1776: When Freedom From The State?

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The Physics Of Freedom

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/07/11/the_physics_of_freedom_147865.html
Authored by J. Peder Zane

Freedom is our Founding Fathers’ greatest gift.

https://constructal.org/
https://mems.duke.edu/about/news/freedom-and-evolution-hierarchy-nature-society-and-science
https://www.wsj.com/articles/physics-biology-and-economic-inequality-11549061005

Since 1776, that single word has been the compass and measure of the
human experiment the world calls America. Whatever disparate,
sometimes far-flung ideologies they may embrace, all who celebrate or
bemoan our past, present, and future ground their claims and critiques
in that single word. At heart, we are ever asking: How free are we?
When you imagine all the other ideas those men in powdered wigs might
have made our identity and obsession, freedom – which feels so
hopeful, open-ended, and optimistic – seems the most salubrious of
choices.

And yet, perhaps because the concept is so fundamental and familiar,
we rarely ask a central question: What is freedom? We assume we truly
know its meaning. But do we? Freedom has become like the operating
systems that power our computers and the world – something the vast
majority of us rely on, take for granted, without really understanding
what it is and how it works. I believe that some, but not all, of our
divisions are rooted in the lack of clear understanding of this
guiding ideal.

In this short space, I want to describe a definition of freedom that
is more accurate and hence more useful than the common understandings
rooted in politics because it is based in the timeless laws of
physics. This scientific lens, which is based on the work of Adrian
Bejan, the celebrated professor of mechanical engineering at Duke
University with whom I wrote the 2012 book “Design in Nature,” allows
us to see freedom more fully and more accurately, in all its power and
glory.

Start with the common understandings. The New Oxford American
Dictionary defines freedom as “the power or right to act, speak, or
think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” Other meanings
include “the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved,” and “the
power of self-determination attributed to the will.”

Clear enough, so what’s the problem? These definitions offer a cramped
and limited view of freedom, casting it as a human creation, as an
idea that chiefly applies to the relations among people. Sure, we
might say butterflies are free, that the time spent in the mountains –
or even pants with an elastic waist – feel freeing, but those are
metaphorical uses of a political concept. Ever since the ancient
Greeks, freedom has concerned people.

Through hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and dozens of books, Bejan
discovered that freedom is far more expansive. It is not a human
concept but a physical reality.

The life of butterflies, and everything around us, hinges on freedom.
He summarized this insight in a powerful statement he first
articulated in 1995 and which he calls the constructal law. It states:

For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), it must
evolve with freedom in such a way that it provides easier access to
the imposed currents that flow through it.

I know that’s a mouthful, but the idea is simple: Everything on our
planet that moves – water on the ground, blood in our bodies, money
through economies – constitutes a system composed of the current
(water, blood, money) and channels they flow through (rivers,
arteries, economies). Given the freedom to move and to change, these
flow systems evolve with a specific direction in time, to move more
current (or mass) more easily.

To see how, consider the first raindrops that fell to earth. In the
beginning they were isolated entities. But soon they began to coalesce
because it was easier to move or flow together. Over millions of
years, these unthinking, inanimate molecules carved out rivulets,
brooks, streams and rivers. Today, these tree-like river basins cover
the globe, moving water from the plain to the ocean’s mouth far more
efficiently than if the raindrops had been destined to seep by their
lonesome.

Through his own extensive research and that of collaborators around
the globe, Bejan has shown how the constructal law predicts the
emergence and evolution of the designs that give shape and structure
to our world. The same principle explains why air coalesces to form
jet streams in the sky and why human history is the story of greater
and easier movement of people, goods, money and ideas. All
self-organize into better channels that allow them to flow more easily
across the landscape.

Why does this happen? We don’t know. Like the laws of thermodynamics –
which predict that hot should move to cold, that matter should be
conserved – the constructal law is a first principle of physics that
summarizes an observable and universal phenomenon: the tendency of
matter to generate evolving designs that increase flow access. There
is no mechanism behind it; it is an uncaused cause.

It all hinges on freedom: the freedom of flowing matter to generate
evolving. It is the secret sauce of nature. Our planet evolved from a
fiery molten ball into a wondrous sphere of oceans and rivers,
mountains and forests, cities and air transport systems because of the
freedom of everything that moves to generate designs that allow them
to flow more easily. Bejan put it this way to me: “Freedom is many
physical (measurable) features that allow an observed object to
change. No freedom, no change. No change, no evolution. No evolution,
no life. Freedom is physics—biological and nonbiological—and so is
evolution, nature, and life.”

As I am writing for RealClearPolitics, the question remains: If
freedom is not an exclusively human creation, how does physics change
the way we should think about politics?

First, it shows us the limits of the common understanding of freedom
as a fixed set of outcomes – as a chiseled-in-stone set of laws and
practices against which human behavior must be measured. Don’t get me
wrong, it is good to have ideals. But while they tell us where we
might want to go, they do not tell us how to get there. This common
understanding falsely assumes that ideas like freedom are simply
things that we choose to embrace or reject. When we ask, for example,
why democracy didn’t flourish in Russia after the fall of communism or
in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, our answers revolve around
the failings of leaders and the led.

The constructal law provides a better answer by showing that politics
is anchored in physical realities – in the evolving systems through
which ideas and laws, rights and practices move from the centers of
power to the people and vice versa. In developed democracies such as
the United States, the rule of law, the concepts of “one person one
vote,” free and fair elections, and a free press are just a few of the
“currents” that move through the designs of a democracy. These
currents and channels cannot be simply imposed in one fell swoop; they
must evolve, over time, building on what was, like the raindrops that
gradually created the mighty river basins from the tiniest rivulets.

In assessing political systems, the central question is not, how free
is it compared to some utopian ideal, but to what extent does it
permit or restrict the freedom of people, ideas, goods, money, and all
the rest to self-organize into designs that allow those things to move
more easily?

Bejan, who grew up in Romania under communism, notes that
dictatorships are doomed to failure because they are not just fighting
the people, but physics. Censorship, coercion, and intimidation are
the tools they use to constrain the tendency of everything in nature –
which includes people – to flow more freely.

Finally, the physics of freedom should give us a new appreciation of
the Founding Fathers. Their greatest gift to us was not the rights
enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but
a political system that was truly free – one that could evolve, get
better. Those who see our past as a golden age are as misguided as
those who view our history as a series of moral failures. America
truly is a great experiment because our capacity for change means we
never are, but are always becoming. In freedom.