Freedom and organization are thoughts and happenings that unite us as members of civilized society. The physics is the universal phenomenon of evolution with its many familiar manifestations such as economies of scale, social organization, diminishing returns, the spreading of ideas, and the relentless generation and adoption of better flow architectures over time. This program arches back to science itself—science as an evolutionary and self-correcting add-on that empowers humans. Why is this important? For at least four reasons:
First, if you look at the world map today you see a physical flow that carries all the human features and concerns that we have discussed. The flow is organized nonuniformly, hierarchically on the earth’s surface. You see the same hierarchical movement taking shape in your mind as you review the history lessons that you were given: books, movies, names, places, and human events covered in the press.
Second, it is always the case that the society moves more, produces more, and is longer lasting when it is endowed with freedom, hierarchy, free questioning, and self-correcting. These physical features are also distributed nonuniformly, in ways that are obvious. This second flow architecture coincides with the hierarchical distribution of creators and transmitters of science, on the same world map. This is no coincidence.
Third, freedom is a physical feature, such as shape, dimension, weight, change (process), and power. Freedom is measurable. Nothing changes, nothing moves, and nothing evolves unless it has freedom. The freedom property is a measurement of how many features are free to be changed in the flow system configuration. Measurable is also the physical effect of freedom on efficiency and performance. Freedom is also measured as the number of “degrees of freedom” that are present in the constitution of the model of the observed (physical, natural) configuration of the flow system. Degrees of freedom are those features that can be changed freely, independently of other features.
Evolution without freedom is nonsense, because one cannot have design in nature (live, morphing to flow more easily over time) without freedom to change. The straight steel pipe is not a live system because it does not have the freedom to morph, to improve its flowing in an evolutionary manner. The drawing of the steel pipe is dead. The turbulent water stream in the river channel, through the marsh, and even through the steel pipe, is a live flow system. It has configuration, freedom, evolution, and it persists in the future. In one word, it has “life,” just like all the other flow configurations with freedom to change, from animal evolution to technology evolution and society evolution.
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 the designs of inanimate flow systems (river basins, turbulence, snowflakes) and animate flow systems (lungs, vegetation, animal locomotion, human, and machine evolution, e.g., aviation). We can use this method to investigate and innovate social, political, and technological systems as well.
Every tree canopy, branch, and leaf avoids the space of the neighbor because it must have free access to fresh air. The spacings between canopies appear to be carefully designed and sized. There are also carefully sized spacings between leaves. From this physics comes the arrangement of branches and leaves, and the few large and many small mosaic of tree canopies on the forest map (cf. Chap. 3).
The fourth reason why the physics of freedom is important is science itself. After all, what is science? That’s easy, science is a kick. Why is there such a pleasure, this feeling of having a hunch, figuring it out, discovering that you are right and then telling everybody? The science question is about all of us. Why it is human to have hunches, to want to know and, if possible, to know in advance, to predict?
The answer is that all these urges—to have food, shelter, knowledge, and longevity—are design features that facilitate life, which is the movement of all animal mass over the earth [1–3]. Without such design, our mass would not be moving as easily and as far. Without other flow designs (physical streams, inputs called food, fuel, useful energy), our mass would not be moving at all.
Science lives up to its literal meaning, which is knowledge (scientia in Latin). As we come to know more, we become more reliant on our knowledge to do something with it, for us. We predict better what will happen if we make decision A, and what will happen if we make decision B. We compare the anticipated effects of A and B, and we choose. Knowledge is the ability to implement design changes that are useful to the individual and the group. With physics, we design the future, we predict it, we build it, and we walk into it. Intelligence is to “see” a better design before the better design is spoken, tested, and built. Intelligence is the fast-forwarding of design evolution.
Knowledge is science, and it evolves by observing, condensing, and streamlining mentally the flow of observations. The condensed are the principles, and, among them, the most unifying are the first principles, the laws. Few large and many small is the hierarchical flow design that empowers everything about us as we move on earth and in life. In the flow and evolution of knowledge, the few large are the laws, and the many small are the observations and the data.
Knowledge (science, information, news) flows on the globe because it is moved by moving individuals. It flows from individuals who move more (because they possess knowledge) to individuals who move less and have the need to possess knowledge. When both ends of this flow possess the knowledge, the flow of knowledge stops.
The spreading of knowledge is often described as the “diffusion” of information. Seen from physics, the term “diffusion” is not correct. The spreading of anything is a combination of two ways to flow. First, the spreading is by “invasion” by carriers along fast and long channels that stretch across the available territory or population. Second, the interstices between the channels are “consolidated” by diffusion perpendicular to channels, which is slow and covers short distances. The coexistence of the fast and the slow, or the long and the short, is why any spreading or collecting flow has an S-shaped history of how the covered territory increases in time.
Physics is not a rigid text in today’s physics textbook. Science evolves, because we all want to predict the future. We are being selfish. We design this future to be good for us, with ourselves inserted in it. This virtual future walks and drives with us, in front of us, like the carrot in front of the horse, except that we have it better than the horse: we create food and fuel, more and more, and we keep going. In this future, we make choices, all the time. We go with the flow, and the flow goes with us. Without knowledge we would be crawling back into the caves, fearful of everything that moves. Read the world news, this still happens today.
I remember one morning when I was a sophomore, walking to class. The subject that day was one of the pillars of mechanics, called Strength of Materials, which is a misnomer for the resistance (stiffness) of loaded structures. I was reviewing in my mind the previous lecture, which had been about how to select the thickness of a steel bar such that it will not bend much when a specified weight was attached to its end, as in Fig. 10.3. When I was crossing the street I was struck by a mental image so powerful that it felt dangerous. I saw that by knowing the principles I knew what will happen to that bar. I knew the future of the bar and of those sitting on it.
The monumental value of science is subtle. Crossing the street I saw that I was being given the power to predict the future. Not one future but several, one for each bar that I was contemplating. Even better, I was being given the ability to select the future that serves us best: the future with a bar that is strongest, lightest, and easiest to build. This meant that I was being empowered to design the future. I, a veritable nobody from nowhere behind the Iron Curtain, was acquiring powers that before science were attributed to the work of God.
Good ideas travel far and persist. Science is a story that flows freely from those who know to the many more who wish to know. This flow spreads on the globe and in time. It flows from generation to generation. It flows one way, from high to low, from a source to a population on an entire area. The sources have been many. Among them, the Golden Age of Greece was the biggest jolt forward in science. The heat engine, the industrial revolution, the telephone, and the Internet are mere puffs of smoke from the engine of geometry and mechanics.
The effect of science is measurable in watts. The allocation of more power to more individuals is knowledge, which represents the design changes that keep us alive and flowing easier, moving farther, and lasting longer in time. Collaboration means working together, organization, life. With freedom, the flowing entities are free to change. They move to the right, and then to the left, and find better ways of flowing. Organization and design happen naturally. The collaborators do not know that they are collaborating, and know even less about with whom they are collaborating. They just find themselves interlinked on the globe in ways that serve them well individually. Hierarchy is in all these flow architectures.
The science that we learn and teach today is compartmentalized and told in several languages. There is one language for experts on animate things (animals, plants), another for experts on inanimate things (the rivers and the winds), yet another for experts on “natural” things (the animate and the inanimate combined), and finally the language for “artificial” things (society, economics, engineering). This is how we are raised, and as a consequence we think that humans are not natural. This makes as much sense as thinking that humans do not obey the physics laws of mechanics and thermodynamics.
Nothing cuts and divides more deeply than language. The first duty of the scientist is to learn the languages in which the original ideas were first published, and the history of the scientist’s discipline. The second duty is to teach languages and history to disciples. Start with French, Latin, Italian, and German, and then learn English. It pays to publish in English.
The organization of science is maintained and reinforced by its establishment, which is the few embedded in the very many, the nobodies, the upstarts. This is a natural hierarchy (cf., Chap. 3). It is difficult to question the established view, particularly when the questioned phenomenon is everywhere. The more common the phenomenon, the less likely it is that it will catch our attention. For example, throughout human history everybody knew that air has no weight. What could be more obvious than the fact that the balance at the market does not tilt unless one puts something on the platter? Obvious was also that the sun rises, passes over our heads, and sets on the horizon, and therefore the sun circles around us. Admit it, you grew up thinking this way. In fact, most of the people on earth today still think this way. This is as obvious as thinking that running, flying, and swimming are three different movements, and that gravity does not matter to the fish.
Can a nobody, an amateur who accidentally and completely innocently wanders on the wrong street, convince the marching crowd that there is a better idea? Yes, the amateur can do it, with freedom and a respectful disregard for what others say, and only by persisting.
Marching columns do not climb peaks
In science, a truly original idea rocks the boat. The initial reaction is silence. The second is quiet skepticism. When the idea begins to spread the skepticism turns into attacks, and later into their complete opposite: adoption, claims that it was not new, and plagiarism.
Many see the obvious, fewer see the subtle. Some are at home in both, the obvious and the subtle. The subtle is the bird’s-eye view, which empowers us to predict evolution in nature and it reveals the key role of freedom in making evolution possible. Nature may look complicated, but it is in fact a tapestry woven in a very simple old loom. The designs consist of many flow types and sizes, all governed by a succinct law of physics. All the designs fit because they flow together with their environment, the animate and the inanimate, the small and the large, and the human and the not human. They do not fit perfectly, and never will.
The more we rise above the details, the simpler the tapestry of nature looks. Taking a bird’s-eye view is very good medicine for those dizzied by the smoke that nature is complicated, diverse, random, infinitesimal, nondeterministic, fractal, turbulent, nonlinear, and chaotic.
I learned the bird’s-eye view method at MIT in the classrooms of Building 3, where I also learned my English. I remember the words, the times, the places, and the professors who taught me key words. I first heard the expression “the bird’s-eye view” with a Dutch accent, from J. P. Den Hartog, my famous professor of dynamics. He was an artist of the simple, in a discipline that was already cluttered with many complex mechanisms. That was decades before the blur of computer-generated simulations of anything today. He taught us to step back, look at the whole, make it simple but and not “throw the baby away with the bathwater.” Decades later, while lecturing in Amsterdam, I discovered that the baby thrown out with the bathwater is a Dutch saying. Professor Den Hartog was teaching the art of seeing the essential, and keeping it simple.
Luckily, at the same time, I was learning the bird’s-eye view as a method in thermodynamics [1–4]. This is how thermodynamics was being taught at MIT in 1969, as a method to think, in addition to how to perform accurate calculations that keep the world warm, moving, efficient, wealthy, and safe.
The bird’s-eye view method in thermodynamics is called “the control volume,” which is an imaginary bag in which all the components and fine details fit. The control-volume method is a provocation to the student: if, as you claim, the components of your system obey the laws of thermodynamics, then show us that your whole ensemble of components obeys the same laws.
Very often the student fails this test. No, not because of lack of training. The student fails precisely because of the training, which is reductionist and pushes the mind in the direction of analyzing smaller and smaller parts. This training instills the belief that the truth lies hidden in the infinitesimal. Statistical mechanics grew along that path. So prevalent is the doctrine of reductionism that most of my peers think that something is “fundamental” if it is small enough to be present in everything. This thought is wrong, a violation of language, and certainly not why the concept of fundamental is useful.
Look at the edifices of ancient Rome, which were significantly taller and stronger than in earlier periods elsewhere. Sure, tiny packets of clay are found throughout the Roman edifices, in every corner of every brick. But, clay was present in everything else before Rome. The fundamental in the buildings of Rome was the use of the fired brick and cement, which could withstand much greater loads in compression and bending than earlier building blocks made of dried mud. The fundamental is the building block. The brick is macroscopic, not infinitesimal. The fired brick and science (architecture, mechanics) are why Roman buildings were a new “species” among buildings, taller and stronger, and with much bigger vaults and air spaces.
Fundamental means deep down, at bottom, not infinitesimal. The “fundamental” is the truth that lies as “foundation” (from the Latin noun fundus, which means bottom). The secret—the brick—is of finite size, not infinitesimal. The difference between finite size and infinitesimal is like the difference between black and white, night and day, dead and alive, and pregnant and not pregnant. The infinitesimal does not have freedom, flow, organization, and evolution. The finite size does.
There are fundamentals hidden in applied physics, and they deserve to be discovered. There are “idea people” who are not scientists, and they deserve to be heard. All science is useful. With science we know more, we remember less, we have less work to do, and consequently we have more time to live, learn, and create.
Freedom is the mother of all evolution and science. If you doubt that, think of it in the opposite direction, to the absurd: What kind of science would that be where the choices made long ago are already the best, rigid forever? It would be useless, with no purpose and no future. It would be the opposite of the science that attracts us, inspires us, and empowers us on earth.
Journalism, you see, is the religion of modern society.
(Honoré de Balzac, La peau du chagrin)
The wonderful thing about the human mind is that it has the natural urge to rationalize the observed, and vice versa, to observe in order to reason and put the observation of nature to good use, to empower man, family, and offspring. The mind springs into action. The mind of the listener does not check the title printed on the speaker’s diploma. Anything goes.
Centuries ago scientists knew this because they themselves had begun as “amateurs,” which means “lovers” of what they were doing. They discovered and invented because they were curious, not because they were digging for usefulness, applicability, practical importance, and pleasing the sponsor.
Today, in the knowledge industry, most scientists are unaware that the most important ideas that they cherish came originally from amateurs, from nobodies who were just curious. This is true across the board, not just in science. Opposite the amateur, every established scientist has an axe to grind. Any peer review written by an establishment scientist should be taken with a grain of salt.
Scientific revolutions do not happen through the accumulation of new data. Revolutions happen while looking at existing data and seeing their organization—their message—in a new way, suddenly, involuntarily, accidentally, unwittingly. Over time, the science improved by revolution tends to usurp the authority of academicians and politicians. Such changes are much slower under totalitarianism where false science and groupthink are raised to the level of truth. Examples of this kind are genetic theory in communist USSR [5] and the alledged analogy between heat transfer (heating a solid body) and work transfer (charging an electric capacitor) in communist P. R. China, which brazenly violates the laws of thermodynamics (reviewed in [1–4]) (cf., p. 143). Much of this is nationalism in the guise of scholarship [6, 7]. False science [6–12] joins the fake blue jeans, fake iPhones, and pirated books [13].
Many in academia make the mistake of equating the goodness of an idea with the number of authors who agree with that idea. The history of science proves this to be false. Science is not about counting people. All individuals are not equally imaginative. All opinions are not equally important. Science is not democracy.
Many make the mistake of equating the goodness of ideas with the volume of research funding, people hired, money spent, and buildings built. The history of science proves this to be false. Science is not the amount of money spent. Dollars spent are not equally important. When I read the scientific literature, I see names, dates, and ideas, not budgets. Science is not accounting.
When I read the news of a huge research grant for a big research center, I predict that it will change nothing. The truly new, the svelte, beautiful, and valuable comes from the least expected source, which tends to be the nobody with a zero budget. That’s science again, and it is just like in competitive athletics: you have no idea what poor kid walks from the street onto the playing field. That is wonderful, it is the good news that sustains science and civilization.
Plagiarism means the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.
Corruption is in force, talent is rare. Thus, corruption is the weapon of the mediocrity that abounds.
(Honoré de Balzac, Le père Goriot)
The main purpose of science is to live a happy, creative, and long life, without the difficulties that create unhappiness, despair, giving up, and early death. In this big river, one benefits from swimming not alone (cf., Chap. 2). Yet, freedom is key: it pays to be independent, uncompromised, not a joiner.
All research is autobiographical. It is a human story about the researcher, the author, the people close to the author, the moment, the place, the language, and the excitement. I discovered this in my early teens when for Christmas my mother, the pharmacist, gave me Max von Laue’s science story “The History of Physics”. I still have this book. Likewise, the story of the present book was about ideas and human events in science. The story behind the story is how science “happens,” how it evolves, and why science is good for all of us, so good that we keep telling its story. Think of science as a good joke, in fact, it is the best joke because it is repeated the most.
Here is a concrete example, which will probably make you laugh. Repeated misunderstandings that have long been corrected in science have a lot in common with repeated claims of inventions of perpetual motion machines [2]. The history of such inventions shows what to do about those who keep repeating claims that are known to be untrue. Two hundred years ago, the Institut de France adopted the policy of not accepting any more claims of perpetual motion inventions because (1) they did not work and (2) they had been proven invalid based on the old science of mechanics. A clock cannot turn forever, because of friction. To deny review and publication to such claims was not censorship then, and it is not today. On the contrary, it is liberating and encouraging the evolution of science.
What is to be done? The answer is obvious: Stop publishing and sponsoring falsehoods, teach the disciplines correctly, improve them along the way, make them even more general and powerful, and clean up the misconceptions that tend to arise during the evolutionary design of science.
![$$\dot{W}\,[watts]$$](../images/482511_1_En_11_Chapter/482511_1_En_11_Chapter_TeX_IEq1.png)
solely from the atmosphere of temperature T0 [K]? Fuel is not needed. The air stream ![$$\dot{m}\,[kg/s]$$](../images/482511_1_En_11_Chapter/482511_1_En_11_Chapter_TeX_IEq2.png)
is used first as heat source in the heater (or boiler) of the power plant. The temperature of the air stream drops as it flows through the heater; therefore, the stream is used next as heat sink while flowing through the cooler (or condenser) of the power plant. The air stream is finally discharged into the atmosphere. What’s wrong with that?
A method for the production of mechanical power (
) from the atmosphere, T0. The air stream (
) is used first as source in the heater of the actual power plant. The temperature of the airstream drops as it passes through the heater; therefore, the stream is used next as heat sink while flowing through the cooler at the power plant. The spent air is later discharged into the atmosphere. Is this design possible?
Wrong is the focus on the particular scheme, which is the inventor’s claim. Wrong is to lose sight of the big picture, the holistic view. It’s like watching the hands of the magician, not the whole stage. At fault is modern science education, which is reductionist, and this is particularly the case in physics. The cure is to step away from Fig. 11.2 and recognize that to the right of the dashed line the air stream loop must complete itself while in thermal contact with the ambient. The
whole system that contains this complete drawing is a closed system in steady state, with an impermeable boundary of one temperature (T0) and with the atmosphere (and the supposed recipient of 
) as its environment. Inside this closed system, the air stream completes a loop.
For the whole system, the first law of thermodynamics requires that 
, where 
is the heat transfer rate between system and environment. If the inventor is right, then power is produced 
, i.e., power leaves the closed system) and heat must be transferred from the atmosphere to the system 
which means that heat transfer enters the system). These flow directions (heat in, work out) violate the second law of thermodynamics for this class of systems: closed, thermal contact with only one temperature reservoir (T0), and operating in steady state or an integral number of cycles.
We have rediscovered here that, at best, the “whole” can be a purely dissipative system that converts work into heat, one way, like any brake or clock mechanism. In other words, 
and 
or work in and heat out. The inequality sign matters. This proves mercilessly that heat transfer is not analogous to work transfer, and that publications that continue to push false physics are worthless. The heat–work analogy is an error of the same rank as a perpetual motion invention.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
Science is like a civilized territory that improves, prospers, and expands because it makes life better for the people who belong to it. It expands as long as it keeps producing useful things, which attract people. The civilized welcome the newcomers—the nobodies—provided that they obey the laws, the disciplines. People join because their lives become better that way.
To fight the barbarians who pillage on the perimeter is a necessary and unpleasant effort, a nuisance, not the objective. As the defeated are assimilated and civilized, the civilized territory expands and, as a result, life, peace, movement, and freedom flourish.
The civilized territory that does not fight the barbarians is destined to disappear along with the good way of life that it was sustaining. The village without dogs falls prey to the wolves. Science, like all the useful artifacts produced by the civilized, is no different.
Mistakes will continue to happen. As the paleontologist Michael Taylor [21] noted, “Science is not always right—very far from it. What marks it out from other fields of human endeavor is that, because of its formalized humility, it’s always ready to correct itself when it makes a mistake. Scientists may not be humble people, but doing science forces us to act humbly.”
Carl Sagan saw it differently: “In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken’, and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” Carl Sagan was wrong about religion. He forgot Christianity, Reformation, and the origin of universities. He was even more wrong about scientists changing their minds every day.
To refute a false claim is for the benefit of all. To reject the practice of repeating the false claim, and to name those who keep repeating claims that are known to be untrue, is not defamation of such authors. On the contrary, it is a service to all who use science, which include the authors of erroneous claims. This is why authors and journals publish errata and retractions, and why universities worth their name should punish those who plagiarize and publish fake science. The relentless pursuit of the truth is in the public interest.
Science is self-correcting because it is imbibed in freedom. This key truth of science needs to be broadly communicated to all, not just scientists.