Will I love Scale?

This is an immensely ambitious book, in which West discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern the behavior of complex systems, from cells and organisms to cities and companies. He argues that the life, growth, and death, of these systems all follow predictable power scaling laws, which can have major implications for our understanding of the world as well as our policies. As all grand theories, it may at times be overreaching, but even then it does so in a thought-provoking way.

Geoffrey West does a remarkable thing in this book; he brings his training as a theoretical physicist to problems of biology, global sustainability, and the economics of our cities. He shows the power of mathematics to illuminate remarkable facts about fundamental questions like "Is there a limit to how long animals can live?", "How big can animals get?" and even "Why do cities last so long?"

I learned how the square-cube law explains why you couldn't have a real-life Godzilla, that all mammals share roughly the same amount of heartbeats, and about branching patterns in our lungs, rivers, and trees.… show more.