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Astrophysicists Prove That Cities On Earth Grow in the Same Way As Galaxies in ...
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These guys begin by creating a mathematical model of the way human population density varies across
a flat Euclidean plane. (They say they can ignore the effects of the Earths curvature in their model
because any variations in population density will be small compared to the radius of the Earth.)
That is exactly how cosmologists think about the way galaxies evolved. They first consider the matter
density of the early universe. Next, they look at the mathematical structure of any variations in this
density. And finally they use this mathematics to examine how this density can change over time as
more matter is added or taken away from specific regions.
Because of the many decades of work on cosmology, these mathematical tools are already well
understood and easily applied to the similar problem of the population density on Earth. All that is
needed is some data to calibrate the mathematical model.
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For example, the time it takes for any perturbations in the population density to smooth themselves out
is of the order of five years. Thats the timescale over which about 35 percent of people in the US
change residences.
Having created a model of the way that population density varies, Lin and Loeb test the model against
publicly available data. The results are in good agreement with the theoretical prediction across a
broad range of spatial scales, from a few km to 10^3 km, they say.
They go on to calculate the number of cities above a certain population threshold and show using the
model that this quantity has a logarithmic slope equal to -1. This statement is equivalent to Zipfs law:
the rank of a city is inversely proportional to its size, point out Lin and Loeb.
They also calculate the average number of friends a person might have within a given region. And once
again their model comes up with the inverse-rank friendship law that urban sociologists are already
familiar with.
Interestingly, they say their model leads to the same laws for a wide range of initial conditions. Thats
important because the models do not require any fine-tuning to match the observed data, a problem
that cosmologists are frustratingly well versed in.
The work of Lin and Loeb is not just a mathematical curiosity. It has important implications for other
factors that are related to population density, such as the spread of disease. Indeed, they say their
model points to a new way of determining how disease spreads based on a parameter they call the bias
factor, which ought to be observable in historical data on epidemics.
Just as the development of models for non-linear structure formation in the universe led to a wealth of
theoretical and observational work in cosmology, future work here could include the calculation of new
observables such as the bias factor for the spread of epidemics, they conclude.
Thats a fascinating piece of science that leads to a unified theory of urban evolution for the first time.
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00738 A Unifying Theory for Scaling Laws of Human Populations
Tagged: Communications
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