Scale invariance

Abstract

Scale-invariance is one of the concepts that appears more often in the context of complexity. The basic idea behind scale-invariance can be naively expressed as: ‘the system looks the same at every scale’. Or, ‘if we zoom in (or out) our view of the system, its features remain unchanged’. Although it is true that complex dynamics are often at work when a system exhibits scale-invariance, it is important to be aware that this is not always the case. For instance, the random walk [1] is a process that exhibits scale-invariance but with underlying dynamics that are far from complex in any sense of the word (see Chap. 5).