Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. West is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.”
发表于2024-11-02
Scale 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书
无论你住在哪里,你每天花在通勤上的时间是恒定的1小时。 这被称为马尔凯蒂定律,他把这个发现于1994年发表在一篇论文中,他指出,即便是是一个被监禁的犯人,没有地方可去,他每天也会走上一个小时。 理解这一点,对于理解城市的合理规模很有启发。人步行速度是每小时5千米,...
评分无论你住在哪里,你每天花在通勤上的时间是恒定的1小时。 这被称为马尔凯蒂定律,他把这个发现于1994年发表在一篇论文中,他指出,即便是是一个被监禁的犯人,没有地方可去,他每天也会走上一个小时。 理解这一点,对于理解城市的合理规模很有启发。人步行速度是每小时5千米,...
评分第一遍很粗略的翻看这本书,看得云里雾里,第二遍是为了写这篇书评,边看边写的,这本书想阐述的是世间万物里都有一个共性,他们都遵循着一定的潜在框架和规律,作者从一个物理学家的角度,融合各类学科的思想来思考这个问题。公司和城市这些事物会与大自然中的生命体有其不可...
评分为何几乎所有公司都只能生存数年时间,而城市却能不断增长,且能够避开即便是最强大、看上去最完美的公司也无法逃避的命运? 为什么即使大城市存在污染、犯罪、交通堵塞等问题,人们还在不断涌入大城市? 在我们人类所有面临和关心的问题之中,上述这些只是冰山一角而已。从能...
评分图书标签: 科普 complexity 管理 物理 Scale 科学-生物/医学/生命科学 生物学 心理学
From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in.
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses.
Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.
West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.
有点车轱辘话了
评分一个跨界物理学家竟能取得这么多成就!想去Santa Fe Institute朝圣
评分好书,作者对生物和社会组织,使用科学的方法,一数据分析的方式,推导出规模化扩张的一般规律。也解答诸如为什么蚂蚁这么小,却可以举起自身重量若干倍的重物等。
评分Very interesting book. A good way of looking at life and death. Animal, people and organizations are not all that different, with sublinear scaling whereas city has super-linear scaling. The key of keeping growth is to overcome discontinuity and use innovation to fuel the growth. However, whether singularity will come is still a question.
评分这本书会让你见识到物理学家风格的思维方法——“尺度分析”,和它带来的惊人结论。尺度分析本来只研究物理问题,而作者韦斯特把这个方法用在了生物学、社会科学和经济学上,结果一出手就等于横扫。这本书能让你见识一点世界的底层逻辑,了解一点物理学的套路,又能治疗某些流行的妄想。它难度系数有点高、道理有点硬,非常值得你来挑战一下。
Scale 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书