[ from the TrimTab Book Club discussion listserv, edited for Television ]
Sep 17, 2021, 9:50 PM (14 hours ago) Kirby wrote:
Compare these two statements:
1. Buckminster Fuller discovered the geometry of nature (which isn’t to say others haven’t also discovered it).
2. Buckminster Fuller helped popularize the geometry that nature actually uses, as discovered by Linus Pauling et al.
The first assertion would be considered vast overreach by most, but the more generous will agree: sure, Fuller’s Synergetics reflects an emerging awareness, increasing throughout the 1900s, of what nature’s structural strategies might be.
So what is this geometry of nature again? Oh, you know, like in organic chemistry: lots of hexagons (the bestagons), with some pentagons. As in buckyballs, graphene, nanotubes… As in macro-molecules more generally, such as in DNA-RNA, ATP, hemoglobin. As in organisms, such as diatoms.
The geometry of nature has more to do with tetrahedrons and triangles than with cubes and squares, and Bucky’s writings certainly contain suggestive content along those lines.
Statement 2, at least, meets our curriculum guidelines.
On with the show.
On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 8:50 AM CJ Fearnley wrote:
Lionel, Synergetics is more dynamic than crystalline geometric forms.
Kirby, by a prior art for the geometry of nature are you referring to
Pythagorianism and/or the mathesis universalis of Descartes and Leibniz
or their followers (such as Plato, the sacred geometry community, Kepler,
Ernst Mach, and so forth)? Or are you simply abstracting metaphorically
from Linus Pauling’s chemistry?
All of the above, or most of the above, used unit volume cubes (which we’re still free to use of course) and called right angles “right” for a reason. The Cartesian orthodoxy is the orthonormal XYZ coordinate system.
Then with Linus Pauling’s generation of bioengineer came the emerging awareness that carbon chemistry is…
