TESTING THE POWER LAW ON URBAN WATER AND WASTEWATER PIPELINE NETWORKS / Å teste hypotesen om at ”Power Law” kan knyttes til ledningsnettverk for vann- og avløpssystemer i byer
Active research has been going on to observe and validate the Power Law in physics, computer science, economics, linguistics, sociology, geophysics etc. This paper sets out to test the hypothesis that the Power Law is a feature of water and wastewater pipeline networks in cities. Databases from 30 different municipalities in Norway serve as the raw data to be processed. The findings may seem a bit intuitive in retrospect, but the numerical results provide some interesting insights. There is greater conformity to the Power Law when the number of pipelines in different length-classes is taken into account, as compared to when the total length in each length-class is considered. By considering only the equations with a high degree or conformity to the Power Law, it is possible to derive a standard equation representing an ‘average saturated Norwegian water and wastewater pipeline network.’ The authors recommend similar analyses of networks in other parts of the world in order to confirm the possible existence of the Golden Ratio (the solution of the equation x 2 – x – 1 = 0) and the Euler number (the base of the natural logarithm) e, in the scheme of things.