Geoffrey West Quotes
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The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.
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Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.
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A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.
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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.
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You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.
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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.
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Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where they - all these problems come from.
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Cities are the crucible of civilization.
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Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.
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We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.
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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.
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When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere.
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If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. They've come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That's why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.
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The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.
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It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.
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Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.
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I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.
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Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, 'Everything here is obeying my conjecture.' It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.
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Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.
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Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.