Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies

Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies
Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9811245487

Time and beauty are two of our most visceral perceptions. Yet, their nature is seldom questioned. In this ground-breaking new work, Adrian Bejan — a true 'original' among physicists — explains, in a scholarly yet colorful style, the scientific basis for the perception of time and beauty.Organized into three main ideas, the book begins first with the perception of time. The author expounds on why we feel that time flies faster as we get older. Perceived time, also called 'mind time,' is different from clock time. In this context, time is another word for 'perceived change'. Next, readers will discover that beauty is appealing because beautifully-shaped images are scanned faster by two eyes. To observe our immediate surroundings and to understand them faster is highly advantageous to survival; hence, there is an underlying evolutionary advantage to our discernment for ideal ratios, shapes, and beauty at large. Finally, time and beauty are jointly understood to explain why the global pandemic had decelerated our mind time. This understanding arms us with techniques to slow down our mind time (which accelerates with age), and to create the conditions for living longer and more creatively.Scientists may have contemplated aspects of time and beauty separately. In contrast, the author submits an original and rewarding approach to understanding them together. In the process, key questions to our cognition are answered. Why does the mind 'try' to make sense of a new mental image? Why is there a natural tendency to organize a new input and mentally position it among past perceptions? Through physics, the book offers a general answer: to empower the individual with speed and clarity of thought, understanding, decision-making and movement. The same answer holds for the other disparate perceptions illustrated in this book, from time and beauty to ideas, message, shape, perspective, art, science, illusions, and dreams.

Design in Nature

Design in Nature
Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2013-01-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0307744345

In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.

Freedom and Evolution

Freedom and Evolution
Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3030340090

The book begins with familiar designs found all around and inside us (such as the ‘trees’ of river basins, human lungs, blood and city traffic). It then shows how all flow systems are driven by power from natural engines everywhere, and how they are endlessly shaped because of freedom. Finally, Professor Bejan explains how people, like everything else that moves on earth, are driven by power derived from our “engines” that consume fuel and food, and that our movement dissipates the power completely and changes constantly for greater access, economies of scale, efficiency, innovation and life. Written for wide audiences of all ages, including readers interested in science, patterns in nature, similarity and non-uniformity, history and the future, and those just interested in having fun with ideas, the book shows how many “design change” concepts acquire a solid scientific footing and how they exist with the evolution of nature, society, technology and science.

The Physics of Life

The Physics of Life
Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-05-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1250078822

An empowering new view of the nature of physics and the constant evolution of our physical and social world

A Great and Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty
Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2010-05-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0731814908

It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?

Heat Transfer

Heat Transfer
Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1119467438

HEAT TRANSFER Provides authoritative coverage of the fundamentals of heat transfer, written by one of the most cited authors in all of Engineering Heat Transfer presents the fundamentals of the generation, use, conversion, and exchange of heat between physical systems. A pioneer in establishing heat transfer as a pillar of the modern thermal sciences, Professor Adrian Bejan presents the fundamental concepts and problem-solving methods of the discipline, predicts the evolution of heat transfer configurations, the principles of thermodynamics, and more. Building upon his classic 1993 book Heat Transfer, the author maintains his straightforward scientific approach to teaching essential developments such as Fourier conduction, fins, boundary layer theory, duct flow, scale analysis, and the structure of turbulence. In this new volume, Bejan explores topics and research developments that have emerged during the past decade, including the designing of convective flow and heat and mass transfer, the crucial relationship between configuration and performance, and new populations of configurations such as tapered ducts, plates with multi-scale features, and dendritic fins. Heat Transfer: Evolution, Design and Performance: Covers thermodynamics principles and establishes performance and evolution as fundamental concepts in thermal sciences Demonstrates how principles of physics predict a future with economies of scale, multi-scale design, vascularization, and hierarchical distribution of many small features Explores new work on conduction architecture, convection with nanofluids, boiling and condensation on designed surfaces, and resonance of natural circulation in enclosures Includes numerous examples, problems with solutions, and access to a companion website Heat Transfer: Evolution, Design and Performance is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in mechanical and chemical engineering, and for all engineers, physicists, biologists, and earth scientists.

Heads You Win

Heads You Win
Author: Jeffrey Archer
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250172519

Heads You Win is international #1 bestseller Jeffrey Archer’s most ambitious and creative work since Kane and Abel, with a final twist that will shock even his most ardent of fans. Leningrad, Russia, 1968: From an early age it is clear that Alexander Karpenko is destined to lead his countrymen. But when his father is assassinated by the KGB for defying the state, Alexander and his mother will have to escape Russia if they hope to survive. At the docks, they have an irreversible choice: board a container ship bound for America or one bound for Great Britain. Alexander leaves the choice to a toss of a coin... In a single moment, a double twist decides Alexander’s future. During an epic tale, spanning two continents and thirty years, we follow Alexander through triumph and defeat as he sets out on parallel lives as Alex in New York and Sasha in London. As this unique story unfolds, both come to realize that to find their destiny they must face the past they left behind as Alexander in Russia.

The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Random House Canada
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2011-08-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307360830

Winner of the 2011 Booker Prize and #1 international bestseller, The Sense of an Ending is a masterpiece. The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's award-winning novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers. Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget. Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?

In The Shadow Of The Banyan

In The Shadow Of The Banyan
Author: Vaddey Ratner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2012-09-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1849837619

A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday