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Geoffrey West Quotes

born 1940 England

Geoffrey Brian West (born 15 December 1940) is a British theoretical physicist, former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe

England
Academics
Physicists

Random Geoffrey West quote

10 quotes

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

It’s hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

The good news is cities are extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that they are also very hard to change.

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

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.

Economics hasn't had an Einstein because it hasn't had a Galileo yet.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

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.

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Geoffrey West (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.