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WORK TITLE: Scale
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): West, Geoffrey Brian
BIRTHDATE: 12/15/1940
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/geoffrey-west * https://sfi-edu.s3.amazonaws.com/sfi-edu/production/uploads/people/resumes/West_CV_2015.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 15, 1940; married; wife’s name Jacqueline (a psychologist); children: Joshua and Devorah.
EDUCATION:BA from Cambridge University, B.A., 1961; Stanford University, Ph.D., 1966.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Theoretical physicist and professor. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, instructor, 1970; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, professor, 2003, president, 2005-09, Science Board, Science Steering Committee; Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, leader and founder of the high energy physics group.
MEMBER:American Physical Society, fellow.
AWARDS:American Physical Society, Fellow and Centenary Speaker, 2003; Los Alamos National Laboratory, Senior Fellow; Ecological Society of America, Mercer Award; Weldon Memorial Prize, 2005; Glenn Award for research on aging; APS Szilard Award, 2013.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist who studies the fundamental questions in physics and biology, with a specialty in elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. He worked for many years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was a senior fellow and centenary speaker. He taught at the Santa Fe Institute, served on the Science Board and Science Steering Committee, and was president from 2005 to 2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” A fellow of the American Physical Society, West lectures around the world and at the World Economic Forum and publishes and edits books on physics and scaling in biology. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Particle Physics and Scaling in Biology
Along with Necia Grant Cooper, West edited the 1988 Particle Physics: A Los Alamos Primer. The illustrated collection of articles by particle physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory examine theoretical and experimental advances over the past twenty years. In varying levels of technical language, articles present information on the fundamental forces of nature, weak and electromagnetic interaction, gravity, quarks, gluons, and nonabelian gauge theories.
West and James H. Brown, Regents’ Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico, coedited the 2000 book, Scaling in Biology, part of the “Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity” series and drawn from a 1997 symposium at the Santa Fe Institute. The book addresses the biological process of scaling, such as various thicknesses in bones, which has been of interest for centuries by such people as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo. The editors collect essays that synthesize the diverse yet interrelated areas of scaling and address relevant topics in scaling in biology by experts in the field. Contributing to the understanding of quantitative biology, the book discusses allometry and fractal structure, branching of vascular systems of mammals and plants, biomechanical and life history of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, and species-area patterns of biological diversity. Writing in Quarterly Review of Biology, Rebecca Z. German commented: “Such a wide variation of subjects, beyond ‘traditional allometry,’ is well served by tile organization and unity of concepts the editors bring to this volume.”
Writing in Time International that “West brings one of the research community’s most versatile minds to bear on some of nature’s most complex questions,” Murray Gell-Mann described the type of work West and Brown are doing. For example, the relationship between the weight of a species of mammal and variables like blood pressure and metabolic rate have been found to be true from shrews to whales. In addition, studies of social animals can help humans learn about the formation of armies and terrorist groups. Gell-Mann concluded that West’s gift for science are what’s needed to encourage scientific disciplines to mingle to produce useful information.
In an interview with Gardiner Morse in Harvard Business Review, West commented on why science that studies scaling in biology could apply to business interests: “We’re finding that the equations for the growth of biological organisms – like the relationship between their mass and their energy use – look similar to the equations for the growth of a corporation or a city…We’re wondering if there might be fundamental laws that constrain the growth of social organizations regardless of what they do.”
Particle Physics and the Standard Model and Scale
In 2012, West joined coauthors Stuart A. Raby and Richard C. Slansky to publish the loose leaf bound edition of Particle Physics and the Standard Model, a reprint of the 1986 publication by Los Alamos Labs. In physical and mathematical terms, the book gathers various descriptions and basic laws of the nature of particle physics. There is information on the quantum electrodynamics field theory, symmetries, Feynman diagrams, rotations using trigonometry, CP violation, local symmetry with math, QED symmetry, quantum chromodynamics, besons mesons and basic particles with diagrams, quark-gluon interactions, particle masses, inelastic scattering/scaling, and particle decay with diagrams.
West next published Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies in 2017. Studying complex scientific principles, emergent systems, and networks, West can unite diverse phenomena that can govern rules pertaining to life cycles, plants, animals, aging, mortality, and even the growth of cities and businesses. For example, he has discovered that fractal geometry governing the supply of energy to mammals and the removal of waste from the body dictates the body’s size, growth rate, efficiency, and life span. Similarly, cities grow based on social capital (their version of energy), but they are able to grow virtually indefinitely regardless of size. Moreover, when a city doubles in size, the crime rate goes up 115 percent. Although dense with information, this “compelling work applies mathematical rigor to real-world problems; likely to be of interest to urban planners and entrepreneurs,” according to Library Journal reviewer Wade M. Lee.
In addition to offering scientific results, “the book is also a satisfying personal and professional memoir of a distinguished scientist whose life’s work came to be preoccupied with finding ways to break down traditional boundaries between disciplines to solve the long-term global challenges of sustainability,” according to Jonathan A. Knee in the New York Times. Writing in Kirkus Reviews, a contributor said: “Some of the concepts West explores are much-used elsewhere but rarely so clearly explained—e.g., how does a self-organizing system selforganize, and what emerges in the case of emergence? “
Despite the book featuring fascinating relationship between size and weight of animals, it has flaws. A reviewer in the Economist declared: “Mr West is an entertaining, chatty guide to the things that interest him. That is mostly to the good, although the chattiness does mean that ‘Scale’ suffers from a problem of scale. A ruthless editor could have excised at least a quarter of the words and created a tighter, more compelling book. Size is not always everything.” On the other hand, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted: “West turns up many fascinating paradoxes in this large, stimulating, and mostly lucid book of Big Ideas.” In his observation of biological and social systems, “West demonstrates that laws of scaling are remarkably universal,” said Macy Halford in a review in the New Yorker.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Economist, May 13, 2017, review of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, p. 75.
Harvard Business Review, March 2006, Gardiner Morse, “Geoffrey West on the Value of Free Thinking,” author interview.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of Scale.
Library Journal, May 1, 2017, Wade M. Lee, review of Scale, p. 89.
New Yorker, September 25, 2017, Macy Halford, review of Scale, p. 97.
New York Times, May 27, 2017, Jonathan A. Knee, review of Scale.
Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2017, review of Scale, p. 75.
Quarterly Review of Biology, June 2001, Rebecca Z. German, review of Scaling in Biology, p. 219.
Time International, May 8, 2006, Murray Gell-Mann, “Scientists & Thinkers: Geoffrey West,” p. 64.
ONLINE
Santa Fe Institute Website, https://www.santafe.edu/ (November 1, 2017), author profile.
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31“Ruling Passions.”New Scientist162 (1999): 34 R. Lewin“Built to Scale.”Science NewsOctober 16, 1999 P. Weiss“New Clues to Why Size Equals Destiny.”Science284 (1999): 1607 D. Mackenzie“Growth Clocked: Size and Temperature Predict Pace of Life.”Nature(2001) J. Whitfield“All Fired Up: The Universal Metabolic Rate.”Science9(21) (2001).AAAS “Science Update”radio show, 2001, K. Brown.“For All Creatures Great and Small: One Model Predicts Metabolic Rate.”Scientific American9(26) (2001) D. Labrador).“Faculty of 1000”.Review of Gillooly et al. 2001 Science paper designated as “must read” article, 2002, J. Eisen.2) Popular Press“Team’s Model Demonstrates How Evolution Obeys Mathematical Laws.”The Washington Post, April 7, A-3, 1997 C. Suplee“The Geometry of Weeping Willows and Blue Whales.”Daily Telegraph(London ), April 30, 1997 R. Highfield“All Things Great and Small: Model Shows How Energy Use by Most Life Forms is Related.” The Dallas Morning NewsApril 21, D-8, 1997 S. Goetinck“Team Explores Sizable Secret of Nature.”Albuquerque Journal, A-1, April 28, 1997, J. Fleck“Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale.”The New York Times, Science TimesD1 January 12, 1999 G. Johnson“Nature’s Blueprints.”US News & World Report60 June 14, 1999 J. Couzin“Square Root of an Elephant”The Financial Times(London) 11 June 19, 1999 C. CooksonHalf-hour Interview on CBC’s “IDEAS”Program, October, 2002 C. Whittaker“Metabolic Rate May Be Missing Factor that Aligns Genetic Evidence with Fossil Record.”Dallas Morning News, 2004 S. G. Ambrose“The Science of Synergy.”Santa FeanMarch 2006.“Connecting Maverick Minds, A Conversation with Geoffrey West”Harvard Business Review, March 2006.“In Focus,”Interview, KNME-TV, May 2006.
32“Breakthrough Ideas for 2007: Innovation and Growth, Size Matters,”Geoffrey B. West, Harvard Business Review, February 2007.“The Powers That Might Be, A Grand Unifying Theory of Biology?”Interview with Geoffrey West, The Scientist, March 2007.“Sleep Found to Repair and Reorganize the Brain: Why Mice Sleep Longer than Humans,”V. Savage, G. West, Harvard University Gazette, March 2007“Boomtown,”New Scientist, May 2007“The Living City,”Seed, August 2007“Size Matters: The Hidden Mathematics of Life,”Interview by Robert Krulwich, National Public Radio, August 2007“Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension,”NOVA PBS, October 2008“Four is the Universal Number of Life,”Super Interessante,Portugal, October 2008“Focus on Rethinking Scale”Alliance Magazine, Vol.15 Number 2 June 2010“Cities as Complex Systems”People and Places: Issues that Connect Us, Vol. 1 Issue 3 October 26, 2010Catalyst Networking Group Sandia LabNews, November 19, 2010“Cities As Barometers Of Socioeconomic Change Both Good and Bad”Radio Free Europe, November 2010“The Science of Cities”The Brian Lehrer Show,December 2010“A Physicist Solves the City”New York Times, December 17, 2010“One Man’s Slum is Another Man’s Manhattan”Forbes Magazine, March 23, 2011“The tallest tree in the land: New model predictsmaximum tree height across the United States; gives information about forest density, carbon storage”(Based on the PLoS One paper with Chris Kempes) MIT NEWS, July 18, 2011Interview with Steffan Heuer, Herrenknecht September 2011“Physicist Cracks Cities Formula”Interview, Atlantis,January 2012“Cityby Numbers”interview, Urbanite, January 2012Stanford Report Interview by Steve Tung on the upcoming Hofstadter lecture“Cities of Future”Staci Matlock for Santa Fe New Mexican
33“The Laws of the City”Interview by Ludwig Siegele for The Economist May 2012http://www.economist.com/node/21557313“The Urban Physicist Geoffrey West”Profile by Nikki Greenwood for Discover Magazine, October 2012Reflex MagazineInterview by Daniel Saraga (expected in print March) Reflex is a bilingual (French and English) Swiss science magazine co-financed by EPFL “Big Data Needs Big Theory”Scientific American,May 2013“Big is beautiful-Prepare yourself for even bigger megacities in the future”Interview with Lena Barner-Rasmussen for Wartsila’s company magazine. Wartsila is a global leader in power solutions for the marine and energy markets, and has taken an active role in creating solutions for future smartpower generation.Published in Sep 2013“Life in the City Is Essentially One Giant Math Problem”Smithsonian Magazine, May 2013“Bigger Cites Do More with Less” Scientific American, November 2013 “Megacities: slums or saviours of tomorrow” World Economic Forum Blog, November 2013 “The Rise of the Megacity”CNN blog, November 2013 “The Spark of Invention”Time magazine interview with Jeffrey Kluger November 2013 VIDEO, RADIOAND TELEVISION Yahoo Labs.Big Thinkers Presentation, Mountain View, CA,September 2010Growth, Innovation, and the Pace of Life from Cells to Cities and Corporations, Are TheySustainable?"http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/west-yahoo-cities-companies/The Brian Lehrer Show,The Science of Cities, December 2010http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2010/dec/23/science-cities/The Economist, NewYork,Feb 2011The Intelligent Infrastructure Series –The Ideas Economyhttp://ideas.economist.com/presentation/urban-physicsUrban Systems Symposium, New York,NY,May 2011Panel “Modeling & Measuring Cities”,Panel “Defining Urban Systems” http://www.livestream.com/urbansystemssymposium/video?clipId=pla_8614fa62-b2e5-426a-a5b7-6f2d0443757a
34X-Ray Earth National Geographic, May 2011(television)Edge.org, May 2011Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die and Life Gets Faster: A Conversation with Geoffrey Westhttp://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-westThe Forum –BBC podcast from TED, July 2011BBC World Service http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hsvwtTED GLOBAL,“The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations”Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2011http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.htmlLong Now Seminar, “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster”San Francisco,July 2011http://fora.tv/2011/07/25/Why_Cities_Grow_Corporations_Die_and_Life_Gets_FasterSetting Time Aright conference. “Emergence of “Universal” Time in Living Systems from Cells to Cities” Jesse Dylan video August 2011http://vimeo.com/31748227The Code, Episode: Prediction BBC UK August 2011(television)Radiolab.It's Alive? October 2011Interview with Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourthttp://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/its-alive/Conversation Crossroads with Garrison Leykam, October 2011http://conversationcrossroad.com/?p=3518Cambridge nights October 2011http://cambridgenights.media.mit.edu/SFI Website February2012Cities Scaling and Sustainabilityhttp://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-sustainability/“Thinking Cities”filmby Ericsson multimedia, February 2012Interview by Einar Bodstromhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC1oFkBVuLU‘More is Different’ Singapore,February 2012http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/conference-more-is-different/id523060215Documentary film on “Future Cities”March 2012VPRO Television(Netherlands)
35TED Radio Hour“What Does Nature Teach Us About Cities?”Radio Interview for NPR by Alison Stewart March 2012http://www.npr.org/2012/06/15/154806578/what-does-nature-teach-us-about-citiesKPFK (Los Angeles) Radio interview by Brandon Barney March 2012Defining Urbanites: how we became a city species and why it matters New Cities Summit, Paris, May 2012http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62nzu5oGGCg&feature=plcp&noredirect=1Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman“Is the Universe Alive?”Science Channel Televised June 2012http://science.discovery.com/tv/through-the-wormhole/episodes/season-three/is-the-universe-alive.htmlAdam Frank NPR and University of RochesterJune 2012To the Best of our Knowledge –Wisconsin Public RadioOctober 2012Interview by Steve Paulson “City as Organism” http://ttbook.org/book/city-organismFilm by Paul Hunter on Jane Jacobs. (title/date TBD) Dubai TV at the World Economic Forum in DAVOSInterview by Nada Saba for Regarding the “Rules that govern urbanization” ForumLive DAVOSDiscussing the Global Economic Council white paper “Perspectives on a Hyperconnected World” January 2013Interview by Gary Regenstein from Thomson Reuters http://new.livestream.com/wef/am13channel2jan25Interview by Joel FernandesJanuary 2013Infrastructure and Urban Development Initiative. Afilm by The Forum Media TeamVideo Interview for Skoll Foundation“Dare to Imagine” April 2013http://youtu.be/Q1eIYZjzO7APaul Cooke for “Horizon” BBC Documentary SeriesFebruary 2013Interview by BBC (TELEVISION) Pardee lecture on radio -WBUR, Boston NPR affiliate –“World of Ideas” hosted by Glenn Alexander May 2013http://worldofideas.wbur.org/2013/05/12/westInterview with Wesley Stephenson for “The Why Factor” BBC world service June 2013Interview with Melanie Fall (air date TBD)June 2013Film for the BBC on why the First World War happened andexposingthe myths that continue to cloud our understanding of the conflict
36Interview by Peter McManus BBC ‘Radio Features August 2013“Cities are the source of but also the solution to our problems”Interview with Mary-Charlotte Domandi for Santa Fe Radio Café,February 2014Discussing Science on the Screen’s Particle Fever http://www.santaferadiocafe.org/podcasts/?p=5585Interview on The Big Show with Honey Harris (KABC 98.1), February 2014Discussing Science on the Screen’s Particle Fever http://www.santafe.com/blogs/honey-harris)Edge.org a conversation with Geoffrey WestWhy Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster May 2014http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-westAspen Ideas Festival, Interview with Natalie MayerJune 2014http://www.aspenideas.org/session/science-cities-good-bad-and-uglyAspen Ideas Festival, "How Will Climate Change Transform U.S. Cities?" Interview with The Atlantic June 2014http://theatln.tc/19KSFh0Interview with Jason Fields for Reuters June 2014http://reut.rs/1FDumi4Aspen Ideas Festival, Interview by Baruch Shemtov for genConnectJune 2014http://yhoo.it/1MFlPNKInterview with John Elledge for the New Statesman June 2014http://bit.ly/1DH0ijj“The functioning of cities by the laws of physics” Interview with Rafael Garcia for Folha de Sao PauloAugust 2014http://bit.ly/1EdW3fKInterview with Lara Eli for Zero Hora, Brazil August 2014http://bit.ly/19KUsCFThe Julia Goldberg Show KVSF 101.5Discussion onthe upcoming eventat SFIwith Tony Hsieh August2014http://www.santafe.com/the-voice/podcast/burn-him#.VAHoyEivxxQThe Richard Eeds Show KVSF 101.5Discussion on the upcoming event at SFI with Tony Hsieh September 2014http://www.santafe.com/the-voice/show/the-richard-eeds-show1#.VAXWXf3Bq1wInterview with Isabella Kaminska for Financial TimesArticle for Financial Times House and Home on City Evolution –September 2014http://on.ft.com/1CVkVXO
37Interview with Susan Lazarus for South China Morning PostArticle for the Nobel Laureates Symposium, Hong Kong September 2014Nobel laureates offer ideas on battling climate changeThe Richard Eeds Show KVSF 101.5 Discussing on “The Theory of Almost Everything”January 2015 SELECTED CONFERENCES ORGANIZEDCo-Chair and Organizer of lst Joint US-USSR Gauge Theory Workshop, Yerevan, Armenia, USSR (1983).Chair and Organizer of APS Particle Theory Meeting, Baltimore, MD(1983).Organizing Committee, First Snowmass Meeting on Future of High Energy Physics, Snowmass, CO(1982).Chair, Organizing Committee, DPF Meeting, Santa Fe, NM (1984).Organizing Committee, Theoretical Advanced Summer Institute for Graduate Students (TASI), Santa Fe, NM (1987).Organizing Committee, Theoretical Advanced Summer Institute for Graduate Students (TASI), Santa Fe, NM (1987).Co-Chair, Organizing Committee, Santa Fe QCD Workshop (1989-1999).Organizing Committee, 1994 DPF Meeting, Albuquerque, NM.Co-Chair, Organizing Committee, Gluonia95, Corsica, France (1995).International Advisory Committee for the Conference Celebrating 100 years of the Electron, Perugia, 1997Advisory Committee to Orbis Scientiae Coral Gables Conference (1995 -present).Advisory Committee for the International Workshop on Hadron Dynamics, Frascati, November, 1996.Advisory Committee for the International Conference Celebrating 100 years of the Electron, Frascati, 1997.Co-organizer, Workshop on “Scaling in Biology,” Santa Fe,NM,October, 1997.Organizing Committee, International Conference on Biological Physics, Santa Fe, NM, September, 1998.Organizing Committee, Weak Interactions in Nuclei (WEIN 98), Santa Fe,NM,June, 1998.Chair of Committee, Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems, World Economic Forum,Dubai, Nov 2012
38Advisory and organizing committees for many conferences and workshops in both physics and biology (including advisory committee to the NSF and the API).Chair of Committee, Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems, World Economic Forum,Abu Dhabi, Nov 2013Co-organizer, Workshop onthe “General Principles of Physical Aging” Connecting the Biological and Physical Principles of Mammalian Aging, Washington DC April 2014SELECTED RESEARCH AWARDSProgram PI and mentor participant in SantaFe Institute’s undergraduate intern program, 1998-present.PI or Co-PI for $1.3M Annual External Funding (DOE and NSF)Co-PI (with Paul Ginsparg) for the successful and much-publicized EPrint Archive to the communication and dissemination of scientific research (1994-2000).Co-PI “New Mexico Adventures in Modeling: Integrating IT into the Curriculum through Computer Modeling Approaches.” NSF (2003-2007)Co-PI Universal Scaling Laws in Biology: Origins, Applications, and Ramifications.” NSF (2002-2007)Co-PI “A Broad Research Program in the Sciences of Complexity.” NSF (2002-2007).Co-PI “Research Experiences for Undergraduate Interns at the Santa Fe Institute.” NSF (2004-2007).Co-PI “A Broad Research Program in the Sciences of Complexity.” NSF (2007-2012).P.I. “Fundamental Scaling Laws in Biology,” Thaw Charitable Trust 2004-2009P.I. “ Universal Scaling Laws in Biology: Origins, Applications, Ramifications, and Extensions” NSF(2008 -2012)P.I. “Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site at the Santa Fe Institute”NSF (2009 -2010)P.I. “The Physical Foundations and Systems Biology of Aging”American Federation for Aging Research (2009-2010)P.I. The Physical Foundations and Systems Biology of Aging NSF (2009 -2011) P.I. Research in Biological Mechanisms of AgingGlenn Foundation for Medical Research (2009 -2010)Co -P.I. “ Towards a Predictive Theory of Social Organization and Dynamics” JSMF (2009 -2012)Co-P.I. “Comprehensive Program to Develop the Theory and Application of Urban Organization and Dynamics”Rockefeller Foundation (2010 -2012)P.I. “Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability” Thaw Charitable Trust (2010 -2014) P.I.“Innovation and Growth of Human and Social Organizations from Cities to Corporations” NSF EAGER(2010 -2012) Co-P.I. “ The Principles of Complexity” John Templeton Foundation (2011 –2014) Co-P.I. “ The Principles of Complexity” John Templeton Foundation (2015–2018) SELECTED MEMBERSHIPSExecutive Committee, Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society (1981-83).Program Advisory Committee, LAMPF (1981-83).Chair, Advisory Committee, Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz (1986-98).Postdoctoral Committee (1986-1990).Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (to the DOE and NSF) on the Future of Nuclear Theory (1987).Chair, Theoretical Postdoctoral Prize Committee (1987).ISRD Funding in Nuclear and Particle Physics Committee (1987).
39Chair, Search Committee for the Theoretical Division Leader (1988).High Energy Physics Task Force for the Superconducting Supercollider (1990-1993).Chair, External Advisory Committee, Department of Physics, University of Arizona (1990-91).Chair, Search Committee for the Director of LAMPF (1991).National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee for Physics (1989-1993).National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee for Physics (1989-1993).Committee on Metrics for Evaluating Research (1993).NSF Review Committee for the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP), University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara (1989); Chair, 10-Year Review, 1994).External Review Committee, Department of Physics, Brown University (1992-93).American Institute of Physics (AIP) Review Committee for “Physics Today” (1993).National Science Foundation (NSF) Visitors Oversight Committee (1995).Tactical Planning Committee (1995).Fellows Executive Committee (1995-1996).University of California President’s Search Committee for the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (1997).Science Board, Santa Fe Institute, (1999 –2005, 2005 –present).Search Committee, P-Division Director (2001).NSF Advisory Committee for Mathematical and Physical Sciences(2009 -2014)NTU Complexity Program Scientific Advisory Board (2012 –present) Future Cities Laboratory Scientific Advisory Committee (2012 –present)Board of Advisors Nautilus Feb (2013–present)Biodesign Institute External Advisory Board (ASU) (Mar 2013–present)Advisory Board Stockholm Resilience Center“What is Urban” project(Mar 2014 –present)Updated 3/18/15
Geoffrey West
Distinguished Professor and Past President, Science Board, Science Steering Committee
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. West served as SFI President from July 2005 through July 2009. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he was the leader, and founder, of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is one of only approximately ten Senior Fellows.
His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This led to the development of realistic quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles. This work, begun at the Institute, has received much attention in both the scientific and popular press, and provides a framework for quantitative understanding of problems ranging from fundamental issues in biology (such as cell size, growth, metabolic rate, DNA nucleotide substitution rates, and the structure and dynamics of ecosystems) to questions at the forefront of medical research (such as aging, sleep, and cancer). Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to understand quantitatively the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, including the relationships between economies of scale, growth, innovation and wealth creation and their implications for long-term survivability and sustainability.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was one of their Centenary Speakers in 2003. He has been a lecturer in many popular and distinguished scientist series worldwide, as well as at the World Economic Forum. Among recent honors he was a co-receiver of the Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America, the Weldon Memorial Prize (2005), Oxford University and the Glenn Award for research on Aging and the APS Szilard Award (2013). In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" and his work selected as one of the breakthrough ideas of 2007 by the Harvard Business Review. He is the author of several books, a visiting Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and an associate fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University.
West received his BA from Cambridge University in 1961 and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1966, where he returned in 1970 to become a member of the faculty. West is married to Jacqueline West, a psychologist in private practice; they have two children: Joshua, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California and an Olympic silver-medalist. Devorah, is studying International Studies at Stanford.
Briefly Noted
Macy Halford
The New Yorker. 93.29 (Sept. 25, 2017): p97.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
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Briefly Noted
[...]
Scale, by Geoffrey West (Penguin). Undergirding this sweeping work is the observation that biological and social systems respond similarly as they grow in size: an animal twice your size usually requires seventy-five per cent more calories to stay alive; as the population of a city doubles, the number of gas stations rises by around eighty-five per cent. However, cities, unlike biological systems, also manifest super-linear growth: double the size of a city and the crime rate jumps by about a hundred and fifteen per cent. Touching on subjects as diverse as Godzilla's infeasibility and the long-term survival prospects of human civilization, West demonstrates that laws of scaling are remarkably universal.
Mr Big; The maths of life
The Economist. 423.9040 (May 13, 2017): p75(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Cairo certainly does scale
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. By Geoffrey West. Penguin Press; 479 pages. Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
GEOFFREY WEST is the restless sort. He has spent much of his career as a theoretical physicist, working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. After a while he became fascinated by biology, then cities and companies. He is interested in all sorts of things, from Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ship designs to Ingmar Bergman's films. When he says that he drives his wife nuts, you believe him.
On one level, "Scale" is a book about Mr West's peculiar career path. But on another, it is about the hidden mathematical patterns underlying life, cities and commerce. Many things that appear unrelated are actually linked, he says. The size of an animal is related to the speed of its metabolism and its lifespan. If you know the population of a city and what country it is in, you can predict fairly accurately how many petrol stations it has and how many patents its citizens produce. Mr West even suggests that the mice and the metropolises are linked.
To take an odd example: how much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the 297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. The researchers came up with that amount by extrapolating from research on cats. They had simply scaled up a feline acid dose to account for the greater mass, without accounting for the fact that safe dosages for drugs do not quite double with a doubling in mass, and other factors also play a role. Extrapolate this over the many multiples of mass an elephant has over a cat, and Tusko should have had a few milligrams, not several hundred.
Non-linear scaling relationships such as these fascinate Mr West. "Underlying the daunting complexity of the natural world lies a surprising simplicity, regularity and unity when viewed through the coarse-grained lens of scale," he writes. In other words: do not get too distracted by what animals and plants look like, or how they have evolved. Just look at fundamental properties like their size and weight. These tend to obey mathematical laws.
Cities, he suggests, are a little like giant organisms. They often grow in the same exponential way. A map of lorry journeys looks a bit like a network of blood vessels. Cities also scale non-linearly. A city that is twice as populous as another does not have twice as much infrastructure and twice as much productivity. It has a bit less infrastructure than you would expect, and a bit more productivity per head (as well as more crime). Just as an elephant is a more efficient animal than a cat, big cities are more efficient than small ones. That is why people are drawn to them.
Having charted these patterns, Mr West is not quite sure what to make of them. He suggests that urban planners should think of themselves as facilitators of fundamental natural processes. But how, exactly, should they do that? Like many urbanists, Mr West admires Jane Jacobs, who believed that cities such as her beloved New York should be left to evolve naturally rather than being tweaked by meddlesome planners. In fact New York is one of the world's most rigorously planned cities. Its grid pattern was laid down when the city was just a small settlement on Manhattan's southern tip.
Mr West is an entertaining, chatty guide to the things that interest him. That is mostly to the good, although the chattiness does mean that "Scale" suffers from a problem of scale. A ruthless editor could have excised at least a quarter of the words and created a tighter, more compelling book. Size is not always everything.
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.
By Geoffrey West.
Review: How Laws of Physics Govern Growth in Business and in Cities
Jonathan A. Knee
The New York Times. (May 27, 2017): Business News: pNA(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
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The new book of Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, comes with a mouthful of a subtitle that suggests he has unlocked the secrets of human existence -- ''Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies'' (Penguin).
Spoiler alert: He hasn't. But don't let this dissuade you from joining him on an enchanting intellectual odyssey.
Mr. West's core argument is that the basic mathematical laws of physics governing growth in the physical world apply equally to biological, political and corporate organisms. On its face, his book's objective is to contribute to an overarching behavioral science of what it calls ''highly complex systems.''
But the book is also a satisfying personal and professional memoir of a distinguished scientist whose life's work came to be preoccupied with finding ways to break down traditional boundaries between disciplines to solve the long-term global challenges of sustainability.
The central observation of ''Scale'' is that a wide variety of complex systems respond similarly to increases in size. Mr. West demonstrates that these similarities reflect the structural nature of the networks that undergird these systems. The book identifies three core common characteristics of the hierarchal networks that deliver energy to these organisms -- whether the diverse circulatory systems that power all forms of animal life or the water and electrical networks that power cities.
First, the networks are ''space filling'' -- that is, they service the entire organism. Second, the terminal units are largely identical, whether they are the capillaries in our bodies or the faucets and electrical outlets in our homes. Third, a kind of natural selection process operates within these networks so that they are optimized.
These shared network qualities explain why when an organism doubles in size, an astonishing range of characteristics, from food consumption to general metabolic rate, grow something less than twice as fast -- they scale ''sublinearly.'' What's more, ''Scale'' shows why the precise mathematical factor by which these efficiencies manifest themselves almost always relate to ''the magic No. 4.''
Mr. West also provides an elegant explanation of why living organisms have a natural limit to growth and life span following a predictable curve, as an increasing proportion of energy consumed is required for maintenance and less is available to fuel further expansion.
When he turns to cities, Mr. West shows that infrastructure growth scales in analogous sublinear fashion. Hence, the number of gas stations or length of roads needed when a city doubles its size reflects similar economies of scale. But relevant socioeconomic qualities actually scale superlinearly by the same factor. And while it is good news that large cities produce higher wages and more patents per inhabitant, they also generate relatively greater crime and disease. This conundrum is at the heart of Mr. West's sustainability concerns. Theoretically, unbounded growth of cities generated by superlinear scaling ''if left unchecked, potentially sow[s] the seeds of their inevitable collapse.''
Despite his reliance on the analysis of huge troves of data to develop and support his theories, in the concluding chapters, Mr. West makes a compelling argument against the ''arrogance and narcissism'' reflected in the growing fetishization of ''big data'' in itself. ''Data for data's sake,'' he argues, ''or the mindless gathering of big data, without any conceptual framework for organizing and understanding it, may actually be bad or even dangerous.''
In presenting his own provocative and fascinating conceptual framework, Mr. West manages to deliver a lot of theory and history accessibly and entertainingly. Yet it is not clear whether that framework is robust enough to be applied productively to the business realm as he attempts to do.
Mr. West concedes early on that the strength of mathematical correlations on which he relies decreases as he moves from the biological to the urban to the corporate. Until relatively recently, Mr. West was unable to get funding to access a database of historical corporate information. At one point during the book, he actually seems to blame this challenge for the particularly thin results in this domain. The problems with his analysis of the business sector, however, may be more systemic.
First, it is at least questionable whether the constantly shifting hierarchal network structures of corporate organizations are consistent with the three fundamental characteristics of networks upon which his framework is based. Notably, a wide range of behavioral economics research, grounded in the pioneering work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, suggests that the optimization requirement is not likely to be met.
Furthermore, the consistent ''decay'' rates of corporations identified by Mr. West -- calculated by the longevity of independent public corporations over time -- does not correspond to any consistent change in underlying activity analogous to ''death'' in living organisms. Even in the context of bankruptcy, which Mr. West looks at separately from corporate ''death'' from mergers and acquisitions, good businesses with bad capital structures often continue ''life'' under new corporate form. It is not evident how meaningful mathematical calculations could be that treat such situations the same as failed businesses that are simply liquidated in bankruptcy for scrap value.
That ''Scale'' fails to realize the full promise of its title does not diminish the magnitude of its actual contribution and insight. In the 16th century, Francois Rabelais, a French scholar, admonished that ''science without conscience is the ruin of the soul.''
Mr. West's warning that big data without a theoretical framework is the ruin of science is an important contemporary corollary caution that ''Scale'' will hopefully establish for the next generation of scholars.
Jonathan A. Knee is professor of professional practice at Columbia Business School and a senior adviser at Evercore Partners. His latest book is ''Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.''
West, Geoffrey: SCALE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
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West, Geoffrey SCALE Penguin Press (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-1-59420-558-3
From a dean of complexity theory comes a sharp consideration of the pace and pattern of life in a universe of "complex
adaptive systems."Everything is connected to everything else: thus the great insight of modern ecology. But more,
writes theoretical physicist West (Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute), there is a "pervasive
interconnectedness and interdependency of energy, resources, and environmental, ecological, economic, social, and
political systems," and this interconnection gives us something of a grand unified theory of everything. West's book is a
succession of charts, graphs, and aha moments, all deeply learned but lightly worn. By the end of the book, readers will
understand such oddments as why it is that the hearts of all animals, from mouse to elephant, beat roughly the same
number of times across a lifespan and why the pace of life increases so markedly as the population grows (which
explains why people walk faster, it turns out, in big cities than out in the countryside). Some of the concepts West
explores are much-used elsewhere but rarely so clearly explained--e.g., how does a self-organizing system selforganize,
and what emerges in the case of emergence? Of overarching concern, of course, is scale: the behavior of
sequences of things and events in arithmetic and logarithmic numerical relationships, whether atomic bombs or
earthquakes or safe dosages of LSD and metabolic rates. These natural phenomena also have applications in social and
economic systems, as West discusses in such matters as the growth of cities and the decline and collapse of companies,
which are punished in time for their natural tendency to be "short-sighted, conservative, and not very supportive of
innovative or risky ideas." How risky West's ideas are is a matter of interpretation, but there's plenty of news in such
things as his conception of the "finite time singularity" that is unfolding all around us. Illuminating and entertaining--
heady science written for a lay readership, bringing scaling theory and kindred ideas to a large audience.
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Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth,
Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life,
in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
Publishers Weekly.
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p75.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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Full Text:
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities,
Economies, and Companies Geoffrey West. Penguin Press, $30 (496p) ISBN 978-1-59420-558-3
West, a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute, argues in this dense yet accessible work that
there are simple laws that underlie all complex systems, whether organic entities or human constructs. Animals, plants,
economies, cultures, cities, and companies are united by the fact that they come into existence, grow, mature, and
decline. West's central conceit in studying these phenomena is scaling: how a system changes when its size changes. He
finds that the answer is not obvious, but it can be expressed mathematically. For example, doubling an animal's size
increases its energy requirements by only 75%, which remains true whether one looks at a mouse or a whale. The
structures of civilization scale similarly, West shows, as he analyzes cities and corporations within this framework. He
supports his evidence with a plethora of striking charts and graphs that are notable for their simplicity. Reducing
biological and cultural systems to quantifiable data streams has become fashionable, if rightly contentious, but West
turns up many fascinating paradoxes in this large, stimulating, and mostly lucid book of Big Ideas. (May)
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"Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities,
Economies, and Companies." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 75. General OneFile,
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Gell-Mann, Murray
Source:
Time International (South Pacific Edition). 5/8/2006, Issue 18, p64-64. 1/2p. 1 Color Photograph.
Document Type:
Scientists & Thinkers: GEOFFREY WEST.
Section:
100 TIME
Master of Complexity
• THERE AHEN'T A LOT OF THEORETICAL physicists who have helped solve an old puzzle in biology. But then, not a lot of theoretical physicists are Geoffrey West. As president of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), West brings one of the research community's most versatile minds to bear on some of nature's most complex questions.
Science has never been a world of discrete disciplines. Rather, physics, geology, economics, psychology, even the arts all overlap in a kind of meta-system, with the principles of one touching those of the others. Investor behavior can mimic that of schools of fish; genealogical trees for languages can resemble those for species; mathematics can drive music.
In 1984, I was co-founder of SFI, a nonprofit research facility for theoretical work on just those kinds of phenomena. Geoffrey West's current research is among our most fascinating. Working with ecologist Jim Brown of the University of New Mexico, he has studied, for example, the relationship between the average weight of a species of mammal and such variables as blood pressure or metabolic rate. Such formulas are remarkably precise, holding true from shrews to whales. West and Brown are trying to see if similar relationships apply for social organizations such as cities and companies.
Think those things don't affect you directly? Think again. Studies of social animals, for instance, can teach us a lot about how armies and terrorist groups work, allowing us to respond better to security threats. Knowing how our brains learn can help us design better computers. Understanding the behavior of schools of fish can help us avoid disasters like the 1987 stock-market crash.
West, 65, a former theoretical physicist on the faculty at Stanford University and later head of the particle-theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, became SFI's president in 2005. His gifts are precisely what's needed to encourage scientific disciplines to mingle so freely.
Morse, Gardiner
Source:
Harvard Business Review. Mar2006, Vol. 84 Issue 3, p23-23. 1p.
Document Type:
Interview
Section:
Conversation
GEOFFREY WEST ON THE VALUE OF FREE THINKING
The Santa Fe Institute is both a rare bird and an odd duck: a research community without formal programs or departments, whose itinerant faculty of scientists and researchers engage in collaborative and wildly multidisciplinary work at the frontiers of neuroscience, network dynamics, complexity theory, and other fields. Though SFI research is open-ended and, by design, often less practical than theoretical, dozens of major corporations, from Procter & Gamble and State Farm Insurance to eBay and Cisco Systems pay $35,000 a year for the privilege of listening in on the conversation. HBR spoke with SFI president Geoffrey West about why such free thinking matters.
Some people would say that the state of innovation is fine – just look at the iPod, Google, and hybrid cars. Why do you think there's a problem?
When you talk about innovation, you have to distinguish between the invention of some new widget and innovation on a very big scale, which is what we're interested in at SFI. Looking at the great paradigm-shifting innovations that came out of American industry after World War II, things like the transistor and the laser, you realize that the driving force that gave rise to them was the enormously free innovation environment that places like Bell Labs fostered. This brought together serious scientists – physicists, engineers, mathematicians – from across disciplines and created a culture of free thinking without which it's hard to imagine these ideas could have come about.
SFI was founded more than 20 years ago in response to the suppression of that spirit – which has long been the trend in academia – and to the stifling of the free-thinking, risk-taking mavericks, people who have a broad view of their work and see how it fits into the big picture. Tenure and grant decisions are made with very narrow criteria in mind. And academic disciplines are divided into subdisciplines whose practitioners don't communicate. In the past few decades, corporations have generally followed this same path as they have focused on tightening business practices and improving efficiency. That may be fine in the accounting department and for the generic structure of the organization, but it's squeezing the life out of innovation.
Why should companies pay attention to organizations like yours?
I'm not saying that highly focused research labs can't create great innovations. Obviously they can. Probably 95% of research ought to be done in this conventional way. But my fear is that by eliminating that 5% reserved for the mavericks, we hobble our ability to discover the big, new ideas– the next transistor. That's a serious and tragic error.
Though most businesses seem to have blinders on about this, there are companies that sense the danger in taking this narrow focus, and that's one of the reasons they come to SFI. Our business network has more than 55 member organizations that send people to our events to hear about what's on the cutting edge, interact with other businesses, and engage in the culture of open inquiry. Many of them tell us that their visits here stimulate ideas that they can take back to their companies. InnoCentive, Eli Lilly's online brokerage that connects companies that have questions with chemists who can answer them, was inspired by network research at SFI. And Koichi Nishimura, the retired CEO of Solectron who's now on our board, told me that a talk on ant foraging he heard at SFI helped him think about ways to improve the company's distribution networks.
Your own research is on scaling laws in biology. Why would businesses be interested in that?
We're finding that the equations for the growth of biological organisms – like the relationship between their mass and their energy use – look similar to the equations for the growth of a corporation or a city. In organisms, there are clear limits to growth. There are good reasons why there aren't creatures bigger than a whale or a sequoia. We're wondering if there might be fundamental laws that constrain the growth of social organizations regardless of what they do. This is a work in progress, but it's a topic that business, I should think, would be interested in.
Our research group, by the way, is deeply multidisciplinary. I'm a physicist, but I've evolved into something like a biologist. And we have another biologist, two economists, a geographer, and an anthropologist. I don't think we could do this research without such a diverse group.
German, Rebecca Z.
Source:
Quarterly Review of Biology. Jun2001, Vol. 76 Issue 2, p219. 1/2p.
Document Type:
Book Review
Subject Terms:
*BIOLOGY
Reviews & Products:
SCALING Biology (Book)
u
403
Section:
General Biology
SCALING IN BIOLOGY. Based on a symposium held on 27-29 October 1997. Sante Fe Institute Studies in the Science of Complexity.
Edited by James H Brown and Geoffrey B West. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. $24.95 (paper). xiii + 352 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0-19-513141-X (hc); 0-19-513142-8 (pb). 2000.
The world is filled with natural experiments in scaling; phenomena that have attracted scientific attention literally for centuries, when Galileo first evinced an interest in the relative thickness of animal bones. This book, from a 1997 symposium at the Santa Fe Institute, acknowledges these roots, but provides both professionals and students with a critical understanding of current research.
One of the strengths of this book is the first chapter by Brown el al. They present not only an excellent 20-page background in the theory of scaling, but place the remaining chapters in the context of this summary. The review starts with the empirical observations that drive scaling studies: the results of life existing over many order of magnitude of size. They soon turn to one of the most fascinating aspects of allometric studies, the search for deductive laws to explain these regular patterns. The organization of the chapters, however, is based on the empirical hierarchy that has existed in allometry studies for years: scaling within organisms, among individuals, and in populations or assemblages.
Each of the three groups contains several clearly written chapters, with notable variations in each group. There are examples of the traditional engineering issues over a wide variety of organisms: Biewener (animal locomotion), Zamir (human hearts), and Enquist et al. (vascular plants). Several chapters put scaling in the context of other disciplines (i.e., the chapters on natural selection and scaling, or phylogeny and scaling). In the end, the variation across taxa, over-levels of organization, and among theoretical approaches are brought together by three overarching principles: the concept of integrated scaling laws with quarter-power exponents; invariant quantities that do not scale with body size; and symmorphosis, or the evolution of economy of design. The editors highlight these in the introduction and most chapters touch on these ideas. Such a wide variation of subjects, beyond "traditional allometry," is well served by tile organization and unity of concepts the editors bring to this volume.
Lee, Wade M.
Source:
Library Journal. 5/1/2017, Vol. 142 Issue 8, p89-90. 2p.
Document Type:
Book Review
Subject Terms:
*SUSTAINABILITY
*NONFICTION
Reviews & Products:
SCALE: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability & the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies & Companies (Book)
West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Pr. May 2017. 496p. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9781594205583. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781101621509. SCI
Creatures and companies have life spans but eventually die; why don’t cities? West (physics, Santa Fe Inst., NM; Scaling in Biology) examines scaling laws, or mathematical formulas for how things change with size, to answer such questions. Most intricate systems, both living and nonliving, in which many individual parts act together, do not scale linearly. That is, when the size of such a system increases, one begins to see economies of scale where bigger is relatively more efficient and where productivity is enhanced with size. West demonstrates that organisms become more efficient the bigger they are, but owing to an imbalance between energy needed for growth and maintenance or repair, they eventually perish. Cities, on the other hand, use proportionately fewer resources: their physical infrastructure grows but their social capital (their “energy” produced) actually increases relative to size, leading to an ability to keep growing indefinitely. This title explores why corporations seem to function more like biological beings than like cities. Ultimately, West calls for developing a comprehensive theory that addresses questions of sustainability and allows us to plan for a future in a multifaceted world. VERDICT This dense, yet compelling work applies mathematical rigor to real-world problems; likely to be of interest to urban planners and entrepreneurs.