A Physicist's Search for Simplicity and Unity in the Complexity of Living Systems from Cells and Cities to Ecosystems and Companies

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• Goeffrey West (Santa Fe Institute)
• Tuesday 26 March 2019, 16:00-17:00
• Physics West 117 NOTE location and date.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mike Gunn.

Many of the most challenging and profound questions facing science and society, from understanding life to global sustainability, fall under the banner of “complex adaptive systems.” This talk explores how scaling can be used to develop physics-inspired coarse-grained theories for quantitatively understanding their structure and dynamics.

Despite its daunting complexity, many of life’s fundamental phenomena scale “universally” following remarkably simple power laws, suggesting that fundamental constraints underlie the generic structure and dynamics of living systems. These originate in properties of optimised space-filling networks, thereby capturing essential features of diverse phenomena including vasculature, growth, tumors, aging and death, sleep, cell size, and DNA nucleotide substitution rates. Likewise, characteristics of cities and companies including wages, profits, patents, crime, disease, and roads, scale independently of geography and culture across the globe, reflecting universal properties of social networks.

This has dramatic implications for global sustainability and the accelerating pace of life: innovation and wealth creation that fuel socio-economic systems generate singularities that potentially lead to their collapse.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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• Bham Talks
• Physics West 117 NOTE location and date
• Theoretical Physics Seminars
• What's on in Physics?

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