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Geoffrey West [1940-0] British

Rank: 103
Physicist

Geoffrey Brian West is 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%.

Amazing, Finance, Health

Quote	Tags	Rank
Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.		101
When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.		102
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.	Amazing	103
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.		104
Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.		105
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.	Finance, Health	106
Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, 'Everything here is obeying my conjecture.' It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.		107
Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.		108
Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.		109
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.		110
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.		111
A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.		112
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.		113
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.		114
Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.		115
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.		116
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.		117
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.		118
Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.		119
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.		120
Every fundamental law has exceptions. But you still need the law or else all you have is observations that don't make sense. And that's not science. That's just taking notes.		121
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.		122
It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.		123
Cities are the crucible of civilization.		124
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.		125
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.		126
The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.		201
I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.		202
The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.		203

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