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From one of the most influential scientists of our time, an exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. But, West's discoveries are beautiful and he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer.
The result was astonishing and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything, including how much food it eats per day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, and its life span. If you compare a mouse, a human, and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25 percent more efficient - and lives 2 percent longer. West's work has been game changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability.
Cities, too, are constellations of networks, and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. Scale is a scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Geoffrey West has shown how cities, companies, and biological life follow the same powerful principles of life.
Geoffrey West is the Shannan Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute and an Associate Senior Fellow of Oxford University’s Green-Templeton College. West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions ranging across physics, biology and the social sciences, motivated by the search for unifying principles and the “simplicity underlying complexity”. Most recently he has been developing a science of cities and companies, including the challenge of long-term global sustainability. West has lectured at many high profile events including TED and Davos. He has received many awards and his work featured in numerous publications, podcasts and TV productions. He is the author of the best-selling book Scale; The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies and was named to Time magazine's list of "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2007.
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which is a beneficiary organization of the New Mexico Humanities Council.