PART 1: A Wide-Ranging Conversation with Physicist Geoffrey West about Life, Evolution and US Presidential Politics

GEOFFREY BRIAN WEST (photo courtesy GB West) Redmayne as Hawking. Cumberbatch as Turing. If the timing were right, Christopher Lee would have been superb in the big-screen story of British-born theoretical physicist Geoffrey West. (I've interviewed both.) While Lee was knighted by the Windsors for his service to drama and charity, West was dubbed Time magazine's "One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World." He is best known for his exploration of scaling laws as they pertain to biology, and to cities and companies. Kleiber's law was a particular inspiration. West has also been described as "striking a Gandalfian figure," a good-guy role Christopher Lee once actually got to play as mentor to young Robin Hood. Lee is gone now, sadly (and lives on, of course). And West draws rave reviews portraying himself. He's just a tad shorter than Lee was, with the same strength of character and mix of British reserve and surprise. Unlike Lee, however, whose roots were aristocratic in real life, West grew up "streetwise" in 1950s East End London. West's brilliance in math brought him a scholarship to Cambridge University where he first found excitement in physics. He's worn his hair long (with occasional trims) ever since his 1960s California days as a student at Stanford University (PhD physics, 1966); as a post-doc at MIT and Cornell University and research fellow/lecturer at Harvard; as a visiting professor at Stanford, Sussex and the University of California-Santa Cruz...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news