Inverse Square Law

I've always been fascinated by the inverse square law.   This law of phsysics states the strength of a point source of energy loses its strength significantly as it moves away from the source.   This would apply to sound, radiation, electromagnetics forces, etc.  The first time I experienced this law was when I learned about it as applied to noise reduction in my industrial hygiene classes in 1977.  

So here is how it works:
If you are standing at a point at some distance from a noise source, you can measure a certain strength of noise.  If you now double the distance from the same noise source, the strength of the noise is now 1/4th what it was at the initial point.   If you triple the distance it is now 1/9th, if you quadruple the distance the strength is 1/16th, etc.   So each increase makes a pretty big difference.  It's really just a matter of simple geometry since the energy is radiating out from the source in all possible directions, so each spot (on a hypothetical sphere around the point) only gets a much smaller portion of the energy.

OK so it's always fun to apply these kinds of physical laws to the social sphere.  Let's not takes these too seriously, but maybe some of you out there might comment and suggest some.

Examples:

My wife Roz says her female friends are much easier to get along with than I, her husband.  Ignoring the real issues of gender and a sexual relationship, it's clear that the time and space to these friends is much less than for a marriage, and so a relationship inverse square law would say that the intensity of the relationship  would be far less.   In theory that should work equally well for both the positive and negative emotional manifestations.   But..

As we get further in distance from things and our information becomes "less" we are subject to a substantial decrease in the accuracy of our information.   Thus stereotypes stick to phenomena we haven't experienced first hand ("darkest Africa"; "crazy new yorker") while a human close to hand is observed with a greater degree of accuracy.

Telephone:  Try the game of whispering a phrase from person to person in the game "telephone."  The accuracy decreases by the inverse square of the number of people?????

Oh well.   It's a slow Friday and I'm just noodling.