Geoffrey West Quotes

A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.
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.
Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.
Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.
Cities are the crucible of civilization.
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.
Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.
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.
Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.
Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.
I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.
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.
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 infrastructure.
It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.
Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.
My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.
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.
Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.
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.
Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.
12next›last»
Total Records : 29

Related Books

Author Profile

Votes :
Rating :
AuthorName
Geoffrey West
Profession
Physicist
View Profile

Share to your friends..

Related Author

Aaron Klug Cecil Frank Powell Charles Glover Barkla Geoffrey West James Jeans James Prescott Joule John Polkinghorne John Tyndall Oliver Joseph Lodge Paul Dirac Peter Higgs Roger Penrose Stephen Hawking William Henry Bragg
view more

Popular Topics

Attitude Death Inspirational Life Love Motivational Nature Positive