"New fundamental laws don't pop up every day in science. Yet that's exactly what Adrian Bejan claims to have discovered: a basic principle of nature, overlooked until now, that governs the evolution of everything from river basins to athletic performance and human culture.
Bejan, a mechanical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been writing about his so-called "constructal law" in the technical literature for over a decade. Design in Nature, co-written with journalist J. Peder Zane, is his attempt to bring his big idea to a general audience.
Bejan's thesis is based on flow systems. In his eyes they cover almost everything: rivers (and trees, too) are flow systems for the water that courses through them; human commerce is a flow system for moving goods around the planet; universities and culture are flow systems for ideas. And his constructal law is simple: flows tend to get better - faster and longer - with time."
By Bob Holmes /continue reading
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