geometry of nature?
kirby urner
Synergetics Collaborative recently, taking the train from right near
my hotel, Club Quarters, to 69th Street station in Upper Darby.
Chris and Jeannie are both seriously into geometry. Jeannie, like
George Hart, like George's daughter Vi (now with Khan Academy) is a
visual artist. She also studies projective geometry ala Klein.
Here's a picture of their living room:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/6811434816/in/set-72157629158141638
A picture of Jeannie and Chris:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/6957546181/in/set-72157629158141638/
(some Abbey Road / Beatles allusion happening)
http://www.popartuk.com/music/the-beatles/beatles-in-london-black-and-white-photo-lp0788-poster.asp
Anyway, Chris cites Thomas Kuhn and 'The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions', one of the most cited books of all time, and some
subsequent critiques, suggesting that some scientists are less
effective because they pose as revolutionaries.
He gave the example of Stephen Jay Gould, whom some on-line lecturer
he'd seen had criticized for trying too hard to come off as
revolutionary, whereas his proposals could have done just as well if
not better without the hype.
Chris transfers this criticism to Bucky, suggesting his "geometry of
nature" meme with respect to the IVM was over-sold, and that Fuller
undermined his own efforts by trying too hard to pose as a
revolutionary.
What do others think about that?
Since I'm sometimes expected to play the apologist role, be like the
dutiful disciple, I'll say in Fuller's defense that he really did feel
up against the huge inertia of square, right angle, cube based
thinking.
Even if the IVM is *not* really "the geometry of nature" (whatever
that means), certainly XYZ isn't either, and yet in terms of its
ubiquity and quasi-universal adoption, it's almost as though people
assumed God and/or Nature was an XYZ thinker, more invested in right
angles and squares than any other shape.
There's an almost Biblical adherence to cubic dogmas.
From the vantage point of nano-technologists, already steeped in
graphene, fullerene, nanotubes, the hexagonal flavor of carbon
chemistry is second nature.
The 120-60 degree angles associated with ball packing are accepted, as
are the sharply polyhedral visages of the micro-shapes we've come to
learn about since Descartes' day.
The 120 / 108 degree hexapent aesthetics of Linus Pauling style
chemistry has certainly overtaken the purely 90 degree aesthetics of
the cube-ordered world. Cubes have receded.
My point: I think Fuller was on intuitively on target, as usual, in
anticipating the flood of biological knowledge that would lead to a
somewhat unconscious weakening of the grip of cubist thinking on our
shared cultural milieu.
Speaking in terms used by art schools, he predicted a shift away from
a 90 degree-based heuristics and in the direction of 60 degree-based
heuristics.
The triangle is eclipsing the square, the tetrahedron the cube, in
many dimensions / walks of life.
That being said, it was never necessary (as in "required") to refer to
the XYZ way of modeling as "the coordinate system of nature".
Most would agree it's a human artifact, a construction, a fabrication.
Likewise the IVM, as a skeleton, need not be billed as "nature's
coordinate system" either.
Coordinate systems are ethnic / cultural.
Sure, everything human is ultimately "in nature", but in that sense
whatever is, is nature's geometry (the shape of what naturally
occurs).
Nature herself is nature's coordinate system, and that's simply a
truism, hardly a paradigm shifter.
In letting the IVM and XYZ skeletons both settle to the bottom of the
tank as human artifacts, we admit both into Nature as tools of the
trade.
If Bucky had simply said the IVM is closer to the way you'd think if
you'd been trained to think in terms hexagons and pentagons, that
might have sooner endeared him to the more M.C. Escher loving crowd,
already accepting of 'Flatworms'.
http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-inside-story.html
Fuller might have been over-compensating for a perceived
unsteerability of the XYZ juggernaut.
Use of the phrase "of nature", like Bill Nye's use of "of science",
need not mean anything too weighty.
Kirby
[ a project / operation duck / rabbit facebook.com/philobiz ]