See also: Lazy ant studyIn Sep 1995, Bejan, while attending an international conference on thermodynamics in Nancy, France, whereat he had brought flyers for his seventh book Entropy Generation Minimization, listened to a pre-banquet speech by Ilya Prigogine, who asserted that the various tree-shaped structures in nature, e.g. river basins, river deltas, air passages, or lightning bolts, such as shown below (adjacent(, were aleatoires, i.e. “random” (Ѻ), the results of throwing dice, cosmic coincidences. [5] Bejan commented on this:
A diagram of Bejan's concept of "constructal flow" patterns. |
“When [Prigogine] made that statement, something clicked, the penny dropped. I knew that Prigogine, and everyone else, was wrong. They weren’t blind; the similarities among these treelike structures are clear to the naked eye. What they couldn’t see was the scientific principle that governs the design of these diverse phenomena. In a flash, I realized that the world was not formed by random accidents, chance, and fate but that behind the dizzying diversity is a seamless stream of predictable patterns.”
“In the sixteen years since, I have shown how a single law of physics shapes the design of all around us. This insight would lead me to challenge many articles of faith held by my scientific colleagues, including the bedrock beliefs that biological creatures like you and me are governed by different principles from the inanimate world of winds and rivers and the engineered world of airplanes, ships, and automobiles. Over time, I would develop a new understanding of evolutionary phenomena and the oneness of nature that would reveal how design emerges WITHOUT an intelligent designer.”
“I think of every thing that ‘moves’, from the atmosphere, to oceanic currents, to these other things that move, these ‘buckets of water’ we call animals, I think of them in the same way. So animal ‘life’, the biosphere, is, with regard to movement, and evolving flow architecture, on the planet, no different that other evolving flow architectures, all flowing more easily to churn over the earth’s crust more effectively.”— Adrian Bejan (2017), “Thermodynamics of Emotion” (8:35-9:11) (Ѻ), Oct 28