How fast do living organisms move: Maximum speeds from bacteria to elephants and whales

摘要: Despite their variety and complexity, living organisms obey simple scaling laws due to the universality of physics. In present paper, we study between maximum speed size, from bacteria largest mammals. While preferred has been widely studied in framework Newtonian mechanics, rarely attracted interest physicists, despite its remarkable property; it is roughly proportional length throughout nearly whole range running swimming organisms. We propose a order-of-magnitude interpretation this ubiquitous relationship, based on physical properties shared by life forms very different body structure varying more than 20 orders magnitude mass.