Engineering Book Reviews

This is an interesting and controversial book. People seem to either love or hate it. On the negative side, the author is clearly trying pat himself on the back, and to position himself as someone who should be lauded as a great mind of science. The book is highly redundant as well. By the end of the first chapter we get it that trees promote flow, but he keeps hitting us over the head with this idea, and re-explaining it. He's also a bit preachy with his views of atheism. My biggest criticism were the drawings and figures. They reminded me of the awful and confusing drawings physics teachers would make on the black board. Even his picture of throwing a stick into the water to be fetched by a dog, or the picture of a carrot were confusing, or even the picture of a log in the water made no sense. For heavens sake, if he wants to get acclaim for a new theory he should hire a graphic illustrator to do the drawings, and they should be in 3D perspective, not 2-D with cross sections.

On the plus side it truly changes the way you thing about the world, or at a minimum gives you another way of thinking about it.

The constructural law as stated in the book is this: "For a finite size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it."

He claims that since this is a law, it is more than being descriptive it is also predictive, and that it applies across many disciplines from biology, to thermodynamics and sociology.

Turns out that for point to surface flow systems, a tree structure is most efficient. Thus river deltas, lava flows, organizations, networks, lungs, blood vessels and of course trees all look like trees.

Flow systems that are surface to surface look like a tree with roots.

Interesting facts: Dogs will fetch a stick in a lake such that they maximize running and minimize swimming. Large animals are more efficient at carrying mass, and also schools of fish and flocks of birds are more efficient. Heat sinks should have a tree structure. Animals flap or stride at the rate of M to the 1/6th power, where M is their mass. Tree's are water pumps that transmit water to the atmosphere. Forests are optimally configured to maximize water flow. Evolution uses the constuctural law as a optimization criterion. The golden ratio is appealing because our vision is has a similar aspect ration, and this increase the flow of information. Penne past will self organize and orient itself upright to allow steam to flow through it. Ice bergs and logs orient perpendicular to the wind to maximize momentum transfer from wind to see. Black markets are developed because normal channels of flow are blocked. Most languages follow Zipf's law, where the the second ranked word is half as common as the first, and the third is 1/3 as frequent as the first.

I've given it some thought, and come up with some of my own thoughts on the subject namely:

Seem like there should be a corollary as follows: If you come across a tree structure, something is or was flowing.

In any system ask what is flowing, what is the optimal flow pattern, and if an inefficiency is found then exploit it.

Ebay and Amazon are both tree with root structures. Orders and money flow one way, and product the other way. Both buyers and sellers are more efficient being part of the hierarchy rather than going at it alone.