Award Speech
2021 IAGE Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient
Adrian Bejan
J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor
Duke University
abejan@duke.edu
The IAGE Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual who has made extraordinary contribution to the advancement of green energy over his/her lifetime. The Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest honor bestowed upon an individual by IAGE.
Speech Title: TIME AND BEAUTY
Time and beauty are two of our most visceral perceptions. Yet, their nature is seldom questioned. In this lecture I will show 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, we 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; therefore, in accord with the constructal law of flow design evolution in nature, there is an underlying evolutionary advantage to our efficient discernment for ideal ratios, shapes, and beauty at large. In the process, key questions to our cognition are answered from physics. 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? What is the role of art and ethics in science? Through physics, the general answer is this: to empower the individual with speed and clarity of thought, understanding, decision-making and more effective movement, i.e., life.
The lecture is based on the book "TIME AND BEAUTY: Why time flies and beauty never dies".
Short Bio
Adrian Bejan was awarded the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal:
“For his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics and convection heat transfer...and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems.”
He received all his degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: B.S. (1971, Honors Course), M.S. (1972, Honors Course) and Ph.D. (1975). He is the J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor at Duke University.
Professor Bejan is the author of 30 books and 700 peer-refereed journal articles. His h index is 106, with total 83,000 citations on Google Scholar. He received the major international awards for thermal sciences. He was awarded 18 honorary doctorates from universities in 11 countries.
He is a member of the Academy of Europe and the national academies of Mexico, Turkey, Romania, and Moldova. He is Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).