Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West
Geoffrey Brian Westis a British theoretical physicist, former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities. Among other things his work states that with the doubling of a city's size, services per capita will generally increase by 15%...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPhysicist
energy food human power rest runs takes
A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need about 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and find food.
per
The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.
hard
It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.
amazing govern
I've always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It's amazing that such rules exist. It's even more amazing that we can find them.
spent string theory
I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.
bigger cells energy hard harder less needed sustain
Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy needed to sustain a gram of tissue.
branch cent history length life mammal ninth offspring per physiology pulse rate size
Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry.
connection four individual powerful six true
On average, an individual doesn't have a powerful connection with more than four to six people, and that's just as true here in the U.S. as it is in China.
cities generic means principles relying scientific statement theory underlying
My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.
change ourselves requires traded
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.
life
Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.
scale woven
Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.
bit lead slums tumor ultimately unhealthy ways
Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.
great magnet people plays sucking
A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.