Geoffrey West

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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 resilient. ”

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are. ”

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth. ”

Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry. ”

Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years. ”

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. ”