The essential question of the Scissors group during the summer at Hampshire College was:
The Scale of things, their Form and Structure and how they TRANSFORM - whether or not they are Invariant under transformations - are all important elements of nature.
The engineer who builds a structure, or deals with physical elements, needs to know how things change with size and weight. The artists needs to know how elements used in art are stable with time. The theoretical physicist wants to know about elemental forces that are invariant, or if not how they scale.
Simple investigations (experiments!) composed of measurements and making graphs of the results, or fitting data to some theory or theoretical model may reveal scale invariance's, or scaling laws.
These are important concepts to learn. It is the purpose of the subjects considered in this document to reveal these things.