11-16-2007, 03:32 PM
I've kind of had an epiphany over the last month... that the math we currently use is hopelessly limited by the notation we are using.
I was inspired by reading about Mr Buckminster fuller, (a quote from PBS article)
I was inspired by reading about Mr Buckminster fuller, (a quote from PBS article)
Quote:
Synergetics is Fuller's name for the geometry he advanced based on the patterns of energy that he saw in nature.
For him, geometry was a laboratory science with the touch and feel of physical models--not rules out of a textbook. He started with models of the closest packing of spheres. From that basic starting point he derived triangles as the most economical relationship between events.
He did not start with Euclid's lines in the sand or Descartes' cubes and square XYZ-coordinates. Fuller felt that the old classic approaches did not describe the way nature actually behaves. For instance, Euclid's lines were thought to go off to infinity. Fuller says lines are vectors of energy and he rejected the notion that anything physical could be extended indefinitely.
Descartes cubes are unstable forms. For Fuller, the world is built of stable, finite structures. His triangular coordination depends on tetrahedral models. (A tetrahedron is a pyramid with a triangular base.) Four spheres close pack into a stable tetrahedron: good. Eight spheres stack into an unstable cube: bad. His geometry hinges on the tetrahedron, the simplest structural system within insideness and outsideness: he advances it as the most economical way to measure space and to account all physical (and metaphysical!) experience.
This is what he calls synergetics: an empirical mathematical system in which geometry and number mesh without fractions. It gains its validity not from classic abstractions but from the results of individual physical experience. His two-volume work "Synergetics" has the subtitle: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking.
For him, geometry was a laboratory science with the touch and feel of physical models--not rules out of a textbook. He started with models of the closest packing of spheres. From that basic starting point he derived triangles as the most economical relationship between events.
He did not start with Euclid's lines in the sand or Descartes' cubes and square XYZ-coordinates. Fuller felt that the old classic approaches did not describe the way nature actually behaves. For instance, Euclid's lines were thought to go off to infinity. Fuller says lines are vectors of energy and he rejected the notion that anything physical could be extended indefinitely.
Descartes cubes are unstable forms. For Fuller, the world is built of stable, finite structures. His triangular coordination depends on tetrahedral models. (A tetrahedron is a pyramid with a triangular base.) Four spheres close pack into a stable tetrahedron: good. Eight spheres stack into an unstable cube: bad. His geometry hinges on the tetrahedron, the simplest structural system within insideness and outsideness: he advances it as the most economical way to measure space and to account all physical (and metaphysical!) experience.
This is what he calls synergetics: an empirical mathematical system in which geometry and number mesh without fractions. It gains its validity not from classic abstractions but from the results of individual physical experience. His two-volume work "Synergetics" has the subtitle: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking.
