Preface
3Republishing a book written 20 years ago is a bit like coming across a forgotten childhood photo of a grown friend. A first thought, "Of course, how could this face have turned out any different", is quickly followed by the realization that in fact things could have evolved in a hundred ways other than how they did. Next comes the realization that the image now holds things that you had no perspective to see at the time. The image did not morph in the interim, but your retrospective sense of it has been irretrievably altered by the intervening changes.
4 This Back-In-Action edition of A Fuller Explanation is, in all major respects, the same as the prior 1992 paperback and 1987 hardback editions—a selective snapshot of the ideas embodied in Synergetics (1975) and Synergetics2 (1979). But the world around it is greatly changed. Consider, of course, that Buckminster Fuller died nearly a quarter-century ago. Many of his close friends and colleagues are no longer with us, notably the eloquent writer Ed Applewhite, who played a central role in helping Fuller document his synergetic principles in Synergetics, and passed away at age 85 in 2005. Crystallographer Arthur Loeb, another friend and colleague, who first met Fuller in 1964 at Boston’s WGBH television station, was a leading scholar of structure and form who brought so many others into this marvelous world through his compelling courses on design science at Harvard University. He too died recently, in the summer of 2002.
5 We have lost friends and gained discoveries and technologies. Sometimes I have to remind myself that A Fuller Explanation was written before the internet and Synergetics before the personal computer. (Was there such a time? My children, ages 8 and 6, do not believe it. Bucky, to them a beloved friend of Mom’s to be sure, is otherwise no different from other storybook characters. He’s like Abraham Lincoln, or Henry Ford, very real, but very long ago.) Similarly, A Fuller Explanation was written before interactive technologies made it possible to view and transform geometric forms in splendid and remarkable ways, today making its black and white line drawings almost absurdly primitive in their well-intentioned effort to convey spatial forms. In this, the book is dated. It presents Bucky and Synergetics to us as they were and seemed, almost a generation ago.
6 And yet, today's reader brings the whole contemporary world into the reading—the unavoidable hindsight of the intervening discoveries and events—making it a different book. An initial thought "Of course, how could it be otherwise" is quickly followed by the dual realizations that: 1) things could have gone differently, and 2) Fuller’s grasp of the fundamental principles of structure has proven both prescient and lasting. His discovery of the mathematics governing icosahedral forms, first validated by his own fantastically lightweight geodesic domes in the 1940s, has since been resoundingly accredited by Nature—by C60 and the nanotechnology revolution. Carbon-60, buckyballs, are just the beginning of Nature's endless peer review process. There have been unexpected discoveries in knot theory, quasicrystals, and quasiperiodic tilings. The shape of the universe, no less, is believed to be dodecahedral cells. Even information theory increasingly uses models based on 3D polyhedra or higher dimensional polytopes. New ideas in fractals, self-similarity, chaos theory, complexity theory, cellular automata, emergent properties, self-organizing systems, and scale-free networks are suggesting that nature organizes herself in ways presaged by Fuller's purely self-taught, self-discovered mathematical thinking. In short, the previously strange notion that space has shape and that thinking has shape—explained as clearly as a non-expert, perhaps over-eager student of Fuller could manage, 20 years ago—is today becoming a pervading meme that in many areas might overtake certain classical computational approaches.
7 Rather than try to cram the fullness of the current perspective into the prior frame of reference, A Fuller Explanation is here brought back in action as it was previously published. In this way it presents an accurate glimpse of history through which we hope to influence the future. That will be the job of its new, in-the-now readers, whose ability to influence the shape of things to come is limitless.
8 —Amy C. Edmondson
9 Cambridge, Massachusetts
10 April 2007