Part 14/17:
Power laws extend beyond physical phenomena. Human activities like city populations, stock market crashes, or the spread of diseases all exhibit scale-free, uneven patterns. For instance, a few cities house most of the population, with many small towns. Similarly, stock market crashes tend to cluster—most days are small fluctuations, but occasionally, a crash dwarfs previous movements. These observations suggest that natural and human systems may self-organize into critical states, making big events not rare anomalies but emergent features.