Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

The fascination with death, coupled with the incessant questioning and search for any meaning to life, permeates human culture but has mostly been manifested and formalized in the multiplicity of religious institutions and experiences that humans have invented. Science has generally placed itself outside of such philosophical meanderings. However, many scientists have seen the quest for understanding and unraveling “the laws of nature,” the passion for wanting to know how things work and what they are made of, as an alternative journey in coming to terms with these big questions even if they themselves are neither “religious” nor particularly “philosophical.” Somewhere along the line, I realized that I was one of them, finding in science, or at least in physics and mathematics, some version of the spiritual sustenance that seems to be a universal need.