Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization

The English (original) version is published by Doubleday, Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Ltd., Toronto. The vernissage of the Romanian version was on February 21, at the Romanian Academy, in Bucharest. The book has 296 pages, 60 figures, and it is shaped and structured in ten chapters: The Birth of Flow; The Birth of Design; Animals on the Move; Witnessing Evolution; Seeing Beyond the Trees and the Forest; Why Hierarchy Reigns; The Fast and Long Meets the Slow and Short; The Design of Academia; The Golden Ratio, Vision, Cognition, and Culture; The Design of History. The book is a story of science. It is about the emergence and the evolution of design patterns of “organization” in nature, and about how this universal phenomenon is condensed into one single law of Physics: the Constructal Law, discovered by Adrian Bejan. The story covers the entire territory of nature, from animate and inanimate phenomena to human, social and technology phenomena. The constructal law unifies these all, reveals their deep connection, and entrench them firmly in Physics. Quite so: biology, economy, evolution of sports and machines, they all belong to Physics. Why? Because everything that moves anywhere in nature obeys the few laws of Physics, for instance, the second law of mechanics, and the laws of thermodynamics: energy balance and irreversibility. This book is about a new law, the constructal law – a natural tendency that was not recognized until recently as a unifying phenomenon in Physics: organization, configuration, freedom of evolution, and life. Unavoidably, any scientific text has a biographical nuance. In fact, the research is, in the first place, about the researcher, or it is not original. This is why the story returns often to the Danube, the delta, the olympiads of mathematics, higher level basketball, and the author’s unique chance to hear his parents telling him about liberty at a time when such lessons was putting them in great an permanent danger. For more information on the Constructal Law visit the site: www.constructal.org.