When i was stuck on my the physics i was doing, or being slightly depressed about the s s c, i would work on this problem. And one of the s i quickly discovered in the literature were these remarkable scaling laws. A man named max kliber originally had collected this in the thirties and discovered an extraordinary regularity that it was incredibly simple. So how shall we think about what a scaling law is? Yes, let's talk about thatis, because i want that tat at's a good point of departure. It could be something as fundamental,. which is what im want to get into: metabolic rate, how much energy, how much food, if you like,
If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling relation was used by J.B.S. Haldane in his famous essay, "On Being the Right Size," to help explain certain features of living organisms. But scaling relations go much deeper than that, and they are often much more subtle than the volume going as the cube of the length. Geoffrey West is a particle physicist turned complexity theorist, who studies how features from metabolism to lifespan change as we adjust the size of an organism -- or of other complex systems, from cities to computer networks. His insights have important implications for innovation, sustainability, and the best ways to organize life here on Earth. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/geoffrey-west.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Geoffrey West received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he served as President from 2005 to 2009. He has been listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Home page Wikipedia page Amazon page TED talk on "The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations" Google Scholar publications Download Episode
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