Part 2/17:
Nature’s Power Laws: Evidence of Criticality
Power laws are pervasive across natural and social systems. One striking example involves the scale of wars—measured by casualties—where the sizes of conflicts follow a power-law distribution. This means small conflicts are common, but large-scale devastations happen far more often than the normal distribution would predict. Instead of rare anomalies, huge events like world wars or earthquakes are more probable and significantly skew the average, making extreme events much more likely than traditionally thought.