remains the same concept. As human animals we can't hear lower than our audio perception, nor higher. Other creatures can and do depending on their needs. We might ask: how low is low and how high is high? There are no limits in either direction. We, as human animals, have limits to what we can know or understand. We must learn to live within those ranges of thoughts and deeds. This does not preclude trying to extend those ranges. One of our problems is that we often think that we have reached the range of our limitations and that what we know is taken for granted and we stagnate. It is the exploring and extending our knowledge (from the data that we observe) that is important to understanding. The jury is never 'in'; it is always 'out'. There should never be a 'consensus'. That means stagnation, not dynamism. Scalability ranges from the infinite to the infinite. What we observe (through our senses as human animals) are only instances along that continuum of infinity.

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