Biomedical subjects

O Dreyer

Publications and source records attributed to O Dreyer.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Allometric scaling and central source systems.

Allometric scaling relations abound in nature. Examples include the power law relating the metabolic rate of animals and plants to their masses and the power law describing the dependence of the size of the drainage basin of a river on the total amount of water contained in that river. The exponent is of the form D/D+1, where D is the dimension of the system. We show that this scaling exponent is simply a consequence of the source distribution of the systems considered and requires no further assumptions. To demonstrate the wide range of validity of the result we present a simple experiment that shows the predicted behavior in one dimension.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2001

Allometric scaling in animals and plants.

In this paper we give a derivation for the allometric scaling relation between the metabolic rate and the mass of animals and plants. We show that the characteristic scaling exponent of 3/4 occurring in this relation is a result of the distribution of sources and sinks within the living organism. We further introduce a principle of least mass and discuss the kind of flows that arise from it.

Animals↗

PubMed2000

Generic isolated horizons and their applications

The notion of isolated horizons is extended to allow for distortion and rotation. Space-times containing a black hole, itself in equilibrium but possibly surrounded by radiation, satisfy these conditions. The framework has three types of applications: (i) it provides new tools to extract physics from strong field geometry; (ii) it leads to a generalization of the zeroth and first laws of black hole mechanics and sheds new light on the "origin" of the first law; and (iii) it serves as a point of departure for black hole entropy calculations in nonperturbative quantum gravity.

Journal Article↗