This is an extraordinary
insight. What we are saying is that ordered systems act as sinks for
imposed currents by improving their access. We leave out the actual
physical nature of those currents and accept our ignorance does not
predispose our understanding. Suddenly Chinese medicine has a
creditable framework.
It also clarifies the
evolutionary process as decision driven. A mouse tests a new
environment, prospers and leave offspring. It has nothing to do with
survival of the fittest. It has to do with right choices.
That also tells us that
the collective acts to mediate personal choices for the same reason
and why infestations must fail.
The controversy over
evolutionary causation interfered with formalization for decades.
This cleanly cures the problem. It may well close the topic.
Freedom
Is Good for Design: An Interview with Adrian Bejan
MARCH 11, 2013 by THE FREEMAN
Adrian
Bejan is a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University. So
why on earth are we talking to him? Bejan is the first person to
articulate what could be one of the most important ideas since
Darwin’s theory of evolution. He calls it the
Constructal Law.
It goes like this:
For
a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in
such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents
that flow through it.
All
this may sound highfalutin. But the idea is this: Systems survive
when things flow better over time—all kinds of systems. In fact,
this is what “life” is: flowing and changing (morphing) freely to
flow/move more easily. From natural systems to human systems, when
things flow better, we start to notice patterns in nature that are
products of good flow. And if Adrian Bejan is right, this is one of
the most important—and underappreciated—aspects of our world.
Combine the insights of Hayek, the maths of Mandelbrot, and the
biology of Darwin and you get something that might transform the way
you see the world.
The
Freeman:
Welcome, Professor Bejan.
Adrian
Bejan: Thank
you for introducing the Constructal Law to your readers.
The
Freeman:
Why should anyone care about the Constructal Law?
Adrian
Bejan:
“Should”? Everyone does it already. Every human instinctively and
intentionally seeks to understand and use the surroundings, to make
life easier for himself or herself, and for those connected to him or
her. We perceive the surroundings as patterns in space (images) and
in time (rhythms, sounds). Beliefs, knowledge, religion, and science
came from this primordial urge.
Science,
for example, began with geometry and mechanics, the science of
figures, static or moving. All science has been about this design in
nature, and the growing deluge of observations of this phenomenon is
calling us to summarize it—that is, to compress and simplify under
a single law of physics. That law is the Constructal Law. And this is
why everybody benefits by knowing the law—the law of design
evolution, the law that predicts the future of all flowing designs,
including ours.
The
Freeman:
You have studied a staggering array of phenomena with this way of
thinking. What kinds of things have you successfully been able to
predict and explain using the constructal approach?
Adrian
Bejan:
Along with many colleagues worldwide, I showed that the Constructal
Law predicts and unifies all animate and inanimate flow designs and
evolution, for example: river basins and deltas, lungs, vegetation
(roots, canopies, leaves, forests), snowflakes, streets and avenues
(urban traffic), the earth’s climate, all animal locomotion
(swimming, running, flying), why the bigger live longer, the wheel,
the human preference for the “golden proportion,” the rigidity of
the hierarchy of universities, the evolution of speed sports
(“faster” calls for “bigger,” over time), and the equivalence
between wealth (GDP) and movement on the world map (fuel
consumption).
The
Freeman:
Some people see comparisons between constructal phenomena and
fractals. But fractals are mathematical descriptions, or perhaps
abstractions. What’s different about your work, and what makes it
the stuff of science?
Adrian
Bejan:
Fractal algorithms are descriptive. One picks the algorithm that
leads to a “drawing” that resembles a natural image. (People
rarely show you the multitude of algorithms that lead to drawings
that look like nothing.)
The
Constructal Law is predictive: It teaches us how to discover the
drawing and how to predict the evolution—the morphing—of the
natural design over time. Description is empiricism and it is common,
that is, diverse and abundant. But prediction involves theory, as
well, and it is more rare because it unifies these abundant
phenomena. Science needs both: the many small and the few large, the
diversity and the unifying pattern. Both are delivered by the
Constructal Law.
The
Freeman:
What do your biggest skeptics have to say? And how do you respond to
them?
Adrian
Bejan:
There are no “big” skeptics. All the prominent authors of design
in nature who have commented on the Constructal Law in print have
been extremely supportive: see the comments cited on the cover and
inside the book I wrote with J. Peder Zane, Design
in Nature,
both editions, hardcover and paperback.
The
reality is that the Constructal Law drives a growing research
movement in science. If you search “constructal” on Google
Scholar today, you find 2,160 titles of scholarly articles and books,
this after only 15 years of Constructal Law thinking. This research
movement is global. On October 14 and 15 this year, colleagues in
Nanjing, China, are hosting the 8th International Constructal Law
Conference.
The
Freeman:
You have said, “Freedom is good for design.” At first blush, this
would seem contradictory. Our readers are interested in emergent
order. What do you mean by "design," and what are the
implications for society?
Adrian
Bejan:
It is not contradictory at all—the opposite (design without
freedom) is nonsense, because one cannot have design in nature (live,
morphing to flow more easily over time) without freedom to change.
The
water flow through a straight steel pipe is not a live system because
it does not have the freedom to morph, to improve its flowing in an
evolutionary manner. The steel pipe drawing is dead. The water
flowing through the river channel, and through the marsh, is a living
flow system. It has design, evolution, and persists in the future. In
one word, it has “life,” just like all the other designs with
freedom—from animal evolution to technological evolution and,
obviously, societal evolution.
The
Freeman:
This sounds a bit like something Friedrich Hayek would have said.
Adrian
Bejan:
Put another way, a rigid flow system (dammed river, rigid society) is
not natural and is destined to be replaced by one that is free to
morph, because the future points toward configurations with greater
and greater flow access. This is why freedom is good for design.
The
Freeman:
You have discovered an important relationship using constructal
thinking: the relationship between energy and the wealth of nations.
Can you help us understand this in layman’s terms?
Adrian
Bejan:
Look, everything that moves does so because it is being pushed or
pulled. Nothing is moving by itself. The river water is pushed by the
earth heat engine, which drives the climate (winds, oceans, and so
on), the animal is moved by the work derived from food, and we are
pushed by our engines—by the work derived from fuel. All this work
is destroyed (dissipated), and the visible phenomenon is movement
with evolving design.
With
the Constructal Law, we had predicted that our movement on the globe
should be hierarchical, with few large and many small (as in the mass
traffic of airways), and that it should be increasing over time, to
spread more, to bathe the world map more.
The
Freeman:
With a few major arteries and many minor streets and roads, for
example.
Adrian
Bejan:
Exactly. Then we discovered that the big channels (the few large) in
this global basin of human flow are the inhabitants of the affluent
countries. So, because more flow means more fuel spent, we made an
x-y plot with all the countries, showing (x) the annual fuel
consumed, versus (y) the annual wealth—i.e., the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). We found that the intangible “wealth” is
proportional to the fuel spent, which means that wealth is movement,
and wealth is
physics.
The
Constructal Law governs not only the hierarchical, vascular
designs—i.e., few large and many small movers—but the future
design, which consists of more movement over time and greater wealth
and fuel consumption for every group on earth. This is why every
group is racing upward on the line indicating the proportionality
between energy use and wealth.
The
urge to have wealth is a manifestation of the Constructal Law. It is
the urge to have more movement, fewer obstacles, and more freedom.
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