Now, I have this little child who has never been out of the city, and this little child comes into the parlor, and they've got a television, and they're having the Olympic Ski trials in Hokaido, Japan, and this little child is in Philadelphia he's never been out to Japan. And he sees there is quite a mountain there well he sees a pile of pillows on his bed, and he can understand a hill and the feeling of the hillside and that's a big one. And he can see, then that angle, and that feels good to him; then he sees the snow and that seems good to him. So everything that goes on there, in the skiing looks absolutely logical to him and what the skier is doing, slalom, he's using angles on his ankles and he's entirely angling, angling, angling as he comes down. Everything is angles. The little child feels this then completely logical to him.

Now, what I'm getting at, oh incidentally, I was asked to come and speak in Aspen, Colorado in the winter, in l972, and the professional who started Aspen as a ski run, after the army used it for training, the professional they first had there who really turned it into a ski resort was Eastland, and he was still there in l972, and I don't know whether he still is. And Eastland said to me, "Have you ever skied," and I said "No, I never did I've done a great deal of skating, but I never did ski. I guess I'm much too old." And he said "Not necessarily. If you'd like to, and we'll have to get you the right equipment, we'll have to get you properly fitted out. If you'd like to I'll take you out and see how you do really get on." And so we went at it for two or three days, and he said that I could ski.

And, then, I felt very, very obligated to this man. He was the professional, he was doing this all for nothing with me, and taking a tremendous amount of time. We were having hot tea and coffee after skiing, and I told him what I just told you. I said I am now going to give you the scientific description of skiing the scientific generalization of skiing it is called angular valving of gravity. He said, I never thought of it that's exactly right. Isn't that interesting really? There is a pattern integrity, we're getting really at a generalization.

We find that, and this great skier really felt that that was absolutely accurate, and he enjoyed it tremendously. This, then, relates to what I feel about education. That is, I am absolutely confident the child and the human being must teach itself. It must really find out. It has to have confidence as it goes. It has to get a feeling of what it is all about. Then, what the teacher can do, is then, if the child has experienced a little of that, then the teacher can do what the television did he can tell you that there is a great big mountain, instead of just a little hill out in front of the house, and that the same principle is going to work. So the teacher must really only amplify what it is that the child already feels and feels very deeply. And, they assume that the child didn't feel it because they didn't have the words gravity or horizontal it's absolutely nonsense. Those are very limited, special ethnic experiences, and the communication lines are already open, and whatever words happened to be used are fine. And the child will take on the words, as long as it is identifying what it feels.

Now, this brings me back then, as I said, to thinking about precession. I have this little child, and a little child then we found, learned it could roll over, that was a whole lot. Not the original experience at all. So then the little child when he does finally stand up, having actually rotated, then the little child very quickly finds you see the little children trying this, they have a lot of fun spinning round and spinning round (Bucky is demonstrating this on the tape).

So, then, this is one of the prime motions of our Universe. We have actually a rotation of our planet. We have, the axial is a very, very fundamental thing to the Universe.

Then we have the same little child learning that not only rotating, he can also go into orbit, go around in circles. Then he finds he can go into orbit while axially rotating too so we call that dancing. So we've got two very important motions of Universe here. Then, the little child learns that it can take in his breath, he can expand and contract. A very fundamental motion of Universe. We've now got three very important ones here. Now, another one he can do is to twist his top one way and his bottom the other way. We call that "twist" in dancing now, but "torque." So we have axial, orbital, expansion-contraction, torque four of them. Now another one, very fundamental, is just start kissing. Try to turn oneself inside-out. I gave you the rubber glove the other day. Evoluting, rubber donut remember. Evoluting at the top and involuting at the bottom. The child starts to find then, involuting-evoluting, which you apparently get in all of electro-magnetics and so forth.

So there are five of the most fundamental motions in the Universe which the child is spontaneously familiar with and you can talk about. But the word, "precession," we come to that, and the child is kind of blank. The first child experience of "precession" that he might be able to catch onto is when his uncle brings him a top. And the uncle brings him a top, and starts winding it up, and then after a while he gets the top going. So the top is axially rotating very rapidly, but also, it has a secondary, very small motion it leans way over like this. And the little child has learned that when he leans way over like that, he keeps on going. So he says, "Uncle, why doesn't it fall over if it's leaning?" And Uncle says "I've got to get a cigar," and that's the end of that.

The reason, of course, is "precession." The reason he was familiar with these other five is that he seemed to do them all alone. One of the things that engineering tries to remind the non-engineer about is that every action has a reaction, but to a little child, the fact that he is doing this doesn't make him realize that he is pushing the earth that way a little he's so tiny and the earth is so big, there is just no such awareness. But he is, of course, affecting the planet to an incredibly meager degree but he is doing so.

Now, "precession," as I said was "the effect of bodies on motion on other bodies in motion. So he really was doing a "precessional" thing to the earth, but he was unaware that he was doing it. So, the first five are familiar because they seem to be within yourself, and you do not think of the earth as in motion, even, let alone that you could push it a little. I can understand then why "precession" has been in a sense so remote from the basic thinking of the individual feeling himself so very independent on what seemed to be a flat earth, going to infinity. And he's the only thing in motion.

Now, "precession," I was the Science and Technology Advisor on the staff of FORTUNE MAGAZINE for two years. They had no editorial titles on FORTUNE, so that they did not put that on the articles when I wrote, but my job was to, when FORTUNE would take one great corporation after another and explain the great, enormous work that corporation was doing, and explain which executives had the highest initiative and so forth they did very good stories on these corporations. But, the Managing Editor who brought me on to FORTUNE was Henry Luce at that time in 1938 wanted me to try to bring home to the readers of FORTUNE a little more insight into the science and technology which really lay behind the great corporations' activity. And I was only put on stories where the technology was something difficult, and when I came to do those stories the chief scientists, Vice President in Charge of Research and Engineering, or whatever it might be, would always say to me, "it's going to be impossible for you to tell the FORTUNE readers what it is we are concerned with in depth in science here in our company, because it can only be expressed mathematically. And the FORTUNE readers do not read the mathematics, or very few of them do, so therefore there is no way you can talk to them."

I had been given a double spread for each of my stories, and in every instance I was able to tell the FORTUNE reader what it was they were engaged in, in depth, without recourse to just the mathematical formulas. I was able to bring it into some sensibility, that I just gave you, the same kind of sensing identification, experience of your own body.