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Portrait of Geoffrey West

Geoffrey West

(1940) Physicist

91 quotes in 387 categories

Geoffrey West says exponential growth shows human power, yet it also hides the seeds of our own downfall. He explains that cities are massive networks of roads, rails, and power lines that give each place a unique feel, and even slums can form their own social order and economy.

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Geoffrey West is a physicist, best known for H. G. Wells: a sketch for a portrait.

Quick Facts About Geoffrey West

Born: December 15, 1940
Profession: Physicist
Notable works: H. G. Wells: a sketch for a portrait

About Geoffrey West

Geoffrey Brian West is a British theoretical physicist and 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 population, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.

Quotes by Geoffrey West

“It’s extremely difficult to kill a city! On”

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Cities are the crucible of civilization.

Cities

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“the population bomb has been swept under the rug,”

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“bring in the big bucks or perish.”

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“TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CITIES”

Cities

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“can any of this be sustainable?”

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

Business

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Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.

Cities

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Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

Cities

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

Career

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Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.

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The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

Data

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When people come together, they become much more productive.

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“is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions”

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A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.

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Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.

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“The city as the engine for social change and increasing well-being is one of the truly great triumphs of our amazing ability…

Change

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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…

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“Thus, to avoid collapse a new innovation must be initiated that resets the clock, allowing growth to continue and the impending singularity…

Growth

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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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Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy…

Animal

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You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components -…

Behavior

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“But like all excellent, fulfilling and meaningful relationships, it has also occasionally been frustrating and challenging.”

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Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

Cities

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“If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the…

Heart rate

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“Only in very recent times has a perspective inspired by science and “rationality” been brought to bear on these profound questions in…

Logic

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“Yet despite appearances, the interstate system is in fact a quintessential fractal when viewed through the lens of the actual traffic flowing…

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“Ants brilliantly self-organized to evolve remarkably robust and hugely successful and sophisticated physical and social structures, but it took them millions of…

Ants

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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…

Amazing

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“It is all too often forgotten that the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and…

City

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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…

Cities

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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…

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“None of these systems, whether “natural” or man-made, can operate without a continuous supply of energy and resources that have to be…

Biology

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“In addressing a subcommittee of the National Science Board (it oversees the National Science Foundation) charged with reviewing “transformational” science, he remarked:…

Creative thinking

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“And in 1956, Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the Charles Darwin, wrote an essay on the forthcoming Age of Leisure in the…

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“Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living…

Cost of living

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“Continuous growth and the consequent ever-increasing acceleration of the pace of life have profound consequences for the entire planet and, in particular,…

Change

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“Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between…

Computers

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“Many of the most interesting phenomena that we have touched upon fall into this category, including the occurrence of disasters such as…

Investing

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“It behoves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great men to discover simple things. . . . How far even then…

Great men

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Geoffrey West by topic

City (17) Cities (12) Life (11) Science (10)