Geoffrey West

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

"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 res…"

"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."

"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…"

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

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

"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."

"Cities are the crucible of civilization."