GEOFFREY WEST

One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.

When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, 'Everything here is obeying my conjecture.' It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where they - all these problems come from.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.

Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.

A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.

Cities tolerate crazy people. Companies don't.

Slums could be thought of as the development of a special organ, or they could be thought of as a tumor that's grown, and in some ways is unhealthy and could ultimately lead to the city's destruction. My own feeling is that slums are probably a bit of both.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.

Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.

On average, an individual doesn't have a powerful connection with more than four to six people, and that's just as true here in the U.S. as it is in China.

Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry.

Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy needed to sustain a gram of tissue.

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

I've always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It's amazing that such rules exist. It's even more amazing that we can find them.

It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.