A New Law of Physics Says Rights Are REAL
Chapter 12.5: The Constructal Law
Category 1: Natural, cont’d
The Constructal Law
❝What obstacle can stay the mighty force
Of the sea-seeking river in its course,
Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait?
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Will”
The Constructal Law
Duke University engineering professor Dr. Adrian Bejan spent his younger years as a basketball star in communist-controlled Romania. Though he was in one of the few available occupations that actually rewarded merit, he saw the failures of communism all around him. “When you grow up under communism," says Bejan, “you have to be an optimist to survive.”1
Bejan brought that optimism with him to America, but he also brought something else—an observation he had made during his years watching and playing basketball. “The ball flows through channels,” he notes. “The players on offense are trying to open up the channels, to facilitate the flow.”2 The defense works to shut down these channels, so the ball moves to locations where it has an easier pathway to get what it needs—in this case, to get to the basket. Bejan noticed that as the game progresses over time, this pattern assumes a tree-like structure, with the easiest channels being used more frequently.
Bejan noticed this tree-like pattern repeating itself throughout the world.
In living and inanimate systems in nature…
Lightning bolts
River deltas
Trees
Leaves
Animal migration
Snowflakes
In the human body…
Veins and arteries
The structure of the brain and nervous system
The branching pattern of the lungs
And in human activities…
In road networks—major freeways lead to smaller highways to county roads to local neighborhoods to driveways.
In areas of habitation—more densely populated cities surrounded by smaller towns surrounded by villages and rural dwellings.
In the spread of knowledge—from the author of a book to its readers to the people they tell about the book, some of whom read the book and thus become new nodes from which new branches form…or from a professor to his students, who disseminate the knowledge further, and some of whom eventually teach the idea themselves.3
Wherever there is a self-directed flow system, it manifests this tree-like structure. Clearly, there is some principle at work here. By 1996, Bejan had given this principle a name: the Constructal Law.
“Flow systems” are things that move—that grow and change over time: rivers flowing, snowflakes forming, animals migrating, and blood moving through the body. Such flow systems exhibit this tree-like pattern, as observed in the Constructal Law.
But the Constructal Law does more than observe—it explains why this pattern emerges: “For a flow system to persist in time…which means to keep moving, to be alive…[it] must have the freedom to morph, to change, to flow more and more easily, for greater access.”4
The Constructal pattern is the result of the flow system seeking greater access to what it needs. In a thermodynamic process such as the formation of snowflakes, the ice crystal is seeking access to areas of lower temperature. In a lung, the branching structure maximizes access to oxygen.
“Design is a universal tendency in nature,” says Bejan, and “freedom is good for design.” When a flow system is allowed to unfold naturally, it will unfold along lines that give it the best chance to get what it needs. This branching process, in essence, is a continual quest for greater freedom.
