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The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller
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]."
A great self-promoter. He made no contribution to civilization that I could ever see.
...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
Sounds a bit like Tesla...Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
I'd say that comparison is a little unfair to Tesla. Tesla seems nutty, but largely because he was exploring and defining the cutting edge of the science of electricity. Conversely, Fuller seems nutty simply because he was a freakin' nut.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It truly pains me to see someone with capitalization, punctuation, and even grammar turn himself into a blathering idiot by drooling "prolly" all over Slashdot.
This is neither YouTube nor MySpace; if you want to identify with us, please never say "prolly" again.
a bunch of wusses in NY who couldn't build a dog house don't impress me much as critics. I will have to RTFA to see if they completely missed his most important influence. As a kid in high school I read Spaceship Earth. That was mid '60s, a world most of you won't remember but be assured...nobody had heard of peak oil or cared much about gas mileage. I have pretty much been for greener and less wasteful ways of doing things ever since.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Putting religious beliefs before science? That's something I really don't understand. If there's anything I've learned by reading about Einstein's views on religion, it's that he was the quintessential scientist even in this respect: he didn't subscribe to any known organized religion, but vehemently refused to rule out the existence of god- and found atheists arrogant for doing so. His religious views seem to be somewhere in between pantheistic and agnostic, and I don't see how they affected his scientific work.
Perhaps you're referring to the famous quote "God does not play dice". I don't think this quote expresses a religious belief as much as it articulates a "gut instinct" about the way the universe worked: that it's fundamentally deterministic. Of course, being Einstein, he had to word it in a deliberately provocative fashion. I think gut instincts have a real place in science- they can often be useful starting points for hypotheses, or used to guide an investigation in a direction that one only grasps subconsciously at first. The only real restriction is that one needs to be able to recognize when experimental evidence has proven one's gut instincts wrong. I don't think Einstein lived to see this point; local hidden variable theories hadn't been experimentally ruled out by Bell inequality experiments such as the Aspect experiments before he died.
And I'm not even sure Einstein was thoroughly wrong about the universe being fundamentally deterministic. Even though the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics contains an element of randomness (the very randomness that Einstein railed against), the Everett-Wheeler interpretation says otherwise. The Many Worlds interpretation, as it is often called, asserts that random wave collapse merely looks random from within our own "branch" of a larger wave function that encompasses many universes. If you were somehow able to view the entire wave function, it would look completely deterministic. The only reason we see randomness in quantum "collapse" is because our macroscopic detectors (such as our eyeballs) induce decoherence in quantum states that cause environmentally-induced superselection. (Explaining that sentence in english would take many pages, so if you're curious I suggest you use those words, plus the abbreviation einselection, to do some googling.)
That book should be required reading in all schools. It's out of print, but on the net. Take the time to read.
What?
It's also how a spoked wheel works so it was nothing new in terms of engineering.
Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight, I'd say it's more likely the engineering "talent" behind its design was chance, in that he happened to discover an interesting 3D geometric pattern. He had no particular knack for engineering. After that first dome collapsed, he tried to claim he intentionally built it too weakly, in order to see where it would fail. No one present was convinced. He imagined his "dymaxion car" would be able to cross any terrain, climb any mountain, and eventually even fly. He had no idea how this would happen, nor did he seem to care--- because he was a "visionary", not an engineer. The guy invented his own map geometry that avoided the use of pi because he found the indeterminate nature of pi "unsatisfying". A distaste for the facts of mathematics is not a trait found in engineers. No, he wasn't an engineer by any stretch of the definition of the word. The guy was a salesman, and what he sold was enthusiasm. He made most of his money on the lecture circuit, which he then blew on his harebrained "Dymaxion" crap, which lost money but generated "buzz", which drew people to his lectures. Good work if you can get it, but he was no engineer.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
FTA: "instead of finding a job, [BF] took to spending his days in the library, reading Gandhi and Leonardo."
We need more people like this. I'm not saying that it would be a good thing if everyone were like this, but we do need more dream sellers.
If nothing else, they make the world less boring.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
No we're not. They're just so commonplace now that we take them for granted.
In the 19th century, we got the internal combustion engine, radio, telephone, railroads, and cars, among other things. In the past 30 years alone, we've sequenced the entire human genome, can make computers pretty much any size you want, can predict weather accurately just about anywhere on the planet up to a week... the list kind of goes on like this. None of that would be possible without some serious inventiveness.
Keep in mind that there was so little that anybody knew about our world and the universe in 1800 that it really didn't take much to come up with inventions that took advantage of the new knowledge of the time, like electricity and radio waves. Nowadays, new knowledge involves quantum physics or genetic manipulation. I'm sure that, 100 years from now, anything we come up with will seem almost trivial, but keep in mind that it took over 50 years for someone to figure out how a battery worked and what to use one with. Turnaround time on using new discoveries is, for the most part, a little faster these days.
Just looked at the people posting slanderous comments against Buckminster Fuller. Surprise, surprise, conservatives hat a man who spoke out against the status quo and against corporatism.
If you want to understand why certain people seem to hate Bucky with an unreasonable passion, read Critical Path.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The basic calculations for stealth technology predate the development of stealth aircraft SIGNIFICANTLY because there wasn't enough available computer time, and the initial stealth aircraft were angular not because it's necessary for stealth but because the computations are dramatically simpler that way. Does that mean that modern stealth aircraft are nothing new in terms of engineering? Let's face it, progress is iterative.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"