9 Children: The True Scientists
2This book is for the only true scientists—the children.
3 The philosopher-scientist Sir James Jeans said: ‘‘Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.’’ The great Viennese physicist, Ernst Mach, whose name is used to identify ultrasonic airplane speeds—‘‘Mach Number’’—said, ‘‘Physics is the attempt to set the facts of experience in most economical order,’’—the only raw material of all science is experience.
4 Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences—‘‘Which is the mostest? Which is the leastest?’’ They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness; they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart. True scientists deal only in the experienceable and base their assumptions only upon the physically re-demonstrable behaviors and characteristics.
5 Innocently betrayed by the equally innocently detoured-from-reality educational system, the young scientists are lured into
6 From Introduction to Einar Thorsteinn, Barna Leikur (Reykjavik, Iceland, 1977). Introduction copyright ©1977 by R. Buckminster Fuller.
7 forsaking their innate true-scientist advantage by adopting the school-taught mathematical tools with which to probe, sort out, and reassociate their experience-won information, most of which mathematical tools are experimentally nondemonstrable assumptions. In the school-taught mathematics, reality is ‘‘three-dimensional.’’ Can you demonstrate physically a real something having no weight, no temperature, no longevity? Try to demonstrate a structural model of the subdimensional ‘‘point’’ of which the schoolteachers and professional mathematicians pretend to themselves that their one-dimensional lines, their two-dimensional planes, and their three-dimensional realities are constructed. To give simple proof of nice, simple plane geometry you must demonstrate physically the ‘‘surface’’ of nothing. Try to produce a structural model of the square root of minus one or a structural model of eternally unfinishable π(pi).
8 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Mathematics catalog states ‘‘Mathematics is the science of structure and pattern in general.’’ Humanity's invention and adoption of the word image and its brain-formed employment as image-ination was occasioned by the need to describe to others the visual experiencing of structural conceptions—images. ‘‘Seeing’’ always and only occurs inside the brain. ‘‘Seeing’’ always occurs only as brain constructs—image-ination. Professional scientists deceive themselves by adopting such nonexperienceable ‘‘tools’’ as unimaginable imaginary numbers.
9 Victims of their nondemonstrable, ergo self-deluding, mathematical assumptions (axioms), academic scientists have been forced to improvise a vast complex of speculative techniques for coping three-dimensionally with an inherently four-and moredimensional reality. They have been forced as well to adopt a plurality of incommensurable fraction constants with which to compensate for their use of a mathematical coordinate system other than that employed by physical Universe. Nonunitarily conceptual, eternally self-regenerative, Scenario Universe's ‘‘here’’ differentialing, and ‘‘there’’ integrating complex of nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping energy intertransforming episodes, and their interdependent effects complementations, al-
10 ways and only operate as (a) angularly convergent, gravitationally importive, syntropic, substantive, structural-systems' concentratings, and (b) angularly divergent, radiantly exportive, entropic, destructural dispersings, and never in the always and only immutable frame of behavioral data reference of conventional education's and academic science's three only omni-interperpendicularly, self-interacting sets of always only interparalleled, eternally extensive, absolutely straight lines, which straight lines are 180-degree angles. Nature uses only waves—never straight lines.
11 All mathematicians assume that a plurality of lines can passage through the same dimensional point at the same time, whereas physicists find that a physical-reality line is an energy event and that only one energy event can transit a given locus at a given time, all of which accounts for the physical interference patterns and angular reflections, refractions, and smash-up dispersions visibly occurring in their particle bombardment cloud chambers. Academic science has found no solids in nature, yet conceptually confused physics identifies one of its most advanced activities as ‘‘solid-state’’ physics. Arduously employing the formulae of calculus's cofunctioning and infinitesimally deviating fluctions from their originally perpendicular-parallel ‘‘x-y-z’’ line of reference, professional scientists sometimes arrive at quantations having reasonable agreement with the quantities demonstrated by physical experiment. Having learned awkwardly, circuitously, and fortuitously to cope, they hold grimly to their educational formulae. Their invisible cobweb-weaving in the dark being the only scientific method of which they know and with which they have become painstakingly familiar, academic scientists hold meticulously to it and therefore succeed in indoctrinating less than one-tenth of 1 percent of humanity to a degree of professional cleverness adequate to cope meaningfully with experimentally developed data in the frontiers of scientific advance.
12 This innocently acquired dilemma of humanity is now correctable because persistent childlike integrity of exploration, employing only experimentally evidenceable tools and strategies, has discovered and demonstrated the omnirational mathematical coordinate system being employed by eternally regenerative Scenario Universe. Its discoverer has named it ‘‘synergetics.’’ If it becomes popularly adopted, synergetics has been discovered just in time to avert comprehensive disaster for all humanity. In many religious scriptures it is prophesied that if and when humanity attains salvation, ‘‘a little child shall lead them.’’ This could be modified to read, ‘‘the only true scientists, the children, shall lead humanity's way with their experimentally demonstrable, omnirational coordinate mathematics.’’ How and why may this occur?
13 Within the realm of design science and engineering, it is now incontrovertibly demonstrable that if humanity employs the sum of its knowledge and pools all the world's resources, we now have aboard our Spaceship Earth more than ample capability to take care of all humanity for all generations to come and to do so at higher standards of living and individual freedom than any humans have thus far experienced or even dreamed of, while in no way endangering the ecological integrity of our planet. This is to say that we have 4 billion billionaires aboard our planet whom the competitive expediencies of our present [1977] cultural economic system are inadvertently depriving of realizing their good fortune.
14 It is also incontrovertibly demonstrable that it is feasible to accomplish this lasting success for all humans within ten years while concurrently phasing out all further human use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. We can live handsomely on our annual energy income from the sun and the many modes of its impoundment by our planet's biospheric and ecological energy intertransformings.
15 Why aren't we spontaneously doing this? First, because humanity has for all time past been convinced that there is a lethal inadequacy of life support on our planet. This misconception engendered political and religious organizations, all of which proclaim that they can lead their devout followers to special salvation. Each political system says, ‘‘You may or may not like our system, but we are convinced that it is the fairest, most logical and ingenious system for coping with lethal inadequacy of life support, wherefore you have the best chance of surviving if you join our group; but because there are others who disagree and think they have the only adequate system, it can only be resolved by trial of arms which is fittest to survive.’’ Thus technology is employed exclusively on a partisan basis.
16 We now have 150 sovereign-state admirals simultaneously in command of our one and only Spaceship Earth. We have the starboard side of the ship trying to sink the port side, and the stern trying to secede from the rest of the ship. All the political and religious systems have demonstrated only increasing incapability to cope effectively on behalf of their side, let alone for all humanity.
17 Only a new kind of revolution can solve the problems. Unlike history's past politically and religiously commanded revolutions, realizing the now-feasible, physical success for all humanity involves an applied-science revolution whose total success for all will forever invalidate any and all of the one-sided rationalizing ramifications of selfishness and exclusivity. Attainment of physical success for all cannot be accomplished by political strategy. It cannot be accomplished by private enterprise's unilateral advantage seeking. It cannot be accomplished by priestly intercession. It can only be accomplished by a design revolution which produces so much higher technical performance per each unit of resource invested as to take care of all human needs. It can be accomplished, only through each of the individuals of all humanity first acquiring experimental knowledge of the child-discovered, completely lucid, mathematical coordinate system employed by nature, and thereby in turn spontaneously comprehending structure, leverage, and mechanical advantage, and thereby in turn learning that it is technically feasible to attain lasting physical success for all humanity, and thereafter setting about spontaneously to accomplish that success; second, by humanity-at-large's apprehending that this can be accomplished only if it is for all humanity; and third, by humanity-at-large's recognizing that the accomplishment of lasting physical success for all also requires development of universal scientific and technical comprehension and physically demonstrable technological competence.
18 Because people know how to use a telephone, to drive a car, and to travel by airplane does not mean that they understand science and technology. At present there are 40 million scientists and engineers on planet Earth—that is only 1 percent of humanity. Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not understand science and technology because, of the innate scientists (grown children), 99 percent do not understand the physically non-demonstrable mathematical language of science. Not understanding science and technology, the 99 percent do not know that all that science has discovered, and continues to discover, is that physical Universe is naught but a complex of technology —the most elegantly efficient, effective, and interconsiderate technology. Not understanding that the blue sky, clouds, birds, mountains, trees, and great seas, as well as the ecology that regenerates them, are all of the most exquisite technological design so superb as to be observationally different from humanity's thus-far developed, crudely gross, technological designings. The prime difference between humanity's thus-far developed technology and that of nature's biological designing is that nature solves her compression problems by load distributing hydraulics, and humans solve compression problems only by nonload distributing ‘‘solid’’ crystalline substances.
19 Because 99 percent of humanity does not understand what science has learned, that 99 percent equates technology only with its partisan uses as weaponry and money-making machinery. This dilemma of humanity's technological ignorance can be cured only by education of the 99 percent to the fact that nature herself is not using the nondemonstrable mathematical coordinate system of science, but instead is using a lucidly demonstrable system, with which natural and comprehendable system the majority of humanity can quickly discover for itself that its omnisuccessful continuance on this planet can be attained only through a technological design-science revolution.
20 Fortunately, we can now report that an educational revolution is occurring—one in which only synergetics' experimentally demonstrable geometry is employed. It is based on the discovery of the relative energy investment values of nature's geometrical hierarchy of cosmically primitive structurings and intertransformings. It is the geometry of general systems. All of its lines are vectors—that is, they exist only as energetic phenomena. A vector always represents the product of mass, multiplied by the velocity of a given energy entity operating in a given angular direction in respect to a given axis of observational reference. Synergetics discloses by physical models the orderly ways in which nature intertransforms, propagates, pulsates, sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly, yet is always demonstrably operative by ‘‘tuning in’’ and ‘‘tuning out.’’
21 Einar Thorsteinn has written and illustrated this book and has developed extremely simple drawings which make synergetics conceptually inspiring and informative—to both children and grown people. He designed beautifully cut-out drawings with which anyone can produce the family of primitive structures to become familiar with both the symmetry, the relative numerical volume values, and the topological characteristics of nature's hierarchy of primitive structurings.
22 Making these beautiful synergetic models and placing them on display in homes and schools will swiftly accommodate young humanity's self-education in the fundamentals of scientific exploration and development. This will be one of the fortunate events leading to the general comprehension and spontaneously demonstrated competence essential to sustain human survival on this planet.