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Merkx first met his constructal-theory co-editor in the fall of 2003, when Bejan was appointed to the Provost's International Advisory Committee, which Merkx chairs. Bejan later asked Merkx for travel support for a research trip to Eastern Europe. After the trip, the two came together for lunch, and Bejan talked about his theory, sketching for Merkx trees and rivers with their patterns of channels extending from delta shapes. Those images, Merkx recalls, mirrored familiar patterns in the social sciences. “I've always had a kind of system approach,” he says. “I see countries as systems. And sometimes if the system is not functioning well, then it breaks down, the same way a flow system can break down when it has too many obstacles.”
The theory's inventor, Bejan, has faced his own obstacles as an engineer with a theoretical bent. “To me, engineering is a science, and on this I fight with everybody,” he says. “I want respect for engineering science. Engineering is not something that you tinker with in a shop, sell, and make money. That is technician work. Engineering is a mental viewing, it is ideas, it is rare and noble, just like frontier physics or biology.”
Bejan has long been enamored of patterns—and freedom of movement. After all, he says, science seeks deterministic principles in a world seemingly ruled by chance events. And scientists insist on the freedom to question, overturn, and invent those principles.
He grew up enduring the restricted patterns of Communist Romania. His father, a veterinarian, had been imprisoned with the beginning of Communist rule in 1948, and his mother, a pharmacist, similarly “disappeared” for a time ten years later. Beginning in third grade, Bejan took afterschool drawing and painting lessons at a fine-arts school; there, as he puts it, he “learned the language of patterns.”
But basketball competed with art for his attention. He was exposed to the sport first as a ball boy at a local sports arena. In high school, he was a starting player in a professional league: He jokes, “Moi, LeBron James!” After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the Galati Polytechnic University, in part to continue playing basketball in national competition at the highest level: Galati had a team in the top league.
Basketball, a flow system in its own way, is always with him, Bejan says; at Duke's faculty club, he can be seen practicing the flow of the game, dribbling, pivoting, and shooting. When, in his schoolboy days, his basketball coach was asked about producing a great shooter, he would reply that his interest was in producing a great passer. The game fundamentally is about moving the ball, and that imperative involves, moment by moment, choosing the more efficient scoring path. “My coach taught that when you see a good opening, pass the ball. Or, if you don't see the opening, give it to a guy who knows how to dribble.
“The playing field is like vascularized muscle and arterial blood flow. The players are milling around in order to create pores for all these possible paths. And a good team puts the ball in the right channels—the right channels over space and time.”
Then, in a reaction to the Prague Spring of 1968, a current of liberalization that swept briefly through Eastern Europe, Romania's Education Ministry offered scholarships for study in the West. On the basis of a competitive exam, Bejan earned one of the half-dozen places.
He enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it was the only school that Romanian authorities allowed him to apply to. As a freshman he took a strength-of-materials course, in which he learned how to calculate the maximum stress that a beam could accommodate. “I said to myself, this is amazing,” he recalls. “I know what will happen to something without having to build it and test it.” He had discovered the power of theory. The next year, he took a class quiz that required predicting how a machining process would produce chips off a chunk of metal. It was the first time as a college student, he says, that he was encouraged to be an original thinker—a quality, he adds, that he encourages in his own classes.
Bejan refused to return to Romania after graduation, instead accepting an offer to continue work at MIT toward his doctorate. In the eyes of the government, he wasn't just a defector but a traitor as well. At his old high school, posters went up identifying him as an example to be avoided.
“Constructal theory shows that freedom is good for design,” he says. “Also freedom to morph is good for design.” A political system —like an engineering system or a natural system—has to be self-correcting to endure. Freedom, in the realms of politics and economics, nurtures networks that are efficient, including networks for encouraging creativity and for maximizing profits. That's why democracy has staying power, he says.
Outside his office in the Pratt School of Engineering, Bejan displays a quote from Plato: “Let no one untrained in geometry enter my house.” Inside, on one wall, he has certificates grouped according to a strict pattern: on the left, awards from professional societies; on the right, fifteen honorary degrees, clustered geographically, from Western to Eastern Europe. On another wall is a seascape he did in grade school and his intricately rendered, multiple-perspective projections of a kite, from his polytechnic days.
Within Pratt, Bejan is considered an iconoclast—and a maverick. In the preface to his earlier book, he repeats a lesson about academic colleagues he learned from one of his former MIT professors. The lesson came in the form of an insight from Sancho Panza, loyal servant to Don Quixote: The windmills hit his master just as hard as he hit them.
Beyond the campus, too, Bejan is regarded as an unconventional thinker—though he's succeeded at working with other unconventional thinkers, including Sylvie Lorente, professor of civil engineering at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse, France. Lorente, with Bejan, helped develop a Duke mechanical-engineering course on constructal theory.
This summer, Bejan traveled to Portugal for an international constructal-theory conference, which drew more than 100 physicists, biophysicists, and engineers. On a Paris stopover, he met with other groups of constructal-theory enthusiasts. Some specialized scientific journals, he laments, haven't been quick to publish his work because engineers don't often have status outside the engineering profession—even as, to some engineers, theory-powered thinking doesn't do much to confer status. Still, a decade ago, he was awarded the Worcester Reed Warner Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineering International. The medal goes to one individual each year in recognition of “outstanding contribution to the permanent literature of engineering.” In Bejan's case, it honored “his originality, challenges to orthodoxy, and impact on engineering thermodynamics and heat transfer.”
Today, he says he maintains the drive to create that comes from being an outsider.
“I feel I have to prove myself. I feel that every day.”
Bejan is quick with the constructal quip, referring to animals, in constructal terms, as “walking trees,” including terms like “svelteness” in the technical diagrams he shares with visitors, and declaring that “the future belongs to the vascularized” (a saying he borrowed from his collaborator Lorente). For all his enthusiasm, he has confronted questions about the novelty of a concept linking the shapes of systems with their other properties. An anonymous posting on a physics website, for example, declared that “The idea of deriving outcomes of (biological, astronomical, other) systems based on the simple laws that govern them is gorgeous, necessary, and very, very old.” But Bejan says that what makes the theory “dangerous,” or the observations embedded in the theory seemingly old, is the harking back to engineering as a scientific pursuit. What a theory can do, he adds, is to tie together seemingly random observations into a grand package, or to reveal the pattern that's not apparent.
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