Human ingenuity is simply our way of partaking in a natural flow of life that's been around a lot longer than we have.
When a tree falls in a river, it impedes the water's flow. No, this isn't a Zen koan. It is the beginning of a description of innovation and illumination that nature provides, which we can use to understand and improve our lives and society, according to Duke University thermodynamics expert Adrian Bejan.
"Once the tree, or another obstacle—a beaver dam, say—is pushed away, water flows more freely throughout. All the waters have been liberated relative to their previously constricted flow, and that freed area attracts more movement. As a result, the surrounding areas benefit," Bejan explains to Quartz.
Apply this to a society and you have a physical description of innovation and its effects.
When one person solves a problem with a new idea—and innovation generally stems from an issue that needs resolution, Bejan says—then people in the local landscape and beyond are also positively influenced, economically and otherwise. Money and new notions then flow more freely as the single idea leads to related innovations and opportunities, creating a cascade of additional flow.
Bejan was awarded a Franklin Institute Medal for his flow-theory-turned-physics-principle called constructal law. It posits that all animate or inanimate systems—art, trees, people, organizations, and financial structures—follow the natural design principle of flow. The rule states that for any system to persist over time, it must evolve according to impositions, working with currents that flow through it, and moving with them. To survive and thrive, we must accommodate visible and invisible pressures.
The professor believes pretty much everything can be explained by physics. On June 13, 2018, he published a paper in the International Journal of Energy Research with researchers from Yildiz Technical University in Turkey and Federal University of Paraná in Brazil that shows "the thermodynamic basis for social organization." In it, he argues that human movement and social constructs are described by flow in nature—just as rivers and trees branch in predictable patterns based on pressures, so do people's minds, our organizations, and whole societies.
While working on the paper, Bejan realized he and his colleagues had inadvertently alighted upon a physical description of innovation and human illumination. "This theoretical framework also reveals the physical meaning of innovation: It is a local design change that liberates the flow over the entire territory inhabited by the organized movers," the study concludes.
Design in Life
Simply put, innovations open new pathways that generate opportunity for more movement for everyone around them. "The sudden removal of a local obstacle to human flow opens a valve for new flow," Bejan argues. "It can be measured in physical terms as an increase in movement."
The economic impact of a single innovation is two-fold. The inventor and its local settlement attract sudden movement and the whole flowing area, or population, becomes wealthier than before. "This is the tangible, or physical effect of a single idea, and why research, science, questioning, and tinkering benefit the whole of society," Bejan says.
Advanced societies incorporate this understanding into policies instinctively—governments, for example, encourage small businesses or educational institutions with tax breaks. But we haven't visualized the effect of innovation physically or conceived of the physics principle as predictive, which means the concept remains abstract. Because he believes that nature predicts the patterns of our lives and minds, Bejan says we can rely on what we know about the rules of flow to enhance our institutions and ourselves.
The visualization of innovation simplifies calculations and eliminates doubt. Think of the rushing of rivers where there's free flow, and conceptualize this as a metaphor for creativity in culture—it's easy to see why more, better education and increased research can yield benefits for everyone though they may seem to be a drain on resources when considered superficially. Bejan argues that cultures that fail to recognize these benefits are doomed to "buy ideas" and stay behind, always faltering economically.
