Quotes by Geoffrey West

About Geoffrey West:

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%.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

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.

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.

Geoffrey West

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

Geoffrey West

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 wil...

Geoffrey West

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

Geoffrey West

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.

Geoffrey West

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

Geoffrey West

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

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.

Geoffrey West

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.

Geoffrey West

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

Geoffrey West

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 infrastruct...

Geoffrey West

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

Geoffrey West

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

Geoffrey West

Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.

Geoffrey West

Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.

Geoffrey West

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

Geoffrey West

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.

Geoffrey West

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

Geoffrey West

Author Bio

  • NameGeoffrey West
  • DescriptionBritish physicist
  • AliasesGeoffrey Brian West
  • Born1940
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPhysicist