Geoffrey West Quotations

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.

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

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.

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.