生命体、城市、公司，乃至一切复杂万物，是否都存在相通的内在生长逻辑？制约生命与死亡、城市化的扩张及公司寿命的决定因素究竟是什么？人类能否通过融汇生物学、物理学、社会学、经济学等跨学科知识，找到揭开复杂万物生长背后的简单法则？
享誉全球的复杂系统性科学研究中心圣塔菲研究所前所长杰弗里•韦斯特潜心研究数十年，经过反复试验和求证，终于找到了解构复杂世界的简单逻辑——规模法则。在韦斯特眼中，规模成为衡量世间万物的不变标准，利用规模法则，复杂世界变得可量化、可预测、清晰明了且极度统一。规模法则阐明了从生命体到城市、从经济体到公司的生长与衰败都离不开其自身规模的制约，并与其规模呈一定比例关系，遵守统一的公式。这一算法框架不仅为人类思考未知世界提供了难得的简单法则，而且能解答不同生命体的生长极限之谜，优化城市发展架构并找到推动经济实现可持续发展、公司从初创到卓越的生长曲线。
《规模》将帮助你重新思考生命、认识自身、了解你的生活与工作，并告诉你复杂世界其实充满简单的逻辑，只要跳脱思维框架，打破学科限制，你就会重新看清你周遭的一切。
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.
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 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: West found that despite the riotous diversity in 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. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.
West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.
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