Think size isn’t everything? Listen to Bill Gates’s favourite writer

The human world just keeps getting bigger. What’s more, we like it that way. All seven Wonders of the Ancient World are wondrous, primarily, for their size. And they’re just the successes. What about the glorious failures? What about the tessarakonteres, the galley built for Ptolemy IV Philopator in the early third century BC, with space for 4,000 oarsmen, nearly 3,000 troops and an unspecified number of catapults? Of course, it was impossible to steer. A couple of millennia later, on November 2 1947, Howard Hughes wrestled his fabled Spruce Goose, the world’s largest wooden plane (wing-span: 98 metres) into the air – but only for a minute. It never flew again.

Our successes are often less charming. In his new book, Size, Vaclav Smil lists some of them: pick-up trucks and SUVs have tripled their weight since the 1950s. Sizes of homes, refrigerators and televisions have followed the same trend – and so have we. Between 1896 and 1996, North American women gained 8.3cm and men 8.8cm, while Iranian men shot up by 16.5 cm and South Korean women by 20.2 cm. 

Size is a genial attempt to describe, in the broadest possible terms, one important aspect of the physical world: the effect of scale on structure. Some of Smil’s discussions deal with structures in nature. We learn why a small dog can take the weight of seven other dogs, but an elephant would collapse under the weight of just one more elephant. But most deal with the world we have made for ourselves, for Smil, a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst, is Bill Gates’s go-to commentator on energy and the environment.

And for good reason. Few environmentalists, and fewer economists, understand the wickedness of our current problems. We assume that the world affords us a certain kind of existence, progress and sustainable growth. Smil is there with his slide rule and basic mathematical skills to call it all out. Say, for example, you want to build an engine twice as powerful as your last one. Then, says Smil, you’ll have to double its weight, “no matter if the motors are a bird’s or bat’s muscles, reciprocating engines, or large turbofans. If you want a jet engine whose maximum takeoff thrust is twice as large, you must make it at least twice as massive.” Perhaps you want to build bigger, more compact cities to protect the environment? Well, says Smil, don’t. “Contrary to expectations, larger cities are not metabolically more efficient than smaller ones.” 

Easily the strongest part of Size is Smil’s interrogation, indeed demolition, of our modish and magical approach to mathematics, as though every phenomenon we contended with in life and politics could be reduced to talk of the bell curve of normal distribution, Pareto’s inverse power law, or that hoary old shibboleth, the Golden Mean. This includes a wonderfully acerbic description of Dubai’s “Frame”, that city’s most ill-advised folly, an empty 150m-high frame made of reinforced concrete, glass and gold-coloured steel, approximating Euclid’s famous 1:0.618 ratio and providing “a hideous demonstration of having money to waste”.     

Somewhere in this freewheeling account, there’s a good book struggling to emerge about the anthropology and psychology of size. Among many memorable tidbits, did you know the expansion in radius of an American dinner plate from 25cm during the 1980s to 30cm a generation later resulted in an increase of circa 40 per cent in people’s food intake? The psychology is what most engaged me. But other readings are possible – maybe too many. In his desire to organise the whole of experience around the single concept, Smil fails to find a focus, hustling the poor reader from pillar to post, “from perceptions and illusions to proportions and designs, from basic measurements to the scaling of bodies, organs and artefacts” and on and on. 

He puts as brave a face as he can on things: “There is no apotheosis here,” he warns in his preface, “no triumphal chords.” I think one is entitled to dig in one’s heels and demand: “Well, why the devil not?” This is what the Vaclav Smil who wrote Energy and Civilisation is rightly celebrated for: organising our thoughts and anxieties and particles of half-formed knowledge into something like intellectual coherence and understanding. Size is an endlessly entertaining career through fascinating territory. Still, I defy anyone to explain to me what it is actually for. 

Size is published by Penguin at £16.99. To order your copy for £20, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books