Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition
by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
164 Scaling Fallacy
The assumption that designs that work at one scale will work at smaller or larger scales.
Much is made of the relative strength of small insects as compared to that of humans. For example, a leafcutter ant can carry about 50 times its weight, whereas an average human can carry about half its weight. The standard reasoning goes that an ant scaled to the size of a human would retain this strength-weight advantage, giving a 200-pound (91-kg) ant the ability to lift 10,000 pounds (4,536 kg). In actuality, however, an ant scaled to this size would only be able to lift about 50 pounds (23 kg), assuming it could move at all. The effect of gravity at small scales is miniscule, but the effect increases exponentially with the mass ...
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