Geoffrey West Books
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on complexity science, biological scaling, and the quantitative laws underlying growth and innovation in living and social systems.
Known for: Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
Books by Geoffrey West
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
Scale explores the hidden mathematical laws that govern growth and life across biological organisms, cities, and companies. Drawing from physics, biology, and social science, Geoffrey West reveals how universal scaling laws explain why living things and human systems grow, change, and eventually die. The book connects patterns of metabolism, innovation, and sustainability, offering a unified framework for understanding complexity in nature and society.
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The Physics of Life
Life, in essence, is an energy management problem. Whether you are a cell, a whale, or a person, survival depends on how efficiently you extract, distribute, and use energy. One of the biggest insights of biological physics is that your size determines nearly everything about your metabolism, lifesp...
From Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
The Quarter-Power Scaling Law
At the core of biological scaling lies the so-called “three-quarter power” law. In simple terms, metabolic rate (B) scales as body mass (M) raised to the power of three-quarters—B ∝ M³⁄⁴. This law has been verified across species and environments, from microbes to mammals, suggesting that it is univ...
From Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
About Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on complexity science, biological scaling, and the quantitative laws underlying growth and innovation in living and social systems.
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Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on complexity science, biological scaling, and the quantitative laws underlying growth and innovation in living and social systems.
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