The major thrust of this project is to develop a quantitative and predictive unified framework for understanding the coarse-grained structure and dynamics of biological and social systems across all scales from cells and multicellular organisms to ecosystems, cities and companies. Techniques from mathematics and physics such as network theory, field theory and non-linear dynamics, scaling and the renormalization group, as well as numerical simulations, will be used where appropriate but crucially and necessarily in convergent collaboration with theorists, experimentalists, and practitioners in the multiple fields with which the work overlaps. Developing a science of cities to complement traditional, more qualitative approaches is urgently required to address global sustainability. Can we maintain a vibrant, innovative society driven by ideas and wealth creation or are we destined to a planet of slums, conflict and devastation? The ever-increasing pace of life and increasingly rapid rate of change driven by positive feedback mechanisms in social networks induces serious stress across all aspects of life. Is this sustainable or are we headed for major disruptions to the socio-economic fabric? To address these issues a new conceptual framework is needed, encompassing a quantitative theory of cities, a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability that integrates across the multiplicity of challenges we face.
This is an ambitious program that transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries, ranging across the mathematical, physical, biological and social sciences, with potentially important implications for addressing societal issues such as aging, cancer, urbanization and global sustainability. The two main categories to be explored are i) a generic theory of aging, damage, sleep and repair; and (ii) developing a science of cities, urbanisation and global sustainability. Although the overall goal will be to explore the development of a potential unified framework for quantitative understanding of how these diverse, highly complex evolving systems can be understood from a parsimonious mathematically quantifiable set of underlying principles and concepts, this will be carried out in the context of focusing on several specific problems such as: how are lifetimes whose scale is years generated from microscopic molecular time scales associated with genes and respiratory enzymes? Why is the half-life of US publicly-traded companies about 10 years? Why, on average, do all companies and organisms stop growing and die but almost all cities keep growing and remain viable? Does the scaling of sleep times from babies to adults recapitulate how it scales from mice to elephants? Is there a maximum or optimum size of cities?
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
