5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life

5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life

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

Jaksot(424)

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a...

19 Marras 20181h 7min

22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

22 | Joe Walston on Conservation, Urbanization, and the Way We Live on Earth

There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change. But perhaps there is a tiny cause for optimism...

12 Marras 20181h 28min

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply ...

5 Marras 20181h 20min

20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

20 | Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

Special Halloween edition? Scott Derrickson is a film-lover first and a director second, but he's been quite successful at the latter -- you may know him as the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doct...

29 Loka 20181h 23min

19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future

19 | Tyler Cowen on Maximizing Growth and Thinking for the Future

Economics, like other sciences (social and otherwise), is about what the world does; but it's natural for economists to occasionally wander out into the question of what we should do as we live in the...

22 Loka 201859min

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe for...

15 Loka 20181h 12min

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our a...

8 Loka 20181h 11min

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundwo...

1 Loka 20181h 4min

Suosittua kategoriassa Tiede

rss-mita-tulisi-tietaa
rss-poliisin-mieli
tiedekulma-podcast
rss-lihavuudesta-podcast
utelias-mieli
koodikahvit
docemilia
radio-antro
rss-ranskaa-raakana
rss-duodecim-lehti
rss-metsantuntijat-podcast
rss-tervetta-skeptisyytta
hippokrateen-vastaanotolla
mielipaivakirja
filocast-filosofian-perusteet
rss-duokkari-ekstra
rss-astetta-parempi-elama-podcast
rss-miljonaarien-tasavalta