Uncontrolled Growth

Our "thought for the day" comes from Michael Crichton, and from the novel that made him famous, The Andromeda Strain (1969).

"The mathematics of uncontrolled growth are frightening. A single cell of the bacterium E. coli would, under ideal circumstances, divide every twenty minutes. That is not particularly disturbing until you think about it, but the fact is that bacteria multiply geometrically: one becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and so on. In this way it can be shown that in a single day, one cell of E. coli could produce a super-colony equal in size and weight to the entire planet Earth."

The mathematics of geometrical progression is what famously freaked out the Reverend Malthus, too.