Jeffrey studies a complexity science, the science of emergence networks which is also the subject of his new book scale. We, of course, are celebrating tonight and you will be discussing it. It has received already wonderful reviews from journals like nature, all the way to authors like abraham for coffee. It studies the hidden laws that organize all of our systems from living organisms to cities and not only is his work a visionary and insightful but its beautifully written. Im excited to hear more from jeffrey tonight. Before i let him take over, a quick word about how we will run things. We will have a talk and presentation from jeffrey and a short q a and will have a signing in the back of the room where books are also available for purchase. Thank you again for being with us tonight. Please join me in welcoming jeffrey west. [applause] thank you all for coming on a beautiful night in seattle. I was warned that there might be more spotty audience because of the beautiful weather. I too was enjoying it. So, i think what i will do is on the advice of my good friend catherine is read something from the book which i dont normally do. Its if the subtitle of the book and ill show you this. This is cute. This is something that my Publisher Penguin put together. Isnt that cute . [laughter] i thought it was a pretentious subtitle and in the introduction it starts out with such a big sweep and ill read this little bit and youll see what the book is about. Then ill give a short presentation. This book is about a way of thinking and asking the questions and about suggesting big answers to some of those Big Questions. Its a book about some of the major challenges and issues we are grappling with today ranging from verbalization, growth, Global Sustainability, understanding cancer and metabolism and the origins of aging and death and can be addressed in an integrated, unifying conceptual framework. It is a book about the remarkable similar ways in which cities, companies and our bodies work and how each of them represent a variation of a general theme manifesting surprisingly systematic regularities and similarities in the Organization Structure and dynamics. The big picture framework allows us to address special fascinating spectrum of questions some of which in some of which will be addressed sometime speculate in the ensuing chapters. Heres a sampling of some of them. Why can we live up to 120 years but not for a thousand or a million . Y in fact we die . What sets this limit of our lifespan . Can they be changed and can life plan be extended . Why do we stop growing brushwork why do we have to sleep for eight hours every day . Why do we can we develop a science brings a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics, growth and revolution in a quantitative predictable way. Is there a maximum size of the system . Is there a maximum size to animals . Can there be giant insects . Why does the pace of life continually increase and why does the rate of innovation to continue to accelerate in order to sustain socioeconomic life . Can we maintain a vibrant, Innovative Society with ideas of wealth and creation or are we destined to become a planet of slums, conflict . That is what i will be talking about. Its all in i brought the british version along me which has a different title in different cover. Leading off from that, what i just read the background to all this and the thing that i become more and more passionately engaged in is the question of Global Sustainability and even the possible concept of mobile sustainability is conceivable that all of this marvelous, edifice that we have created can be sustained indefinitely. The first thing to recognize is that everyone is the idea that the physical universe is expanding exponentially and some of us dont try to appreciate the socioeconomic universe in which we live on the planet and thats also expanding exponentially. Want to give you some of our numbers to illustrate that. When the us was formed 200 years ago. [inaudible] 82 of americans live in cities in the world made this amazing transition a few years ago when more than half of us live in cities and the planet, as a whole, is moving towards that 75, 80 level by the end of the century and to give you a sense of the scale of that if you just average from now until 2050 what that means is that roughly speaking urbanizing well over 1 Million People every week. Its more like 1. 4 if you do the arithmetic. Thats improvement adding a new york metropolitan area roughly speaking every couple of months. Every couple of months from now until the foreseeable future, midcentury, its like adding a new york city every couple of months or to bring it home here every few days adding the city of seattle in terms of number of people in infrastructure that you need. Thats extraordinary and the stress and strain on energy, resources and in particular, the social fabric is fantastic. That is the backdrop in which everything is happening. I will expand on that as we go along. Many of you are familiar with this, the World Population. It begins with 10000 years ago which is when we started to come collective and become social and the first cities started to emerge. You can see the extraordinary growth beginning with the Industrial Revolution that it stopped straight up. If you look on this, i was born in 1940, which means there were not many more than to be billion people on the planet and in my short lifespan there are now seven and a half billion and by the end of the century there could possibly be 10 billion people on the planet. Again, the sense of stress on the system is fantastic and again will return to this. This is the paradigm in which we live. The idea of capitalism and open ending growth and its been unbelievably successful and its given us the quality and standard of living and those of us fortunate to participate in it. To give you another metric of that here is the gdp for the United States since the end of the civil war. What the equivalent is to is the issued invested 1 dollar in the stock market in 1870 and you correctly with inflation it would be worth 1 million today. This is extraordinary in terms of wealth. All of this is associated with the urbanization of the planet which i mentioned earlier and, indeed everything that goes on in the planet is pretty much determined by what happens in cities. All of the problems that we face whether its ideas of climate change, the environment, crime, pollution, disease, availability of energy, all of these have been exacerbated and have been brought to the brink by this rapid growth and urbanization. This is the one equation, the fate of the planet is determined by the fate of our cities. We better stop and come to terms with how cities work, what their organization is, what their dynamics is and coming to it as a physicist that is understanding our asking is it conceivable to have a predictive understanding of the way cities work . We urgently need some idea of how cities work, what it is and, of course, at the most primitive level we understand white cities are attractive because their place is a great opportunity, places where you have access to more material wellbeing, you have access to culture, sexy places and fancy restaurants with education and so on. These are provided by the city and so cities act as this extraordinary magnet for people. Of course, none of this can happen in the most fundamental level without energy. Energy needs to be supplied to the city and im sure everyone here is familiar with the words of the second law of thermodynamics and the idea of entropy. Mainly, you create great order by treating cities and other organizations. If you organize stuff then you pay the price always of having unintended consequences in the sense of disorder somewhere else or the process of using energy to create order also creates disorder and thats called entropy and ive just extended that idea toward the consequences of this, unintended conferences, of this marvelous process that we have created, Socio Economic entropy which represents things like this which you are playing with. All of these are part of what urban life has created including this, social unrest and i would venture to speculate so much of the social unrest that we see on the planet which is often in terms of ethnic conflict, religious conflict or cultural conflicts is origins in this extraordinary state that we put ourselves in by this extraordinary expansion leading to this extraordinary stress which in one of the Big Questions is does that lead to so much association that this is what the planet will look like this is what seattle may look like in 60 years, possibly. Probably not but of course there are lots of places in the planet that look like that or like that maybe thats the backdrop for what i want to talk about and what i want to discuss in that book. Talking in the city in terms of ive talked about is very much the way that we think of cities in physicality when you think of cities you think of the roads and buildings and you think of the boulevards of pairs or the sky coopers of new york or whatever. Of course, this is just a stage of what a city really is because the city is the place that facilitate interaction among human beings and thats why we invested and in some ways it may be the greatest invention that this machine brings people together to bring people together to what we do tonight, to create ideas, to innovate and create wealth. Like everything else, you can find the quote in shakespeare that too much says it and there it is. This is for the image of a city and if the interface of being people and infrastructure or this is a wonderful picture and what is wonderful about this is people have been doing this effectively for 2000 years and the stage is still the same and here theyve been doing it but maybe not quite as long there is a marvelous picture of new york 120 years ago and you can feel the innovation, the entre nous worship, the interaction and you can impose on the subject onto this for creating wealth and this is what new york is about. New york doesnt look like this anymore and the buildings look like that but the buildings are still there and those people are no longer there. Different people but the inside buildings, but places that bring people are represented here. Thats what a city is. Interface and integration the physical and the social. Indeed, this is how representation of that in one sense of physical and metabolism and physical metabolism of the city, the energy and the way it works physically and that is in tension with integrated with Information Exchange which is the genomics its represented in socioeconomic systems which is the city of wealth and creation. We stress that many of the problems of the pictures i showed of cities and organizations of all the problems this suite of problems that we face are generated by cities and so they are the origin of these problems which i emphasized earlier but there also these are the places that bring in the smartest people. The smartest people are attracted to the great cities and the great wealth that is created in an urban environment. I will switch gears slightly now and talk about biology. Im using it not only because it uses a large part of the book but because its a segue back into thinking about cities and also it brings up the question about what you mean by cities in the long discussion and the quantity of science of studies is it would be wonderful if it was law and physics and you could calculate any degree of accuracy. For example, we know the motion of the planets within degrees of accuracy so all the it work like some phone calls and all the rest but we do that we can do that because we understand the physics of that in great detail and we can calculate where things are in great detail. Nothing like that about envisioning where the city works or organism or company works, for that matter. We call that in physics a course range or an average description and an example is for questions i asked in the book is aging and mortality. A course screen answer would be asking the question why do we live 100 years and where does that come from for the order of magnitude, lifespan of a human being and why is it only to have three years for a mouse even though a mouse and made up a much everything we are . Its the similar questions and as i mentioned in the excerpt where does the time that we sleep, not because which many of us thought was the night was about eighthours long but because if you asked how long a mouse sleeps, they sleep 1617 hours a night and i dont suppose anyone knows how long and often sleeps. Elephants sleep about four hours. Whale sleeps about two hours. Where do those numbers come from . Why, what is going on here . Those are the questions. Moving into the socioeconomic, thinking of cities and companies and biological organisms metaphorically and to what extent can we do that one of the questions would be why is it, then that companies are like us and were destined to die, all companies die. Whereas most cities do. Its very hard to kill a city. A classic example is almost no cities die and weve done experience by dropping atom bombs on cities and 2530 years later they are fine. The fluctuation is not a very big fluctuation in the stock market and companies fall. We lose the twa, Lehman Brothers and so on. Why is that . Why are companies so fragile in human beings and organisms regularly fragile but resilient . We understand that. And we want to understand this what the hell happened here . All too close to home. I dont have time to discuss this but this is what is discussed and i tried to get us understanding. The book by the way is nontechnical and i tried to put all the equations, so to speak, which are implicit into english so that by mom, in principle if she were still life, would be able to read it and understand it. One of the Amazing Things about organisms, about us, mammals, is that despite the fact that they look different and live in quite different environments, the whale in the ocean and the elephant with this long trunk, we are one of those. In terms of anything that you can measure about them, physiological parameter and ill show you some in a moment. You can measure about them or anything about their life history like how long will they live; how many children do they have and so forth are actually scaled versions of one another. Just to give you an example of that, this is your metabolic which is how much food you need to eat to stay alive. Here it is. Its plotted on the vertical axis in watts. Its and how much you need to stay alive and heres the size and plotted in powers of ten. If you put a mouse here and you wanted to put an elephant on the linear plot with onetwo, three, four it would be near the end of sheet of the paper. Putting it up by factors of ten we can get a mouse and an elephant on the same graph. This is called logarithmic, technically. He plotted this way something remarkable appears and you get this extraordinary irregularity occurring for a process that is potentially a complex do not and im not in the universe. We believe these subsystems in each cell type, genome, has a unique history. We believe in Natural Selection and each one of these is historically contingent meaning if you would have thought that theres this random process going on and if you plotted things like Metabolic Rate there would be points all over this graph and reflecting the historical contingencies the historical evolution of each one. To the contrary, theyve all lined up on some simple line and plotted this way. Secondly, the independent of that amount most naive, well, jesus christ, you double the size of organisms and sells and therefore you double the amount of energy needed to support that animal. Again, thats not true. The slope of this line is very close to the number of recorders which is less than one which is the linear and that means that doubling the size of requiring twice as much food and energy only requires 75 , no matter whether you go from the size of the mouse to double the size of the cat or elephant. Doesnt matter, 25 . These organisms, we are scaled versions of one another. These are scaled versions of each other. Furthermore, this is true of any groups, fish, insects and this is on any other variable that i mentioned, the heart rate decreases systematically imparted in the same way. The slope of that, this is one quarter and we state minus one quarter because its going down. Here is you, this is your brain, the gray matter to white matter in your brain. You see a beautiful scaled line plotted in the same way. I could spend the rest of the evening showing you 75 and they all have the same characteristic and they all have this simple straightline writ plotted in this logarithmic way. Furthermore, they have this intriguing property that the slope of these graphs always go in multiples of one quarter. The number four plays a very special role and the question is where does that come from. Before doing it i want to show you one other thing which is intriguing. Going back to mick jagger falling apart and that is, im sorry, i should have change this. This statement here is a restatement that simply saying the heart rate is decreasing the slope of minus one quarter that is this. It turns out the lifespan, how long you live increases approximately with plus one quarter. It increases the slope and plotted lifespan would be plus one quarter. If you multiply those together the increasing of lifespan is exactly canceled by the decrease of the heart rate. They exactly canceled. If you multiply heart rate by lifespan there is no dependence any longer on size. Its the same for everybody whether you are a little mouse or a big elephant or a whale and what is lifespan times heart rate. You have this amazing result that even though the Little Things dont live very long and big things these things go boom, boom, boom. They all have the same number of heartbeats. What is the origin of all of this . I worked with some wonderful biological colleagues to ask what is this that transcends evolved design. All of these organisms have evolved design. One thing that definitely transcends this is the fact that all of these systems have fortified networks. That one in the middle is you. Thats your circulatory system. This is your brain, the white and gray matter and its also you on the right. And thats inside cells, networks in the top right are mitochondria. The idea was the mathematics and physics of these networks that give rise to the scaling and the origin of this number format. I will move on from there and tell you one other piece of biology and i will go back to very quickly to the cities. The idea is that out of this idea of networks, mathematics and physics of networ