Research Without Borders: Head of Santa Fe Institute to Address NSF

Geoffrey West, president of the Santa Fe Institute, will speak as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Distinguished Lecturer on June 12-13, 2007, giving two lectures.

Background:

Many of the most challenging, exciting and profound questions facing science and society lie at the boundaries between traditional disciplines. Among these are the dynamics, growth, evolution and robustness of complex adaptive systems whether organisms, ecosystems, or societies; network dynamics from quantum field theory to social organizations; the physical-chemical origins of life; biologically-inspired paradigms in computation from viruses to vaccines; the inter-relationship between information processing, energy, and dynamics in biology and society; integrated theories of growth, innovation and sustainability; origins of cooperation; evolution of human languages; dynamics of financial markets; conflicts and patterns of political violence, etc.

The academic landscape needs places where research on fundamental problems such as these, which require creative, transdisciplinary collaborations, is strongly encouraged and supported. Unfortunately, this has often proven to be problematic within the traditional departmental structure of universities.

Bringing together highly diverse minds prepared to engage in substantive, in-depth collaboration in the search for underlying principles, commonalities, simplicity and order in highly complex phenomena is a major challenge. To address some of our major problems requires a long-term commitment to high-risk, high-quality science in an environment where speculation is encouraged and a broader, more quantitative, vision for understanding emergent behavior and multiscale phenomena in complex systems beyond the confines of the canonical disciplines is the norm.

The Santa Fe Institute was founded to meet this set of challenges by providing a unique environment that transcends disciplines, breaks traditional academic molds and draws together an international network of creative researchers.

Background:

Life is the most complex phenomenon in the Universe manifesting an extraordinary diversity of form and function over an enormous range.

Yet, many of its most fundamental and complex attributes scale with size in a surprisingly simple fashion. For example, metabolic rate scales as approximately the 3/4-power of mass over 27 orders of magnitude from molecular levels up to the largest multicellular organisms. Similarly, time-scales, such as lifespans and growth-rates, increase with exponents which are typically simple powers of 1/4.

It will be shown how these scaling laws follow from fundamental generic principles embedded in the dynamical and geometrical structure of underlying networks, leading to a general quantitative theory that captures essential features of many diverse biological systems.

Examples will include animal and plant vascular systems, growth, cancer, aging and mortality, sleep, DNA nucleotide substitution rates and community population structure. These ideas will be extended to discuss urban systems: to what extent are cities an extension of biology? Analogues to metabolic rate and behavioral times in cities scale counter to their behaviour in biology.

Driven by innovation and the creation of wealth this has dramatic implications for their growth, development, sustainability and pace of life which, left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds for their collapse.

The NSF Distinguished Lecture Series is sponsored by the biological sciences, engineering, mathematical & physical sciences, and social, behavioral & economic sciences directorates.