Name: Scale
ISBN: 9781594205583

Scale

"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. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, 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 issues of 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, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of 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.

What Hacker News says

dlcarrierSep 2026

Normally I'd be recommending some kind of Sci-Fi or Fantasy series, but based on your reading list, here's a couple of books from the boring science genre that I actually finished, so they have to be at least somewhat worthwhile:

- Scale (Geoffrey West) - When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… (Steven Pinker)

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devnonymousSep 2026

Coincidentally, I am reading 'Scale' by Geoffrey West where this concept of impedence matching is discussed (amongst many other things). It is fascinating how impedence matching was arrived at in biological systems viq evolutionary pressure to optimize energy usage.

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0xcafefoodSep 2025

It's not mentioned in this article, but Geoffrey West's book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" give a fascinating and approachable overview of similar ideas.

One of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)

It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.

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ajmurmannAug 2025

You might enjoy the book Scale by Geoffrey West. One of the cool things he shows is that infrastructure needs of cities scale with an exponent of 0.85 while social things like incomes, patents but also crime scale with an exponent of 1.15. So as cities grow they get more efficient and it seems to be somewhat of a natural law that crosses countries and cultures.

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liampullesJul 2025

There is an interesting book called Scale by Geoffrey West, which speculates about how the scale of things like organisms and cities is bound by spatial networks. Worth a read

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emanuerApr 2025

Well, you seem crazy enough to, possibly, find some sort of enjoyment from this book: The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian The author explores an philosophical framework to explain the universe through the lens of entropy. I loved it.

Also, it is my firm believe that in the moment you have emergence at play in any shape or form, simulation is the only viable path for in depth research. In my mind any form of neural network is a deterministic chaotic system[1]. If this would be true, simulation is the way how you test and discover truths. So I am a big fan of your intent to start programming.

Another book which your text reminded me of was Scale by Geoffrey West. Again not something pertinent to your effort of Modeling Consciousness, but it informed and delighted me in my attempts to make sense of reality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svV1MsUdInE

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