Go With the Flow

"Constructal Law": [bold added]

“For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve with freedom in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” [Blogger's comment: Huh?]

In layman’s terms, that means all shape and structure—all “design” in nature—evolves in a predictable direction: toward facilitating the movement of whatever flows through it. Designs evolve by configuring and reconfiguring themselves to move more stuff more easily. The world around us reveals a story of movement, flow, life, order and change.

(Duke photo)

Your humble blogger had previously never heard of Adrian Bejan or constructal law, which the J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University discovered 24 years ago.

Why are there tree-like structures in our circulatory systems? Darwinists would attribute them to evolution. Professor Bejan saw them in both the organic and inorganic worlds, "the treelike shapes that abound in nature—in lightning bolts and river basins, in our circulatory systems and the neural networks of our brains."

The new flow-science is beyond tree designs, and once you look for flows, you notice them everywhere:

“This new physics is not strictly about tree-shaped flows. It is about all the morphing architectures that are macroscopic, free, observable and measurable—for example, the round cross-sections we find in blood vessels, subterranean rivers and the tunnels dugs by worms; or the seemingly precise rhythms of breathing, running, wings flapping, flags waving and smoke plumes dancing. The science of form comes predictively from principle, not from analogy. Evolution is physics, not opinion.”

Professor Bejan has also applied constructal law to human behavior.: [bold added]

economic and social inequality is the inevitable result of physical laws. “Hierarchy is not imposed, it is natural,” he says. “Equality, however, is artificial, because it violates the law of evolution in nature.”

Mr. Bejan emphasizes that he does not mean this as a political statement or a moral defense of inequality: “Physics is not about justice or fairness, but about what happens in nature.” The “physics origin” of inequality, he says, “is that nothing moves unless it is pushed. Pushing comes from power, and power comes from fuel for machines and food for animals. Fuel use is the physics measure of movement, and, like movement, fuel use is distributed nonuniformly around the globe.

“Next, because the amount of fuel consumed annually by a population is directly proportional to its annual wealth, the GDP, the life movement of a population—the economy—becomes hierarchical naturally, with a few large and many small movers. So physics and economics are two sides of the same coin. The same hierarchical-flow architecture accounts for both.”

Harnessing that power rather than fighting it, Mr. Bejan argues, is a better way of helping the disadvantaged. “If we think about inequality as a physical phenomenon, perhaps that can inform the discussion, so that instead of trying to erase these differences, we can see how to connect the slow-moving pockets of society to the big-flow architecture,” he says. “Artificial constraints that limit the freedom of a system to change might work for a while. But they are ultimately doomed because they are not just fighting against the will of the people but the laws of physics.”

Systems must evolve and build on the designs already in place. Thus it is folly to think one can impose radically new political and economic systems on different nations. It’s not just the lack of a specific political tradition and the absence of the channels needed to move people, ideas and goods, Mr. Bejan says: “The chief impediment is the absence of a culture that encourages and rewards freedom to question authority, to speak up, inquire, innovate and implement change.”

Imposing taxes, subsidizing "affordable housing", and enforcing ever-stricter regulations are examples of pro-equality measures that go against the powerful forces of nature. It would be easier to help the "slow-moving pockets" join, rather than stymie and divert, the flow. Recent politics has been riven by the question of who is on the right side of history. Adrian Bejan says that we should be on the right side of science.

Below is his 2012 TED talk:

Perhaps Now He'll Get His Due

Albert Einstein called him “The greatest mind in American history”. In 1943 the NY Times science editor said he was “the most distinguished creative scientist this country has ever produced, yet...a man whose name means nothing to the multitude.”

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was one of our greatest scientists, yet it's doubtful that one in a thousand Americans recognize his name. His accomplishments: [bold added]

like Newton’s synthesis of celestial and terrestrial physics, Gibbs’s work on thermodynamics unified myriad seemingly unrelated concepts, bequeathing to future generations the challenge of developing each into its own field of study...

Then came On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances. In this 1878 book-length paper, Gibbs provided what amounted to a unified theory for thermodynamics. Gases, mixtures, surfaces, solids, phase changes, chemical reactions, electrochemical cells, sedimentation, osmosis: Gibbs showed how thermodynamic principles can describe each of these seemingly separate phenomena...

He enshrined his concepts in his second masterpiece, Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics Developed with Special Reference to the Rational Foundation of Thermodynamics, published in 1902, a year before his death. Statistical mechanics—a term he invented—was the methodology that would allow chemistry, almost alone among sciences, to make the transition from the classical era of cause and effect to the quantum universe of all probability all the time.

Thermodynamics hasn't captured the popular imagination like cosmology (the origin and fate of the universe) or astrophysics (which has a lot to say about space travel, black holes, etc.), but perhaps with the resurgence of interest in alternative energy and energy efficiency Willard Gibbs will finally get his due.