Geoffrey West quotes

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science. (Geoffrey West)
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. View quote
Geoffrey West
Cities are the crucible of civilization. View quote
Geoffrey West
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. View quote
Geoffrey West
It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company. View quote
Geoffrey West
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change. View quote
Geoffrey West
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. View quote
Geoffrey West
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. View quote
Geoffrey West
Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe. View quote
Geoffrey West
Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads arteries and so forth. View quote
Geoffrey West
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. (Geoffrey West)
Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development. View quote
Geoffrey West
The good news is cities are extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that they are also very hard to change. View quote
Geoffrey West
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. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can't have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It's not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales. View quote
Geoffrey West
Economics hasn't had an Einstein because it hasn't had a Galileo yet. View quote
Geoffrey West
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. View quote
Geoffrey West
Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, 'Everything here is obeying my conjecture.' It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling. View quote
Geoffrey West
Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't. View quote
Geoffrey West