The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything by Adrian Bejan (PDF)

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The Physics of Life explores the roots of the big question by examining the deepest urges and properties of living things, both animate and inanimate: how to live longer, with food, warmth, power, movement and free access to other people and surroundings. Bejan explores controversial and relevant issues such as sustainability, water and food supply, fuel, and economy, to critique the state in which the world understands positions of power and freedom. Breaking down concepts such as desire and power, sports health and culture, the state of economy, water and energy, politics and distribution, Bejan uses the language of physics to explain how each system works in order to clarify the meaning of evolution in its broadest scientific sense, moving the reader towards a better understanding of the world’s systems and the natural evolution of cultural and political development. The Physics of Life argues that the evolution phenomenon is much broader and older than the evolutionary designs that constitute the biosphere, empowering readers with a new view of the globe and the future, revealing that the urge to have better ideas has the same physical effect as the urge to have better laws and better government. This is evolution explained loudly but also elegantly, forging a path that flows sustainability.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Bejan isn’t the first person to study behavior as physics, or to use physics to describe wider systems. But his new book, The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything, may be the broadest consideration yet. Harking back to the original definition of the discipline―’knowledge of nature’ in Greek―he ultimately concludes that ‘life and evolution are physics.'” ―National Geographic”Riveting and poetic…Renowned energy scientist Bejan…elegantly argues that evolution transcends the boundaries of the biological and governs the flow of all phenomena…Unique and entirely fascinating, this book will linger in your consciousness and prompt you to look at the world with fresh eyes.” ―Kirkus Reviews (Starred)”In this quirky, occasionally ingenious work, Bejan explores evolution as a phenomenon not of biology but of physics.” ―Publisher’s Weekly”Bejan’s book and the theory that it expounds, I believe, would soon establish a new paradigm for biology, sociology, and human and cultural studies. Just as the laws of physics created a unifying vision of the universe and lead to a continuous development of technology, so will this breakthrough concept for these fields. With its depth and breadth, this book seized my attention, took hold of my imagination and resolved many design questions my field faces. Finally, ‘design’ can be grounded in theory, not simply observation and intuitive groping for answers; a theory that has explanatory and predictive power. In this sense, absorbing the book’s message becomes a liberating experience; it removes doubt and uncertainty from routine practical efforts. And with this certainty, comes a hopeful message amidst voices of gloom: the future is constructive, open-ended and full of promise. This book transcends The Origin of Species and complements Principia Mathematica” ―Fanis Grammenos, author of Remaking the City Street Grid – a new model for urban and suburban development.”Anyone interested in wealth, happiness, freedom, sports, politics, cities, market, physics, biology―in life itself will find this book magnificently illuminating. You can turn to any page and find riveting insights into important fields of knowledge that will leave you better off.” ―Victor Niederhoffer, chairman of Manchester trading and author of Education of a Speculator”A revolutionary new way to understand the world around us―from the natural sphere to the human body to political and cultural institutions―based on author Bejan’s unique insights into the science of physics. Written with a deft touch for both experts and (myself among them) lay people, this book is a must-read; you won’t look at, well, birth, death and everything in between the same. If you enjoyed Jared Diamond’s writings on biology and Stephen Hawking’s on cosmology, you love The Physics of Life.” ―New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver About the Author Adrian Bejan, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, is one of the world’s preeminent energy scientists and is known for having developed the Constructal Law of design and evolution in nature. Bejan also currently holds chairs at three foreign universities: University of Evora, University of Pretoria, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Bejan has written the world’s leading books on thermal sciences for graduate-level education in English, including Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics, Convection Heat Transfer, and Convection in Porous Media. He has given two TED lectures. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Physics of LifeThe Evolution of EverythingBy Adrian BejanSt. Martin’s PressCopyright © 2016 Adrian BejanAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-07882-7ContentsTitle Page, Copyright Notice, Preface, 1: The Life Question, 2: What All the World Desires, 3: Wealth as Movement with Purpose, 4: Technology Evolution, 5: Sports Evolution, 6: City Evolution, 7: Growth, 8: Politics, Science and Design Change, 9: The Arrow of Time, 10: The Death Question, 11: Life and Evolution as Physics, Appendix to Chapter 5, Acknowledgments, Notes, Index, About the Author, Other Books by Adrian Bejan, Copyright, CHAPTER 1The Life QuestionWhat is life? is, of course, the big question. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian physicist, made a valiant and now classic attempt to answer this in his aptly titled book What Is Life?, which took up the question from a genetics and biology of living cells starting point. It is a perplexing and perennial question that has possessed philosophers and scientists from time immemorial. Just a few months ago we were informed in The New York Times, no less, by the science writer Ferris Jabr, that science has no answer to this basic question. “What is life? Science cannot tell us … scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life.” He adds that “nothing is truly alive.” Naturally, I disagree with this.This book is my attempt to explore the roots of the life question by examining the deepest urges and properties of all the things that move and that, while moving, change freely. This is nature and it covers the board, from the inanimate (rivers) to the animate (animals, humans, social organization). These urges were with us long before science emerged: the urge to live longer, to have food, warmth, power, movement and free access to other people and surroundings. I will explore why all these things are “urges,” why they happen by themselves, naturally, and why they are in each of us and in everything else that moves and morphs freely.The urge for life, the life question (and its opposite, the death question, which we tend to avoid), is what this book is about. Unlike Schrödinger, however, I will place this question firmly within the realm of physics — the science of everything.In my book Design in Nature (2012) I wrote about the phenomenon of organization in nature and its physics principle, for which I coined the term “the constructal law” in 1996. According to constructal law, life is movement that evolves freely, in both animate and inanimate spheres. Alive are all the freely changing flow configurations and rhythms that facilitate flow and offer greater access to movement. When movement stops, life ends. When movement does not have the freedom to change and find greater access, life ends.In constructal law the life phenomenon is everywhere. Life unites the inanimate realm (rivers, lightning, snowflakes, air turbulence) with the animate realm (animals, vegetation, society and technology). Seen in this broad light, the life phenomenon is older than the biosphere, because the inanimate flow systems of geophysics populated the earth before the animate flow systems of biology.Life, organization and evolution are physics (natural things, physika, in Greek), and are governed by their own law of physics. I know firsthand the difficulty that the science-educated face when reading that life is a phenomenon of physics, comprising all the flow systems — inanimate, animate and human-made — that morph freely and evolve toward greater access. After all, the word “biology” means the study of life (bios, in Greek). Even a child knows the difference between animal movement and the rest of the moving world (rivers, winds, oceanic currents, volcanos, snow, rain, lightning and earthquakes).The physics, the natural tendencies of all these moving things, are one. While in the 1800s the child associated the cart with the animate horse, the child of today associates the cart with the inanimate gasoline, engine and the money paid by the parent at the gas pump. After reading this book, the child of tomorrow will put the money together with the gasoline, the horse and the oats that fuel the horse.This is how knowledge evolves — from science, technology and the rule of law it becomes, in one word, culture. What was obvious and understood piecemeal becomes one entity, much bigger and simpler. With every new generation, the child grows into a more knowledgeable parent and teacher, while increasingly ignorant of the tentative and disunited past. Knowledge is contagious, and it spreads naturally. I do not see a difference between art and science. They are both about images in motion. The inner pleasure is the same whether making a piece of art that inspires the viewer or coming up with a scientific idea that triggers explosions of images in the mind of the same viewer. Scientists and artists are specimens of the same species.Freely morphing movement is a macroscopic phenomenon. The entity that moves does so relative to the rest — its environment — which does not move. Movement is contrast, and contrast is visible. We, the observers, call this phenomenon by many names — organization, configuration, design, architecture, change, evolution — names that make sense in our minds because they are as old and as frequent as the images that bombard our senses. Interesting as they may be, the unseen molecules, atoms and subatomic particles are not the macroscopic life phenomenon of evolving organization. Descriptions of their random walk, disorder and Brownian motion are not the same as descriptions of the paths of rivers, pulmonary air and city and air traffic.In The Physics of Life, I move beyond the parameters of Design in Nature. I construct an edifice of examples to help readers understand the significance of the life principle in their own lives and in our culture today. These examples come from both the geophysical and the animal realms, from the old and the new. They come together not as apples and oranges but as one, because the life phenomenon in nature is one. I will show how the constructal law informs the evolutionary designs that sustain life: power generation and use, transportation, technology and evolution; the spreading of new ideas, devices, knowledge, wealth and better government.As I was finishing Design in Nature one of the most interesting discoveries for me (and what sparked the idea for The Physics of Life) was that air mass transit on the globe has a sharply hierarchical geography (figure 1.1). Even though air traffic connects the entire populated area of the globe (like the cortex of the brain), most of the air traffic is positioned over the North Atlantic.Human movement has geography and history. It creates, like all the river basins put together, a constantly changing world map with a few large channels and many small channels. It has hierarchy. Because I cannot forget my MIT education, I thought of this in terms of physics. Seeing as how air traffic happens because it is driven by engines that consume fuel — et voilà! — the burning of fuel must also be hierarchical, with a world map of its own. A few large consumers of fuel collaborate with many more small consumers to spread the flow of movement throughout the entire population, all over the globe. The hierarchy of the whole is good for every moving individual.Have money, will travel. In a flash, it became obvious to me that the geography of air mass transit and fuel consumption illustrates the geography of global advancement. The two legs of the air bridge over the North Atlantic are planted firmly (and historically) in the most advanced regions of the world, Western Europe and North America. This is how I decided to plot, country by country, the annual rate of fuel consumption versus economic advancement (measured as the annual gross domestic product, GDP).What came out on paper is shown in figure 1.2. There is an amazingly sharp proportionality between fuel consumption and “wealth.” Fuel consumption is physical (tangible, one can weigh fuel and measure the power associated with burning it), while wealth and all the other “obvious” notions used in economics (utility, the idea of money, being better off) are intangible. Economics, it appears, is physics as well; it encompasses the tangible and the intangible.This led me to further discoveries. The fuel consumed annually in one country drives much more than the airplanes that carry the flying population of that country. The consumed fuel drives everything that moves, kicks, heats and cools. It drives the entire society. It keeps it alive. It sustains it. Why do I say “everything that moves”? Because the measure of wealth (GDP) — so sharply synonymous with the rate of fuel consumption — accounts for everything that lives, moves and changes in society.While I was drawing figure 1.2, unusual answers to old puzzles started to voice themselves in my mind. For example, why are all the countries racing upward, along the same line? Why is the United States leading the peloton? Americans are not smarter than the people of other countries; in fact, most Americans are descendants of those people. Why is the urge to have “wealth” in every individual and group?The answers boil down to the single fact that the urge for more and easier movement is in everybody and in everything that moves and changes, with freedom to change. In figure 1.2, this means that the dots must speed-walk to the right, toward more fuel consumption, not less. No one will cut back on fuel consumption, because no one prefers poverty over wealth, or death over life.This is how the story of The Physics of Life got started. This voice in my mind, the relationship between GDP and fuel consumption, led me to question views that scientists, pundits, politicians and the public consider obvious. It allowed me to bring all the answers under a single scientific umbrella.There is a hidden truth in science, and it is unveiled in this book. Science is interesting when it is about us, and when it is useful to us. This is why the ideas in this book are about our needs and how to achieve them, and how to construct a better future for humanity.The story of The Physics of Life is rooted in the obvious: every animal and human wants power. We see this very clearly in the urge to eat — to consume — and in the march upward to the right in figure 1.2 — food for animals, and fuel for our vehicles and machines. Food for the human & machine species (see chapter 4) is power, which in physics is called useful energy (or “exergy”) consumed, per unit of time. From power comes movement: body movement, internal flow (pumping blood and air), external flow (locomotion, migration, transportation). And from power we get the means to ensure our safety and comfort — warmth, drinkable water, health and the construction of highways and steel beams that do not break when we walk or drive on them.My use of the word “machine” in the name of the human & machine species needs some explaining. It is not about automobiles, power plants, refrigerators and manufacturing. Machine is used in accord with its oldest meaning, which is contrivance (mihaní in old Greek), a sophisticated tool that allows for more effective use of human effort. Every artifact that we attach to ourselves is a contrivance, the shirt, the harvested food and the power drawn from an animal or an electric outlet. It’s true that through the centuries new contrivances have made us much more powerful, bigger and longer living. Yet, a machine should not be confused with or limited to the biggest contrivances that empower us today.The machine was in us from the beginning. It was also there from the beginning of science as mechanics and mechanisms, which are as old as geometry. The word itself belongs in the realm of physics because it is physical, the palpable and measureable version of our last name, sapiens (wise, or knowing). Words have meaning, especially in science.The growth and spread of civilization on the globe is the flow of more power to more individuals, for greater movement of the whole. This is better known as the evolution of power generation and consumption (from domesticated animals, to slaves, serfs, windmills, waterwheels, steam engines) and the contagiousness of life (individual liberty, health, emancipation, affluence and empowerment). We cannot have enough of any of these design changes. They are good, and they stick because they are useful for our movement. This is evolution and life, as physics.Everyone wants more power, not less, and everybody collaborates with others in order to get more. Collaboration itself is movement, because the root term “labor” means work, and work entails movement (work = force · travel). Collaboration is another word for organization, a flow configuration with purpose and the freedom to change, which together mean life. When the flowing entities are free to change, they turn to the right, and then to the left, and to the right again, to find better ways of flowing. Flow itself enables better flow over time. This is sustainability, as physics.Life, as a concept in thermodynamics, is unambiguous and easy to grasp. It is the antonym of death. The thermodynamic definition of the dead state is well-established. It is the condition — the being — of a system (an amount of material, or a region in space) that is in complete equilibrium with its environment. For example, in the dead state the pressure and temperature of the system are identical to the pressure and temperature of its surroundings. Dead state means “nothing moves,” not the system, and not its innards.The opposite of the dead state, which I now define, is the live state. The live-state system is not in equilibrium with its environment. Differences of temperature and pressure (and other properties) are everywhere, inside the system and outside, between the system and its surroundings. As a consequence, the system is being pushed and pulled, heated and cooled, it is inhabited by flows (currents) and, above all, by organization. It moves as a whole and it morphs freely as it moves and flows.The live system has flow, organization, freedom to change and evolution. Once present, these features distinguish the alive from the dead.Life is movement, and in order for both to happen, movement requires work spent, work requires food and food comes from work — a job for the human, fighting and hunting for the carnivorous animal and constant walking and grazing for the herbivore. All these words come together to say that life is work. This is the naked physics of life, but why is it important? It is important in education, which is my profession, where many of my contemporaries teach the young that there is a lot more to life than work. It may already feel this way to the child of ready money in an affluent society, where food is much easier to find than in other parts of the globe. The big picture, however, is that of a global movement of humanity that, in order to keep moving, must consume food and other streams (heating, cooling, freshwater) that flow from nowhere except work (power) spent.To each of us, life is a private movie, a strictly personal show in which the individual is screenwriter, director, producer, actor, spectator and reviewer. The individual improves the plot as the tape rolls forward. The direction of the movie plot and the rolling of the tape are the same in all such movies, which is toward a longer movie.This movie has a beginning and an end. There was nothing to watch before the beginning, and there will be nothing to watch after the end. For some of us, the movie script includes one or more intermissions, which cover the brief periods of unconsciousness that accompany modern surgery. These intermissions resemble what was before the movie started, and what will be after the movie ends. In view of all this, there are only two things to do: improve the script, and enjoy the show.We are wedded to an incorrect, dichotomous understanding of life: natural vs artificial, animate vs inanimate, bio vs non-bio and nature vs nurture. Yet most of us are unaware that we are flowing together with so many like us. We are like the raindrops falling on the plain. The water must return to the air, and it manages to do so by flowing through many designs such as tree-shaped river basins, grazing and migrating animals, grasses, trees and forests, waves on the ocean, sand dunes, oceanic and atmospheric currents and disruptions caused by fallen trees and broken branches, all causing eddies, whirls and turbulence, all flowing and dying downstream. All this is life.Symbiosis, the urge to live together when such association is of mutual advantage, is a manifestation of the life law of physics everywhere, bio and non-bio. We see it in two rivulets that come together into one stream. We see it in the fungi on the roots of plants, the mycorrhizal networks and the flow and life of the soil. We see it in every instance of social organization, where the urge to join is of selfish origin.It is not that getting together and making one big thing out of a huge number of small things is the best arrangement. There is a balance to be reached between the large and the small, between the few and the many. Big is not the answer. The answer is that it is easier to move stuff on the landscape (animate, inanimate, social) with the support of a special tapestry of a few large and many small carriers. This balance, or hierarchy, is predictable in every domain we have looked at. This is how the flow most easily covers the available area or volume.Organization (design) happens naturally. The word “organization” speaks of the fact that the design — the organ — is alive, with flows inside and around it, all belonging to a greater whole, and all morphing, evolving, growing, shrinking and moving in the world. Collaboration is a design that comes from the selfish urge of each individual to move more easily. We collaborate in order to flow together in ways that serve us better individually. These collaborations are channels through which things flow, channels that hug the flow and morph with the flow. They are not “links,” and “networks,” not strings tied between two or more nails. (Continues…)Excerpted from The Physics of Life by Adrian Bejan. Copyright © 2016 Adrian Bejan. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Adrian Bejan, the J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, invented what he calls the “constructal law,” defined in this book as follows: “For a flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve freely such that it provides greater access to its currents” (“The Physics of Life,” Kindle ed., 239). As indicated in the subtitle, Bejan claims that this law accounts for “the evolution of everything.” Bejan extends the definition of evolution far beyond biological natural selection: “Evolution is a much broader concept than merely biological evolution. It is a physics concept” (79). “The Physics of Life” purports to apply the constructal law to all aspects of earthly existence, including all nonliving and living things. Chapter 8 explicitly applies this physics concept to political matters, and Bejan also occasionally argues its relevance to ethics.Most of the book involves detailed discussions about the application of the constructal law in subhuman contexts. Since I am not a natural scientist, I am not competent to address those issues. Nor am I an expert on the physics of traffic flows, sports, academic competition, and similar subjects addressed by Bejan. I am, however, qualified to address Bejan’s remarks about ethical and political matters, and the present review is limited to those questions.How does Bejan jump from a physics “law” to ethical and political philosophy? In one word: “analogy.” On page 65, he explains:”Nature speaks to us in the language that she has taught us already. The human mind has the natural urge to understand, which means to rationalize, to explain and to simplify what it needs to retrieve, i.e., to remember more easily. It stores the imagined and the unseen in the imagery that nature has already taught us. This is where the observed and the touched first land on our mental movie screen. This urge is why ‘analogy’ occurs in the mind, and why analogy is appealing and useful. This is the urge that empowered humans with speech, cave paintings, superstitions, religion and science.””The Physics of Life” is all about analogy, with Bejan explicitly eschewing empirical data (231). Bejan even reduces ethics to his constructal metaphor. Without engaging in any philosophical or historical study of ethics, he elucidates the concept of “goodness” as follows:”[The] feeling of familiarity is a comment on the goodness of an idea. I hear comments of this kind every time I lecture on the constructal law. This law is innate in all of us. We invoke it when we say:”Go with the flow.”Find the shortest path.”The end justifies the means.”Carpe diem (seize the day).”Anything goes.”When in Rome do as the Romans do.”All roads lead to Rome.”If you can’t beat them, join them.”Everybody loves a winner. . . .”The rich get richer.”(195-96.)Bejan does not pause to reflect on the ethical implications of the foregoing statements, because the universal constructal law reduces morality to physics. “Good is the feature of the new organization (design) that we select after every change. Good and organization (design) are concepts that belong in science. They are placed firmly in physics as the constructal law” (224). “Go with the flow” and “anything goes” reflect his fundamental theme that everything is about flow (rivers are his favorite topic). Apart from the implicit amorality of his position (the “end justifies the means”?), his commandments imply that we are to acquiesce in and conform to whatever the successful powers dictate. Although he elsewhere in the book expresses disapproval of dictators (they interfere with the flow, don’t you know), he suggests their periods of power are necessarily short-lived. However, history (those inconvenient empirical facts again!) is replete with examples of authoritarian or totalitarian rule lasting for generations. I guess in such situations one is well-advised, following constructal law scripture, that “if you can’t beat them, join them,” because, after all, “everybody loves a winner.” Moreover, “all roads lead to Rome,” and “when in Rome do as the Romans do.” This is a recipe for servile submission. And it is consistent with Bejan’s constantly repeated themes throughout this book—that hierarchy, winners, big people, big animals, the wealthy, and the like are good because they are evolutionary specimens of the natural flow, whereas the poor, the unlucky, and others who lack political or economic power are inferior. One may be forgiven if one immediately thinks of another famous analogy: Social Darwinism.Bejan’s constructal law claims to bring “politics, history and society under the scientific tent where they and everything else belong” (66). Not only ethics but also politics and history are reduced to physics. “Physics alone is the biggest tent under which the life phenomenon fits, encompassing the animate, the inanimate and the social. This is why life is physics, why the constructal law is the physics law of life and evolution and why physics is much broader and more powerful than previously thought” (238, footnotes omitted).Chapter 8 contains the author’s thematic treatment of politics. Near the beginning of this chapter, he sets forth a bizarre model in which politicians constantly change their opinions to keep up with the latest and newest political fads with the media facilitating such flow. Of course, consistent with his aversion to empirical data, he offers none to support his theory. Nor does he consider whether such behavior is conducive to good government. Nowhere do we find anything in this book that would remind us of any deep reflections on human political life. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison famously asked, “what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” This question does not occur to Bejan, because, to him, human nature is replaced by the constructal law of physics: human nature and human government are understood only in terms of the subhuman. There is no essential difference between human ethical and political phenomena and the flow of a river. Although Bejan does not address the subject, it would follow from the applicability of the subhuman constructal law to human government that the checks and balances and separation of powers so carefully established by James Madison and the other founders of the US republic should be eliminated as being inconsistent with good physics. If Bejan were giving the Gettysburg Address, he would praise government of the flow, by the flow, and for the flow.So how does Bejan support his political theory that those politicians are best who constantly change their views? Let him speak for himself (158):”Now, I know what you are thinking: it is crazy or, at best, far-fetched for a physicist to theorize about politics, what good policy is, and how it spreads. Well, think again, because what I sketched here in figure 8.1 is what happens every day with every idea that every scientist publishes. Immortality galore. The fame and longevity of the generator of ideas has the same origin (it is of the same nature) as the continued success and legacy of the good politician.”The “proof” of Bejan’s political theory is an analogy to academic politics, something which (evidently unlike political philosophy and political science), Professor Bejan has actually studied and in which he obviously has ample experience.As applied to ethics and politics, the constructal law rests solely on arguments from analogy. Since rivers must flow, so must human ethics and politics. Everything that contributes to the flow is good; everything that obstructs it is bad. This is called the fallacy of faulty analogy. Limited space does not permit me to elaborate, but the reader can find the explanation of the defects of such analogical reasoning in the following, among other, works: John Stuart Mill, “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation,” 8th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), 393-97 (bk. 3, chap. 20), 553-58 (bk. 5, chap. 5, §§ 6-7); W. Ward Fearnside and William B. Holther, “Fallacy: The Counterfeit of Argument” (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Spectrum, 1959), 22-27; Douglas Walton, “Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach,” Kindle ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 305-15 (§§ 9.4-9.6); Michael C. LaBossiere, “76 Fallacies,” Kindle ed. (Amazon Digital Services, 2012), 120-23; and Marianne Talbot, “Critical Reasoning: A Romp Through the Foothills of Logic for Complete Beginners,” Kindle ed. (Metafore, 2014), Kindle loc. 2264-2307.Alan E. JohnsonSeptember 20, 2018

⭐The laws of gravity. The laws of motion. The laws of thermodynamics. We take these “laws” of physics for granted and associate them with very old men like Newton, Galileo and Maxwell.As Dr. Bejan says, the laws of nature are discovered, not invented. That a new law, the Constructal Law, could be discovered at this late date is a stunning revelation that will change our view of everything from the evolution of the universe and biological life to our understanding of Facebook.Laws of nature seem intuitively obvious – with gravity, things fall down, but they never fall up. Just like the more familiar laws of physics, the statement of the Constructal Law is simple – “Matter and energy self-organizes into flows that maximize their efficiency.” In the process, the flows evolve and change, creating design – for example, the branching of a river delta across its flood plain, or the branching design of the passageways in a lung.But, you might object, the river bed is inanimate and the lung is the result of millennia of biological evolution. How could they be connected?The answer is that the river delta, biological evolution and yes, Facebook, are all directed by a single law of physics, the Constructal Law. And the physical process of evolution it describes is a common underlying element that unites everything that happens in the universe.In “The Physics of Life,” Dr. Bejan lays out the Big Picture of the Constructal Law in a way that anyone can comprehend and appreciate. To say that it will change the way you look at the world is absolutely true. But mere personal enlightenment trivializes the importance of the discovery.Take for example, gravity. All life has evolved within a gravity field and learned to deal with it. We humans are exquisitely designed to stand erect against the force of gravity and use it to move across the landscape. As Dr. Bejan charmingly describes, walking is the process of continuously falling forward, throwing a leg out to catch ourselves and doing it again. No intellectual knowledge of the laws of gravity is required to walk.However, with the discovery of the Laws of Gravity, it became possible to construct theories about how, for example, the planets circle the sun. In science, theories are testable predictions about how things will behave based on the underlying laws of nature.The gravitational theory of orbital mechanics allowed us to predict how spacecraft would behave and allowed the evolution of satellites and interplanetary probes which reach their destinations with magnificent precision – predictably and not by simple trial and error.The Constructal Law provides us a new platform from which to launch a cornucopia of theories which will allow us to predict, design and direct the evolution of systems, things, biology, society and evolution itself in new and very unexpected ways.As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that the modest Dr. Adrian Bejan is in fact one of the most referenced scientists in modern times. His Constructal Law is “Spreading across the landscape” of science like wildfire.”The Physics of Life” lights the match that could ignite a wildfire of understanding and creation for all people with intelligence and intellectual curiosity amongst all the peoples of the Earth. Stay tuned, it’s going to be a great ride.

⭐The book “The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything” by Prof. Adrian Bejan (J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University) brings an awesome and elegant presentation about how Constructal Law of design and evolution rules the design in any finite size flow systems (animate or inanimate) in issues concerned with our daily life.The book showed that the same physical principle used to predict in deterministic way the shape and structure in engineering and nature can be used to explain how the world systems works “as a flow system”. The book brings a new viewpoint about the mechanisms (e.g., sustainability, water and food supply, fuel) that guide generation and evolution of design in the world, treating it as a large thermodynamic system and considering human beings as part of nature. The book clearly reinforces that Constructal Law can be viewed as an universal phenomenon of generation, configuration and evolution of design in any finite size flow system.

⭐This book takes your mind and spirit in a journey where you feel how physics is in every activity we do experience in this life, starting from life itself, water streams and rivers, economy, politics, sociological activities….., and to through the book, you realize how the Constructal Law is evident in several phenomena in life. The subject was tackled in a very interesting way, and even though it may require thorough reading, yet the material is attractive to, and is easily digested by any reader regardless of their background.I already have my copy of this wonderful book of Prof. Bejan (check my review on amazon.com where I purchased my copy).This is an order for two more copies as a gift for a colleague and for the library at my work place.

⭐Physics of Life by Prof. Bejan brings life and evolution to physics. Indeed, life can be recognized as a physical phenomenon on Earth. Furthermore, evolution as a feature of animate and inanimate realms is a physical phenomenon, no doubt. Prof. Bejan postulates that anything that moves is alive as it thrives to evolve in such a way that it moves for greater access to its space, and more freedom. To evolve infers to opt among choices and to choose the better. In this sense, Prof. Bejan advocates – and he is right – that good and organization are concepts that belong in science. Those concepts are firmly placed in Constructal Law as formulated in 1996, which gives a concise statement of the physics phenomenon of organization in nature, which I paraphrase: anything that flows and is free to morph will reconfigure to provide greater access to its currents. Surely, in past circumstances outside the Physics domain (philosophy, theology etc) , humans attributed evolution (or moving/acting) with purpose as a feature of animate and inanimate realms. I give one example: in Greek theology any physical object is believed to have a logic and meaning of existence, therefore objects (natural occurrences) will evolve and thrive according to their purpose (viz. to do work faster). I believe that recognizing that Constructal Law belongs in physics and thermodynamics, and formulating this Law as such, is the major merit of Prof. Bejan. This is definitely an extension to physics and will be observed as a very useful, new and expanded way to contemplate our world and to proactively act within it.

⭐The author isnt deeping too much into the theory.

⭐nice explanation for evolution of life.. captivating and legiblegood book…Thanks to Adrian Bejan

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