The Greediness of Scales

Any straightforward attempt to capture the interactive relationships between size scales within a complexly layered material such as a bar of steel encounters immediate descriptive obstacles sometimes called the “tyranny-of-scales problem.” These obstacles trace not only to the unmanageable number of descriptive parameters required for such a task but to the fact that the localized models that capture the material’s scale-centered behaviors most effectively are syntactically inconsistent with one another. The innovations of modern multiscalar modeling have surmounted these barriers by developing descriptive architectures that implement clever forms of “divide and conquer” tactics. The tremendous effectiveness of these innovations offers great insight into the workings of practical language in general.