The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller 203
The New Yorker features a review of the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition in New York 25 years after his death. Fuller was a deeply strange man. He documented his life so thoroughly (in the "Dymaxion Chronofile," which had grown to over 200K pages by his death) that biographers have had trouble putting their fingers on what, exactly, Fuller's contribution to civilization had been. The review quotes Stewart Brand's resignation from the cult of the Fuller Dome (in 1994): "Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing — dangerous process, ugly result — the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water. The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high. The shape made it a whispering gallery that broadcast private sounds to everyone." From the article: "Fuller's schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past... He was a material determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller's greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely experiment that was Guinea Pig B [which is how Fuller referred to himself]."
Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:2, Interesting)
Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
Likely would have been a slashdotter (Score:5, Interesting)
hallucinatory? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe he was prophet [thirteen.org], giving us a car that by today's standard would have been fantastic on gas mileage back in 1933. We're all gonna be using three wheels soon when we have to try to get gas at Bartertown [wikipedia.org]
Cloud Cities (Score:2, Interesting)
"Spaceship Earth" - ahead of the green movement (Score:0, Interesting)
He was a genius. He had a way of understanding three-
dimensional structures that no one had before, and that
no one else may ever again. Really.
He was a visionary. He had millions of ideas, and they were
all solutions to real problems. I guess that makes him an
engineer as well.
And yes, he was certainly green ahead of the new green trend.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.
Re:Part contributor, part crazy person (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a really strange take on Einstein. I would suggest (unless I am hopeless misinformed) that you look into what he meant when he said that god didn't play dice, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
When you look at only one invention of his, it's easy to tear apart... But when you study the breadth of his work, including his piercing insight in to globalization... I think scientists should be more like Fuller. Overspecialization has made our culture perfect, but very boring.
The Bucky Ball Globe (Score:5, Interesting)
If anybody wants a small sample of Bucky's genius, museum stores often sell die-cut sheets of paper which, when assembled, form a dodecahedral globe. This model is the "Fuller Projection", a more accurate representation of the world where landmasses more closely resemble their actual sizes (that is, Greenland is not as large as South America).
I think what's more interesting about the globe is how the continents are laid out on the die-cut paper. Real relationships between continents are "duh" obvious to viewers because it's clear how people would travel from one part of the world to another (or not). It all comes together when you assemble the globe. They're cheap, so buy two.
I had the great privilege to drive his Honda Accord (he was a spokesperson for Honda in the 70s, I think) with a relative of his across the country in 1979 or 1980 and had a chance to meet him and talk with him. The experience was transformative and motivational for me, and gave me more direction in life.
The above paragraph may sound mushy and corny, but apparently the curators of the Whitney seem to agree with some of my sentiments. And they're harder sells than a 23-year-old.
Tacoma Dome (Score:4, Interesting)
The Kurzweil cult is almost rational by comparison (Score:2, Interesting)
Alternating current works. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not a very good metric. A Model-T in 1908 got 25MPG. The Dymaxion was pretty light. The fabric roof was great on weight but kind of rough in a roll over.
Improvements in fuel efficiency have sadly gone to making bigger, heavier vehicles. For some reason 25MPG seems to be the 'target'.
Belthize
ps: Wikipedia seems to think 30MPG was unheard of '33. Not sure I buy that and of course there's no source.
They's find his influence if Bucky could write. (Score:2, Interesting)
not only that (Score:3, Interesting)
just think how frequent were the inventions in the 19th century. if you force yourself, you can see that institutionalization and specialization of new science branches have also brought refinements of earlier discoveries, but decreased the number of discoveries and inventions too.
we need discovery, inventions. we are sorely lacking them these days.
Re:Alternating current works. (Score:3, Interesting)
I seem to recall from one of his biographies that , even in the best times of his life when he wasn't short on money, he had compulsions, such as having to calculate the volume of his food before he ate it, and phobias, such as not being able to touch other people's hair (except perhaps under duress "at gunpoint").
I'm sure that once he wasn't coming up with novel, and, more importantly, immediately profitable, ideas at a rapid rate, those quirks didn't help him much. I can believe that his mental issues might also have gotten worse once nobody was paying him much mind any more (the transition from scientific/engineering celebrity to obscurity would be hard to deal with I expect), but everything I've ever heard about him indicates he was a weird chap all his life by anybody's measure.
Re:bullpucky (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because by the time you've encountered it, it's in the past and so it's determined. Chaos does deceptively look like randomness. The difference is subtle. It's in the moving present instant that the randomness becomes determined from our point of view. It may be that the determination defines our perspective, you might say. To say that the outcome is predetermined and so there is only one world line requires faith in Fate. That's not scientific, but it's a very old argument that's on point for this discussion. BTW, Everett-Wheeler does not contradict your view. In that theory every possible outcome has a predetermined world-line in which that outcome was Fate. It's just that with Everett-Wheeler all possibilities happen, spawning near-infinite worldlines. To the observer the universe with and without Everett-Wheeler look the same because it is not possible to observe events that have not occurred, yet. Perhaps after we measure the quantum unit of probability this will be possible, but I believe we will just be able to select views of the outcomes we desire and we'll wind up with the Delphi Oracle.
Personally I'm not a big believer in chaos. Misunderstood order, yes. Chaos not so much. In a multiverse where every outcome is preordained for its particular worldline, chaos goes undefined. Chaos theory, maybe. Is that weird? It's important that Everett-Wheeler be correct for a number of reasons, and certainly I believe it plausible -- but I'm not an anonymous physics grad.
For some really out-there metaphysics, consider the possibility that observers get to select their worldlines by believing in a particular outcome. A consensus vote of faith might select some outcome for a particular group of observers. This doesn't contradict Everett-Wheeler because for each possible outcome some subset of observers select the resultant worldline. In this philosophy, all things are possible through faith. Which brings us back to the topic of the thread. Perhaps BF wasn't so wacky after all.
Where in the multiverse is John Titor?
Re:Part contributor, part crazy person (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I picked up, the "God" who doesn't like dice, is more of the deist personification of natural law, than a best friend in the sky. The same "God" who America's founding father's talked about, and that most Enlightenment philosopher/naturalists referred to. More akin to Aristotle's "unmoved mover", than to the modern Judeo-Christian gray haired old man.
A metaphorical god, rather than a literal one, would be the most succinct way of putting it, I suppose.
The Bohr/Einstein debate though, is probably the best anecdote for modern science, still. I took a philosophy of science class that used that as the scaffold to hold up the dynamics of the modern history of science (from Maxwell to the more theoretical modern ideas, like super symmetry and strings), it was truly enlightening, even if Bohr "won" in the end.
I'm getting sick of both atheists and the self-justifying religious trying to put Einstein on their side. Einstein is probably the most abused scientist ever, we keep remaking him into what we want him, instead of accepting him as who he was.
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds a bit like Tesla (Score:2, Interesting)
"Sounds a bit like Tesla"
Tesla was a true genius who invented useful devices. Tesla's inventions were grounded in sound scientific observation. BMF was profusely but marginally imaginitive and stumbled on a natural geometry found in viral capsids and clathyrin. Somehow he is credited with inventing this geometry, which is an absurd accreditation. There is no reasonable comparison between the two individuals.
Re:not only that (Score:4, Interesting)
Also I think the previous parent to which you were responding doesn't understand that as things become MORE complicated, we tend to remix and combine our past inventions with new ones, but the newer ones tend to be even more complex, which takes more time, this is offset somewhat by computers but right now we are OVERLOADED with information. There is so much potential for invention with the internet it's unreal, we're just too slow to realize it all.
I'm sure in the future inventions and much of science will be automated by computer AI, and scientists will have even less of a roll to play, if ray kurzweil is even moderately right.
Re:bullpucky (Score:3, Interesting)
An example I came across is that of a random number generator. A decent one will spit out numbers that are indistinguishable from a random sequence. If the RNG is started twice with the same seed it will produce the same sequence, proving that the numbers aren't really random at all. They have a definite order, but it is one that is so convoluted that without more information (such as the source code for the RNG) the order is nearly impossible to discern.
I'm afraid I haven't explained the idea very well. It's all in Bohm's book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which also happens to be the foundation of the Holographic Universe theory set. Parts of it are very good, other parts are very dry, and still other parts contain maths that were impenetrable to me but should be transparent (or at least somewhat translucent) to someone with a background in Quantum Mechanics.
I like Bohm's ideas, but I don't have the intellectual tools to make any sort of claim on their veracity. I do know this: the theory hasn't gained much traction because it's off the wall, but to my knowledge there haven't been any problems pointed out with it either. Consider this a failed exposition on order turned into a shameless plea for more informed people to check out Bohm's ideas =)