Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Lifespan

How long will you live? & how long will it seem like? Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, has some interesting observations on the correlation between heartbeats & lifespans. He says "...larger animals have predictably slower heartbeats than small animals. ... The whale is a hundred million times bigger than a shrew, but its heart rate is just a hundred times slower. .....larger animals having a longer life span than smaller animals. These two laws together say, essentially, that there are the same number of heartbeats in your lifetime whether you are a shrew or a whale. It gives rise to the idea that big animals live very long but very slowly, and little ones live very fast but over a very short period of time." Read more here