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Scale
- The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
- Narrated by: Bruce Mann
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
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, including how much food it eats per day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, its life span, 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 percent more efficient - and lives 2 percent 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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A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.
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Bucky, Bucky, Bucky
- By Amazon Customer on 08-25-18
By: Jonathon Keats
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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Harmony
- A New Way of Looking at Our World
- By: Charles HRH The Prince of Wales
- Narrated by: Charles HRH The Prince of Wales
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first time, HRH The Prince of Wales shares his views on how our most pressing modern challenges - from climate change to poverty - are rooted in mankind's disharmony with nature, presenting a compelling case that the solution lies in our ability to regain a balance with the world around us. With its holistic approach, this provocative and well-reasoned book takes the discussion of sustainability and climate change in a new direction.
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An Excellent Exploration
- By Sara on 03-31-16
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Creation
- How Science Is Reinventing Life Itself
- By: Adam Rutherford
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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What is life? Humans have been asking this question for thousands of years. But as technology has advanced and our understanding of biology has deepened, the answer has evolved. For decades, scientists have been exploring the limits of nature by modifying and manipulating DNA, cells, and whole organisms to create new ones that could never have previously existed on their own.
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The Goldilocks book on what is life
- By Gary on 07-11-13
By: Adam Rutherford
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Future Shock
- By: Alvin Toffler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Future Shock is about the present. Future Shock is about what is happening today to people and groups who are overwhelmed by change. Change affects our products, communities, organizations - even our patterns of friendship and love. Future Shock vividly describes the emerging global civilization: tomorrow's family life, the rise of new businesses, subcultures, lifestyles, and human relationships - all of them temporary. It illuminates the world of tomorrow by exploding countless cliches about today.
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So Accurate
- By Peter Gracia on 03-31-19
By: Alvin Toffler
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Origin Story
- A Big History of Everything
- By: David Christian
- Narrated by: Jamie Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day - and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History", the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.
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A brilliant achievement, must read/listen
- By 11104 on 09-05-18
By: David Christian
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Deep Truth
- Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny, and Fate
- By: Gregg Braden
- Narrated by: Gregg Braden
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A new world is emerging before our eyes, while the unsustainable world of the past struggles to continue. Both worlds reflect the beliefs of our past. Both exist - but only for now. Which world do you choose? Best-selling author and visionary scientist Gregg Braden suggests that the hottest issues that divide us as families, nations, and civilizations-seemingly separate concerns such as war, terror, abortion, suicide, genocide, the death penalty, poverty, economic collapse, and nuclear war - are actually related.
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Good Information
- By David on 08-13-12
By: Gregg Braden
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Fossil Future
- Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less
- By: Alex Epstein
- Narrated by: Alex Epstein
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing--including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right.
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Strongly Recommend
- By Kevin on 06-14-22
By: Alex Epstein
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The Vital Question
- Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
- By: Nick Lane
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies, and cities. Yet there's a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists.
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Ouch!
- By Mark on 06-24-16
By: Nick Lane
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Abundance
- The Future Is Better Than You Think
- By: Steven Kotler, Peter H. Diamandis
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years.
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Perhaps multiply his time estimates by 10
- By Rick on 11-06-21
By: Steven Kotler, and others
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Age of Discovery
- Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
- By: Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.
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A monotonous text disguised as casual reading.
- By Rob on 07-29-16
By: Ian Goldin, and others
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Growth
- From Microorganisms to Megacities
- By: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 26 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.
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PDF should come with this book...
- By Sebastian on 04-22-20
By: Vaclav Smil
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The Equations of Life
- How Physics Shapes Evolution
- By: Charles S. Cockell
- Narrated by: Ian Porter
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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In The Equations of Life, biologist Charles S. Cockell makes the forceful argument that the laws of physics narrowly constrain how life can evolve, making evolution's outcomes predictable. If we were to find something very much like a lady bug eating something very much like an aphid on a distant planet, we shouldn't be surprised. The forms of life are guided by a limited set of rules, and, as a result, there is a narrow set of solutions to the challenges of existence.
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Too many equations, not enough insights
- By Alec Drumm on 09-24-18
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The Myth of Capitalism tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives. Digital monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are gatekeepers to the digital world. Amazon is capturing almost all online shopping dollars. We have the illusion of choice, but for most critical decisions, we have only one or two companies when it comes to high speed internet, health insurance, medical care, mortgage title insurance, or even consumer goods like toothpaste.
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In this remarkably clear and companionable audiobook, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals.
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The workshop revolutionaries who made our world have never had the attention afforded the political revolutionaries who founded this nation. But it has been these innovators, in small-town attics and on the Mississippi, in Silicon Valley and the wheat fields of Kansas, in a Black woman's beauty parlor and a Dayton bicycle shop, who set America on a course to attain a standard of living unprecedented in the history of the world.
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Wait for the Unabridged audiobook.
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From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.
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Very good
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Read and then take action
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By: Jonathan Tepper, and others
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Business owners want growth but fear it will take over their lives. Surprisingly, the only way to truly grow your company is to reduce its reliance on you - to scale. Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel offer a blueprint to rapidly grow your business while also gaining more freedom. Based on their own experiences starting, scaling, and effectively exiting from multiple successful companies, they provide seven clear principles that will help you determine the best strategy for growth in your company.
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All stuff no fluff
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Summed up in the first few chapters
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You won't learn anything you didn't know
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At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.
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Engaging, but maybe better suited for non-audio
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The Information
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James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born.
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Brilliant book, heroic reader, better in print?
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Linked
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- Unabridged
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Albert-Laszlo Barabasi traces the fascinating history of connected systems. Understanding the structure and behavior of networks will forever alter our world, allowing us to design the "perfect" business or stop a disease outbreak before it goes global.
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The reconstruction of complex systems.
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Chaos
- Making a New Science
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James Gleick explains the theories behind the fascinating new science called chaos. Alongside relativity and quantum mechanics, it is being hailed as the 20th century's third revolution.
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Best AudioBook on Math/Physics yet
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Expert Political Judgment
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The intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This audiobook fills that need. Here, Philip E. Tetlock explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future.
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Five-star book, one-star reading
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The Art of the Good Life
- 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success
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Since antiquity, people have been asking themselves what it means to live a good life. How should I live? What constitutes a good life? Find out.The Art of the Good Life is a toolkit designed for practical living. Here you'll find 52 happiness hacks - from guilt-free shunning of technology to gleefully paying your parking tickets - that are certain to optimize your happiness. These tips may not guarantee you a good life, but they'll give you a better chance (and that's all any of us can ask for).
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Author doesn't know what he is talking about
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Notes on Complexity
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Nothing in the universe is more complex than life. Throughout the skies, in oceans, and across lands, life is endlessly on the move. In its myriad forms—from cells to human beings, social structures, and ecosystems—life is open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining. Complexity theory addresses the mysteries that animate science, philosophy, and metaphysics: how this teeming array of existence, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, is in fact a seamless living whole and what our place, as conscious beings, is within it.
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Only the first couple chapters are about complexity
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Our Mathematical Universe
- My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
- By: Max Tegmark
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Max Tegmark leads us on an astonishing journey through past, present and future, and through the physics, astronomy, and mathematics that are the foundation of his work, most particularly his hypothesis that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and his theory of the ultimate multiverse. In a dazzling combination of both popular and groundbreaking science, he not only helps us grasp his often mind-boggling theories, but he also shares with us some of the often surprising triumphs and disappointments that have shaped his life as a scientist.
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Wow!
- By Michael on 02-02-14
By: Max Tegmark
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Growth
- From Microorganisms to Megacities
- By: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 26 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.
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PDF should come with this book...
- By Sebastian on 04-22-20
By: Vaclav Smil
What listeners say about Scale
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Gary
- 08-12-17
That poor elephant doesn't live in a linear world
We live in a complex world. As the author says in the book, the bible is based on 'opinions, intuition, and prejudices'; and is up to us to determine if 'life has meaning or is without purpose'. For us to bring order out of the chaos we need a narrative to hold the story together. The author tries to tie together all the items that are in the subtitle of the book into a coherent universal truth about the world by seeing the world as a recursive holistic entity tied together by a scaling parameter expressed through emergent properties. The author speaks trenchantly on each of the topics and ties each of the topics together with his universal way of seeing the world with his system wide approach for understanding.
We live in a non-linear world but we always intuitively think linearly (oh I felt for that poor elephant who was given a too large of dose of LSD). When we naively scale we default simplistically by using a linear interpolation. Most of the world is not best modeled linearly (this is why we have statisticians). The author takes our false default position and refines it by adjusting for the dimensionality between area (2 dimensions) and volume (3 dimensions) and adding a dimension for the fractal (recursive) nature inherent within all systems and making the power function such that every doubling means a corresponding increase of 168% (i.e. 2 to the 3/4 power). The core of the author's theory lies within that power function or variations of it.
He never really talks down to his readers and moves the story fairly fast. He speaks statistics fluently but doesn't use a single equation within the book to intimidate math phobic readers. When there is randomness in the creation of a system there will always be an exponential distribution. Just think of a young boy sitting on a dock fishing. The number of fish the boy catches in a very short time will never be more than one. The time between catching the fish will always be an 'exponential distribution' (and the number of fish the boy catches will follow a Poisson Distribution, poisson is fish in French). All I needed to establish that those very special distributions was independence and identically distributed events at a subsystem level (and a few other non specified and minor regulatory conditions). The author takes this fact about the real world and uses it to create the self similarity inherent within subsystems across a network. The author gives an example about aging that illustrates the magical properties inherent within this special distribution and why it is so special and is worth knowing about. (My favorite fiction book, 'Gravity's Rainbow' does that too and I highly recommend that book).
The author is a polymath. He drops a lot of philosophers names and usually that annoys me, because most writers who do that don't seem to know anything beyond the name that they dropped. This author seemed to understand the connections. Aristotle (who he mentions, but mostly for his politics not his metaphysics) would see the world in terms of 'whatness' or 'thatness', the universal verse the particular, or like Spinoza (who the author mentions multiple times) the quantitative verse the qualitative. The author wants to take the intuition (the narrative, the story we tell to understand our place in the universe) and replace it with analytic truths. He'll say at the end of the book, that 'more data is better, but less data is best' because a theory that connects is most powerful of all. He brings up Kepler's laws based on Tycho Brahe's data sets by explaining what is being observed and contrasting that with Newton's Laws which tell how things necessarily are based on a priori truth.
The author wants to establish a universal holistic systems understanding of the world through analytical truths. (I would recommend the movie available on Youtube, 'Mindwalk' for anyone who is interested in these kind of things. The movie is based on a Fritjof Capra book but not his famous book 'Tao of Physics' and Liv Ullmann and Mont St. Michael are always beautiful to behold). Within the author's theory there was a unfolding of the necessity of evolutionary theory similar to Alfred Whitehead's as expressed in the delightful lecture 'The Function of Reason', and parts of Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence of the identical will to power', a way of seeing the world such that everything that is is that way because it has to be. The self similarity inherent within all systems as expressed by the author would fit within a Nietzscheian frame work of the world, but the author doesn't connect those dots.
The author is bothered by the 'finite time singularity' that he thinks we're coming to. His thoughts on economic growth overlap with Robert Gordon's book 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth'. They both seem to lean towards that spectacular innovation is behind us. That's just their opinion and I respect that even though my opinion lies differently (I'm more optimistic, maybe foolishly, but that's just my opinion). Both books, had a bigger problem for me. Both covered too many topics all of which I'm very interested in and consequently have read many books on the topics and the books seldom told me things that I was not already aware of. Authors should always assume that readers are interested in the topic and tell us things we don't already know from recently published books.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-31-19
Incredibly satisfying.
This book will change the way you see the world around you and help make sense of so many emerging phenomenon. A real gem.
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- Bassel H.
- 10-08-17
very general
very general information and long to amount of knowledge presented, didn't meet my expectations of content.
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- 11104
- 11-30-17
A tour de force of intellect and creativity
West and his colleagues have seen relationships and discovered patterns in areas I never would have imagined. How do living things, cities, businesses and the environment change over time with surprisingly regular patterns? How do these patterns compare to one another across different entities?
Serious research has been done on these questions and it is explained with clarity. I like West's habit of stating a principle and then giving a couple of easy-to-understand examples. These are topics I knew nothing about and many of the discoveries are eye-openers.
A few reviewers complained about the charts in the print version. I listened to the audiobook and they were explained well.If you know what a logarithmic scale is there's no problem. I found the English narrator's diction a bit difficult at first, not a plain as a BBC newsreader's, but I got used to it.
The author does not pound on it but his views about the future are bleak unless our species achieves radical change. This may be the best possible time to be old.
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- Michael
- 05-04-18
Best book of 2018
The year isn’t over but Geoff West’ audiobook has greatly enhanced my ability to understand and think about the world and sustainability issues at many levels. It may take some time to find another such book.
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- Kent be Happier!
- 08-10-17
Wow
terrifically exciting and fun, lives up to its full title. highly recommended to anyone no matter the field you may focus.
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- Lawrence the 4th
- 08-22-17
Loved It!
I loved hearing that there may be a connection between natural processes and business processes. It's very thought-provoking idea especially for myself in the green industry.
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- Bryce
- 10-25-17
Diverse, Mathematical, Highly Relevant
Embrace the interconnectivity of biology, economics and social structure in this extremely well researched tome. Geoffrey West sets out to deliver a book that could explain in depth theories of scale to any local bartender and in my opinion, succeeds. Great read, important information and eye opening interconnectivity proven through laws of scale, loved every minute of the listen.
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- Fredrey
- 04-23-18
A new thought
I have thought of these concepts before. Thank you for giving them a vocabulary. I hope to others will be able to note the incredible level of connectivity.
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- Richard McKown
- 04-13-18
Best book about cities since Jane Jacobs
What made the experience of listening to Scale the most enjoyable?
I could listen to Geoffrey West's insights all day long, again and again.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
The nature of exponential growth
Which scene was your favorite?
The description of bacteria in a petri dish doubling in size every minute, and comparing this to the exponential growth of mega-cities throughout the world
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Scale, a documentary about what we have done and where we might be going
Any additional comments?
Scale is the most comprehensive scientific study of the complexity of cities, examining their importance in terms of economic growth and innovation. Cities are poorly understood and as a result we continue to create policies that work against our own long-term sustainability. Most books on the subject of cities are filled with openion about costs and economics. Most books about cities a written with an agenda. Scale approaches the city from the scientific method, revealing entirely new insights into the underlying structure of cities, nature, and companies. So much of what we believe in these subjects has no foundation in fact. The more people, who work in the construction of cities, architects, planners, elected officials, developers and citizens, understand the fundamental nature of how cities work, the better we might be able to shape plans and policies for the long-term benefit of our economy, security and well-being. I believe everyone on the planet should read this book.
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