Air around a wing. Blood through a vein. Money through an economy. Ideas through a society. Plasma in a fusion reactor. These are all flows. And flows follow laws that are remarkably similar, regardless of the medium.

Why this is not taught

Because education is divided into subjects. Those who study physics learn Navier-Stokes. Those who study economics learn supply and demand. Those who study medicine learn heart rate and circulation. Nobody is taught that it is the same mathematics.

This is not laziness; it is institutional. Universities are organised into faculties, faculties into departments, departments into research groups. Those who think between research groups fall outside the funding pathways and outside the journals. Generalists are not promoted. Specialists are.

A practical example: ship coatings

My coatings — SeaSkin, GuardSkin — reduce the resistance of a ship's hull by keeping the boundary layer (the thin layer of water immediately against the hull) smooth. The growth of algae and barnacles disturbs that boundary layer, costs fuel, pollutes seas. Until recently the standard solution was: poison in the paint. Growth dies, hull stays clean.

My solution is different. No poison, but a surface on which growth does not want to adhere. Zwitterionic and silicone chemistry mimicking what shark skin has done for millions of years: a body on which nothing sticks, not through aggression but through smoothness at the nano-scale.

What does this have to do with democracy? The same principle. A society in which "growth" — parasitism, regulatory burden, lobbying — cannot adhere, flows faster and consumes less. Not through force or exclusion, but through a different surface. A transparent, simple, predictable system of government is smooth at the nano-scale. Those who try to live parasitically on it slide off.

Frequencies and resonance

Air at 1 bar has molecules that collide roughly every 60 nanoseconds — a characteristic frequency. A person of 80 kg has a resonance frequency of 1 to 2 Hz. A building has one, a bridge, a wing, an organisation. Every system has its own frequency, and when you bring two systems onto the same wavelength, information and energy transfer far more readily.

This holds for radio transmitters. For dancing partners. For a negotiating team that clicks with the counterparty. And for a molecule reacting with another molecule: when their vibrations match, the reaction is lightning-fast; when they do not, nothing happens.

Those who grasp this look at their work differently. A teacher who cannot reach her class is operating on the wrong frequency. An entrepreneur who cannot find an investor, likewise. A political party that touches no voters, the same. The solution is usually not "transmit harder", but "transmit a different signal".

Laws that cross disciplines

Four examples of laws from fluid dynamics that work outside their own field:

• Bernoulli. The faster a flow, the lower the pressure. In the air: lift beneath a wing. In an organisation: the faster information circulates, the less hierarchical pressure is needed to enforce decisions.
• Reynolds. Above a certain speed, every flow becomes turbulent — chaotic rather than smooth. In water, in air, in a meeting structure: beyond a certain size or speed, systems break into chaos. The solution is not to push harder, but to adjust the scale.
• Poiseuille. Flow through a pipe is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the radius. Halve the cross-section, and the flow falls sixteenfold. In an economy: small increases in regulatory burden cost disproportionately large amounts of growth. Not linearly — multiplicatively.
• Continuity. What goes in must come out. In blood: reduced flow means accumulation somewhere. In money: capital that cannot flow out forms bubbles. In ideas: a society that cannot express itself will eventually burst.

What I ask

Not that the whole of science be turned upside down. But that we learn to think across disciplines. That engineers receive economics, economists biology, biologists physics, and that in doing so they do not recite the formulae but see the connections.

That is what A Plea for Revolutionary Thinking, Learning and Innovation — the book I am writing — attempts to do. Not to proclaim a single theory, but to offer a lens through which the world becomes coherently connected of its own accord.