Thursday, October 14, 2021, 16:00
online only
(for the zoom link contact michael.spira@psi.ch, johannes.schlenk@psi.ch or
antonio.coutinho@psi.ch)
Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute
Abstract:
Why do we stop growing, live for 100 years and sleep 8 hours a day? Why
do companies and people die whereas cities keep growing and the pace of
life continues to accelerate? How are these related to metabolism,
innovation, wealth creation, social networks, and long-term global
sustainability? These are among the questions addressed in this lecture.
Although life is probably the most complex phenomenon in the Universe,
many of its fundamental characteristics scale with size in a
surprisingly simple universal fashion: metabolic rate, for example,
scales systematically from cells to whales, while time-scales from
lifespans to growth-rates, and sizes from genome lengths to tree
heights, do likewise. Remarkably, cities, companies and universities
exhibit similar systematic scaling: wages, profits, patents, crime,
disease, and roads also scale approximately universally. The origin of
these laws will be explained and a conceptual theoretical framework
based on generic principles of the networks that sustain life from
circulatory systems to social networks will be presented. Their
dynamics, which transcend history, geography and culture, have dramatic
implications for growth, long-term global sustainability and collapse.