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

How do the properties change depending on whether you double the amount of gas or you don't, you just double the volume.

So you can tell how some things change, the pressure changes, for example.

So there's this idea that you can compare what you think is the same system at different scales, at different sizes.

In this case, usually for a city, it could be its spatial extent, but usually it's just its population.

So you compare New York to, like, Chicago's about half the size of New York, for example, and then you can go down another.

And so you can compare things that people measure all the time, like, you know, I don't know, it could be the number of homicides, or it could just be grim, or it could be, you know, the GDP of the city, or the wages, the average wages that people make, or whatever.

This is very easy to do, and that's why it's a nice probing tool.

And so we use this one of the ways that we came in to look at cities.

You know, our famous colleague, Jeff West, had done this for organisms with Jim Brown and Brian Enquist and so on to see their metabolism.

And so cities are different.

They just have this weird property in which, as we already said a little bit, if you look at money quantities, in larger cities, you have more money being made.

So whether it's GDP or wages or profits makes up GDP.

or expenditures, how much money people spend on various things and so on.

And so these increase per capita.

So this basically just means that people spend more money and make more money, the larger the city, but this happens on a continuum.

But this continuum increases the amount of money as we go.

And if you think about this for a second, physicists like to think about this in terms of dimensions, right?

So what are the dimensions of this?

It's money per unit time.

So it's kind of a speed.

Showing 241–260 of 816 · page 13 of 41