Scale
The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
About the book
Physicist Geoffrey West, former head of the Santa Fe Institute, looks for the simple laws beneath living systems, from bodies to cities and businesses. He took up a biological puzzle: why people live as long as they do and no longer. He found that mammals, despite their variety, are largely scaled versions of one another, so a species' size predicts its daily food intake, heart rate, time to maturity and lifespan. With each doubling of average weight, a species becomes about 25 percent more efficient and lives about 25 percent longer, a pattern West traces to the fractal geometry of the networks that deliver energy and clear waste. He also applies these scaling laws to cities.
Vinod Khosla put it on his 2017 book recommendations, describing it as physics applied to biology, cities, companies and economics, and calling its insights enlightening and delightful.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Vinod Khosla (Co-Founder/Sun Microsystem)
The physics behind biology, cities, economics and companies. Do they grow, scale and die by the same math equations? New insights that are enlightening and delightful.
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