1 PROLOGUE
2One day in 1930, when our daughter Allegra was three years old, she said, ‘‘Daddy, tell me about Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’’ The story had been read to her many times from a child’s illustrated book. As I started telling it, I began to think of new and heretofore unknown details of the famous story. Allegra was delighted with the innovations. From time to time she would ask me to tell her the story again. Gradually, with new insights into their characters, both Goldy and the Three Bears became much more interesting personalities as may the personalities in the comic strips.
3 At that time I was studying Einstein and others whose work promised to revolutionize the frontiers of thought. One day, when Allegra asked me to tell her a Goldilocks story, I decided to try out a scientific seminar conducted by Goldy with the Three Bears as students asking pertinent questions and getting lucid answers and explanations from Goldy. This intrigued Allegra much more than facetious behavior on the part of the bears and Goldy.
4 After the bears and Goldy made ice cream sodas and were comfortably seated in their famous chairs---with Goldy in a new portable movie director’s chair---they would start talking about this and that, which would always lead to the most scientifically and philosophically challenging subjects. But the bears and Goldy never called it science or mathematics.
5 This was the beginning of my spontaneous thinking-out-loud discourses such as I now give publicly.
6 I became convinced that through imagined expansion of the recallable inventory of fundamental experiences of the child, achieved through description of analogous experiences of others, altered only in magnitude and always similar in principle to the child’s experience recalls, it would be possible to effectively induce that child’s discovery of the most complex and profound phenomena.
7 I was also convinced that the best way to study the thoughts of the scientists I was reading was to test myself by disclosing what I understood to a child. This also put the scientist, whose thoughts I was relaying, under great test. The scientist must be elegantly logical to the child, or else the scientist’s logic is questionable.
8 My out-loud thinking sought for the generalized principles common to all the specialcase experiences---principles of orderly variation of interrelationships between special-case experiences not implicit in or inferred from any integral characteristics of any of the special cases when each is considered only separately. Next I must induce the child to imagine making her own natural objective use of those subjectively discovered principles. I felt it to be true that children had great advantage in this respect as they are not burdened with the misconceptions and obsolete propositions with which the grown-ups have been inundated by formal ‘‘education.’’
9 Thus began a six-year series of discourses. School lessons and other events gradually and imperceptibly shunted aside the stories. One day in 1939 Allegra came home from school a little weary and sat down to relax. Suddenly she looked at me and said, hesitatingly, ‘‘Daddy, one more Goldilocks story?’’ And that was the last time. We both knew that a wonderful chapter in life’s book had been completed. We had gained a great deal from those spontaneously initiated ventures into approximately every field of experience, speculation, and disciplined thought. But we no longer needed the fictitious self-starter. From then on the main engines kept going on their own. The integrity and spontaneity of our thinking was not compromised.
10 Now Allegra is a great dance-anthropologist and chairone of the department of dance in the University of California at Los Angeles. Allegra will go on dancing forever because, as Goldy says, ‘‘Dance is the language of Universe.’’
1213Bucky and daughter, Allegra
14From time to time I as yet hear from Goldy, and she asks that on the occasion of Anne’s and my fifty-eighth wedding anniversary and my eightieth birthday, we dedicate to Allegra Goldy’s resume of her latest illustrated cosmic seminar, to which she has given the title TetrascrolL