Luís M. A. Bettencourt

speaker

816 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

It was a little bit of both.

I guess it's always interesting to think about that.

Mark is a dear friend and colleague, and so I thank him for the plug-in.

But basically, I kind of had this dual personality problem that I've always liked people and the exceptional things that can happen when people come together.

So that happens mostly in cities.

I grew up in Portugal at the time where there was a lot of change.

There was a lot of change in the city I lived in, which is Lisbon.

And there was a lot of development, but it was noisy.

And my parents were kind of involved with nonprofits and so on.

So I was always frustrated why this is so hard.

And then I love science, right?

So you and I are kind of theoretical physicists.

I'm also a theoretical physicist.

Started also with phase transitions in the early universe.

Not exactly what you did, but pretty close.

And, you know, that kind of way of thinking that we learn in physics is just beautiful and has this long tradition and so on.

So I love science.

So I, for a while, was looking for a way to do science, like in some sense we do in physics, at least in spirit.

But at the same time, the problems that fascinated me were problems in complex systems, particularly in society.

And so I wanted to find a place to think fundamentally about phenomena in the world, but eventually call them complex systems.

Showing 1–20 of 816 · page 1 of 41