Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. West is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.”
From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in.
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses.
Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.
West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.
当两个人组成了一个家庭,很多资源能共用,多余的精力可以投放到更有生产力的工作中,实现一加一大于二。同理,当人类由独居变成群居,随着规模的增大,世界向前更进一步。 世界顶级理论物理学家杰弗里·韦斯特在《规模》一书中,用数学的语言告诉我们复杂世界存在的简单规律,...
评分信息浓度非常高的一本书。篇幅也不小,纸书有568页,致谢与注释只占7%。 全书讲各种复杂的东西中存在的普遍规律:哺乳动物体重每增加一倍,心率降低25%;城市人口每增加一倍,加油站只增加85%;城市规模越大,工资越高,GDP越高,犯罪案件越频发,艾滋病和流感病例越多,餐厅越...
评分关于发展的物理学视角 评《规模》 对于发展,人们都可以提出很多的问题来,比如人怎么会出现在这个地球上?生命的生长和消亡背后的机理是什么?经济发展背后的动因是什么?社会发展又有什么规律可言?等等。发展是一个哲学名词,是事物不断前进的过程,由小到大,由简到繁,由...
评分 评分本来我对人类未来能大幅度提高寿命还是挺乐观的,但是看了这本书顿时觉得希望渺茫了。
评分生物学思维还是很有好处的,英文也很优美
评分Very interesting book. A good way of looking at life and death. Animal, people and organizations are not all that different, with sublinear scaling whereas city has super-linear scaling. The key of keeping growth is to overcome discontinuity and use innovation to fuel the growth. However, whether singularity will come is still a question.
评分生物学思维还是很有好处的,英文也很优美
评分这本书会让你见识到物理学家风格的思维方法——“尺度分析”,和它带来的惊人结论。尺度分析本来只研究物理问题,而作者韦斯特把这个方法用在了生物学、社会科学和经济学上,结果一出手就等于横扫。这本书能让你见识一点世界的底层逻辑,了解一点物理学的套路,又能治疗某些流行的妄想。它难度系数有点高、道理有点硬,非常值得你来挑战一下。
本站所有内容均为互联网搜索引擎提供的公开搜索信息,本站不存储任何数据与内容,任何内容与数据均与本站无关,如有需要请联系相关搜索引擎包括但不限于百度,google,bing,sogou 等
© 2025 book.wenda123.org All Rights Reserved. 图书目录大全 版权所有