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Nature: Fractal or Constructal?

I love fractals. I love Benoit Mandelbrot. And this is a fantastic piece. But I know someone who might question this love affair with fractals in nature. Why? Because this detractor has taken things a step further. As I have suggested on here before, Adrian Bejan's constructal law is the as yet most important and underappreciated discovery in the field of physics, evolutionary biology, economics and, well, you name it... Bejan points out that fractals are mathematical descriptions with fuzzy edges. But if we look out in the world, the so-called fractals are not fuzzy. It's nice that we've found geometric analogs to natural phenomena. And fractals are fruitful. But what if we could go further -- finding a natural/organizational law that had technical application across fields? Here it is: 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. So it is not merely that we get recursion in nature. There are functional reasons for such recursion. And function has to do with flow -- that is how systems accommodate the currents that impinge upon a system. Bejan calls this "vascularization." Heart, aorta, vein, capillary. Trunk, limb, branch, leaf-vein. River basin, tributary, brook, creek, stream. Highway, boulevard, street, alley. Constructal theory also explains things like the relationship between energy consumption and GDP, the "gap" between rich and poor, and countless other phenomena from swimming fish to the excellence of black sprinters and white swimmers. In short, it's not just form that's important. It's function.
3/18/2012 @ 9:39AM |1,025 views

"Freedom Is Good for Design," How to Use Constructal Theory to Liberate Any Flow System
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There's a New Law in Physics and It Changes Everything

Anthony Wing Kosner Contributor

The Constructal Sessions, Part II: Freedom and Design

My last conversation with Adrian Bejan ended on the notion that if design in nature is a universal principle of the material world, then freedom is the key variable that determines how efficiently designs can evolve over time. Bejan grew up in Communist Romania, so he knows first hand what happens when human social systems are prevented from flowing by ideology. Bejans new book, Design in Nature (Doubleday 2012, with J.P. Zane), is an introduction to a new way of looking at the physics of everythingfrom the formation of river basins, to the locomotion of land animals, to the design of computer chipsthat he has named the Constructal Law. The growing body of Constructal Theory, which follow from the law, resolve many of the cultural debates of the 20th cantury. Bejan is showing that one need not resort to randomness (and their corollaries meaninglessness and nihilism) in order to remove the science of evolution from the aesthetic grip of religion. There

is a unifying design in nature, asserts Bejanbut that fact requires no deity or other supernatural agent. By placing design in a central place in our understanding of the world around us, and in defining nature and society as sets of interrelated flow systems, Bejan has created (or recognized) a new job description: the flow worker. If we expand our notion of what designers do to include the iterative improvement of any system over time, we realize that, on some level, we are all designers, all flow workers. With that in mind, I decided to probe the issue a bit more with Bejan and begin to identify the method he uses to address the improvement of flow systems both as an engineer and as an educator. Interview with Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Duke University Conducted via email, March 10 17, 2012 Q: You say Freedom is good for design, can you elaborate on that idea more? A: Freedom is the most fundamental property of nature. Freedom means the ability of a flow configuration to change, to morph, to spread and to retreat. It is the natural property that makes all design possible. The natural tendency expressed by the Constructal Law (toward easier flow, and greater access to inputs over time) is visible everywhere because all natural flow systems possess freedom. Without freedom to change, design and evolution cannot happen. With freedom, a natural flow system evolves with progressively greater flow performance. Freedom is the sine qua non condition for improvements over time. Freedom is good for design. We are all familiar with how freedom empowers design, but we take this truth for granted. We do not think about it until freedom vanishes. To make a drawing look better, we change it, we color it, and we replace it. None of this would be possible without the freedom to change the drawing. More freedom means to be able to change more features of the flow design. Engineering and civilization are all about this. We can make a fluid flow more easily through a pipe if we have the freedom to enlarge the pipe diameter. We can facilitate the flow even more ifin additionwe have the freedom to shorten the pipe. Freedom can be measured. The design features that can be changed are called degrees of freedom. The pipe diameter and length are 2 degrees of freedom. The width, length and surface type of a road are 3 degrees of freedom. Power plants, cities, businesses and governments have many more. In this direction toward more degrees of freedom, our imagination, creativity, ingenuityand affluence blossom. Freedom is not appreciated precisely because it is everywhere. Just like gravity was before Galileis law made it a fundamental notion in physics. Today, the Constructal Law makes freedom and its fruits (design, evolution, performance) fundamental notions in physics.

Q: But what about bad design, where does that come from? A: All design is imperfect. This is a good thing, because it leaves the road wide open for discovering better flowing designs tomorrow. Imagine a world in which nothing could change because it is already perfect: no change means no lifea flow system that is not alive. Bad design is a thought that emerges in retrospect. This thought is trivial, because of the dynamic (evolutionary) nature of design: yesterdays design appears to be weaker that todays. A human design extension such as the wheel with wooden spokes may strike us as bad today, because of the modern evolution of wheel technology. Yet, in the 1700s and 1800s, the wheel with wooden spokes was a great facilitator of human movement over the landscape in comparison with the solid wooden wheel of antiquity. The river basin serves as inanimate metaphor for the bad-design-in-retrospect phenomenon. The river channel with a tree log fallen across it may strike us as bad. Yet, the river water will remove the obstacle and make the river basin even better. What appears as bad today serves as an opportunity for better design and evolution tomorrow. Even when the tree log fell in, the river design had been perfected relative to what it had been decades earlier. The animate metaphor for bad-design-in-retrospect is animal movement. Running animals move animal mass on land more efficiently than swimming animals move in water. Fliers move animal mass more efficiently than runners and swimmers. These designs of animal mass vehicles occurred in the time sequence predicted by the Constructal Lawswimmers then runners and then fliersnot the other way around. Swimming was a perfected design before the emergence of runners, and running was perfected before the emergence of fliers. The old design of locomotion looked bad in retrospect, from the vantage point of the new. Yet, the new did not displace the old. The new and the old together move a lot more animal mass than just the old alone alone. This is the time arrow of the Constructal Law. Q: But when it comes to design by humans, dont we have the ability to make bad designs and convince ourselves that they are good? Doesnt our selfconsciousness make us uniquely suited to talking ourselves into bad, unnatural solutions that would never, otherwise occur in nature?

A: Manmade designs are natural, because on the whole they happen in the direction of facilitating and enhancing our movement on the landscape. This is the birds eye view, broadly speaking, the big history that is captured by the Constructal Law. Not every individual detail agrees at every moment with the broad viewthink of the tree log that falls across the brook and slows it. The effect is local and short lived. The constructal urge is what happens immediately, which is that the river basin marshals all its waters to remove the tree log, or to carve a path around it. Q: So, manmade designs behave like natural flow systems if you have a long enough timeframe, but the puzzling thing for us as humans is the persistence of

bad designs, of intractable configurations that limit the freedom to improve flow. What explains, for instance, the persistence of the North Korean regime, when its neighbor to the south enjoys a standard of living ten times as high? A: Your example with North versus South Korea is very appropriate. When we fly at night from Tokyo to Seoul, we see the lights below. Over Korea, an explosion of light (power) in the South is in sharp contrast with the total darkness over the North. Why? Because power means movement, and the rigid system (communism) strangles all its flows. We see the same night contrast between the lights of Florida and the darkness of Cuba. Six decades of strangulation are far too long for the three generations sentenced to die at the bottom of the rain barrel. Yet, this is just one framea blipin the movie of design evolution of civilization in big history. Like the tree log effect, the rigid designs of North Korea and Cuba are short lived. Dictators and their enablers better pay attention to this Constructal Law predictionit is physics, not opinion! Before 1989, the lights of Western Europe burned in sharp contrast with the dark of Eastern Europe. Today, the sea of lights has invaded the dark swamp and set it in motionvascularizing it with freely morphing designs. This is the future of all the swamps, and the tree logs that stand in the way will be removed or bypassed. Q: If any flow system can be improved over time (given freedom), do you have a standard series of steps or procedures you use to analyze the degrees of freedom that are available in a given design configuration and identify where improvements can be made? A: Yes, and in fact I teach the philosophy of this very topic with Prof. Sylvie Lorente in the textbook Design with Constructal Theory (Wiley, 2008) and in the course with the same name at Duke University and other leading universities all over the world. The best introduction to the method is in Design in Nature, in particular, chapters 1-5. Here is a brief sequence of steps toward Constructal Design:

1. Define Your System: Identify clearly and unambiguously what constitutes 2. 3.

your system, i.e. the region in space, or the amount of mass that is the subject of your thinking, analysis and design. Identify the Flows: Make sure your system has the freedom to change, and that you understand what flows within it, i.e. why your system is a flow system. Start Simple: Allow only one feature of your system to change at first. This endows your system with one degree of freedom. Study if and how changes to this feature increase the flow access of the currents that inhabit your system. Incorporate the first feature with which you found that your system performs best into your design (be alert, this is not the end!) Add a Degree of Freedom: Allow a second feature to change freely. As you investigate this second degree of freedom, you will find another best feature, and adopt it. With this second feature in place, go back to step 3 and refine that first feature to work with the second.

4.

5. And Another: Allow a third feature to vary freely, find the best variant of 6.
this feature, and then go back and repeat steps 3 and 4, i.e refine the preceding two features. And so on: This is a construction process with no end, except the finite time of the investigator.

In the evolution of technology, this sequence happens naturally, but slowly, in haphazard bursts of individual creativity. Usually, one step (one degree of freedom) represents a single invention, such as Traian Vuias air-tube tires on the first airplanes, one century ago. With the method of Constructal Design, I think entire companies and industries can fast forward the design evolution of their technologies and reduce trial and error. Nature behaves in the same way, imperceptibly, all the time, and on a much broader range of degrees of freedom. This is why with the Constructal Law we have been able to predict (with eyes closed) the designs of inanimate flow systems (e.g. river basins, turbulence, snow flakes) and animate flow systems (e.g. lungs, vegetation, animal locomotion). And we can use this method to investigate and innovate social, political and technological systems as well. We will continue with the theme of the relationship between flow systems in our next installment.