Everything I know: Section 2

Section 3
Section 1

Part 1

I think it’s important for all of you to share very intimately with me what I do in the way of conscious disciplining of myself as we meet. I am an experientialist. My grand strategy, which I am discussing with you, of coping with problem solving, is one which has an important name operational, the word operational came to be applied to science, I think, it was an invention of Percival Bridgman at Harvard, a natural philosopher at Harvard, who invented the term early in the century. When Einstein made his first announcement, and Percival Bridgman at Harvard, the natural philosopher, said he was deeply interested in how it happened, science in general was caught so off-guard, so unexpecting of Einstein’s kind of an announcement, and the viewpoint that was demonstrated by Einstein. And he became a great student of how all the circumstances surrounding Einstein’s developing the thoughts that he had developed. And he, then, found that Einstein was concerned not with just some data discovered in an experiment, but with all the circumstances surrounding the faithful reporting of the immediate local intimate conditions under which the discovery was made. And, I’ll come back to that to give a working demonstration of why Einstein felt it was so important to record all the circumstances as well as that which was especially isolated out and discovered. The example that I am going to give you is my own invention, but I did include Einstein and Einstein’s philosophy, and my own interpretation of how he came to develop his equation and other of his strategies, in my first book NINE CHAINS TO THE MOON, and because I had three chapters on Einstein, my publishers who were Lippincott of Philadelphia at that time, in the mid-30’s, around 1935, said that they found I had three chapters on Einstein. And they were, at that time, there was a general myth that there were only 9 people in the world who could understand Einstein. They said they had looked at all the lists of the people who understood Einstein, and I was not on any of the lists in fact they didn’t find me on any list, of any authority, and they felt for me to be writing three chapters on Einstein would make Lippincott be accused of being a partner to charlatanry. That I was just a faker.

And so, I was a little stunned, and still quite young, and so I simply wrote back, in a sense quite facetiously, to Lippincott, saying that Dr. Einstein has just come to America, and was in Princeton at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study. And I suggested that they send my typescript to him that he would be the best authority. I really did not think they would take me seriously about that, and I forgot all about that. And it was about six months later, I had a telephone call from a doctor in New York, and he said my friend Dr. Albert Einstein is coming in to spend the weekend with me, and he has your typescript, and he would like to talk to you about it. And, could I possibly come on Sunday evening to his apartment in New York. So, you can imagine, I didn’t have any engagements that would interfere! And I had very few engagements in those days nobody wanted to talk to me. And, I did come then, to the apartment. He was a wealthy man, and he had a large living room, and in more or less dramatic kind of style, people were sitting around the walls of the room, and he was sitting pretty much in the middle. I think they might have later on played music for him. At any rate, when I came in I was brought then to this long room, up to meet him. And I really had, I don’t know how much psychological was in me, but I really had the most extraordinary feeling about being in a presence of almost an aura of him.

He immediately excused himself from the company, and took me out to a little library that was just off the main hall of the apartment, and on the library table was my typescript under a light, and we sat down on either side of this desk. And he said that he had been over my typescript and that he was writing to my publishers to say that he approved of my interpretation of his thoughts, and the way I had explained his translation of philosophy. A philosophy of his which had been published in the New York Times Sunday magazine in New Year, 1930, called “The Cosmic Religious Sense,” and it was a very, very inspiring piece, and I had asked the publishers if I could quote it in my book, and I did. Having then this chapter on his philosophy, I then had another chapter on the way that I felt he had interpreted it into, how he applied that philosophy to all his own grand personal strategy of life, and how he came about developing his thoughts and his equation.

Then I had a third chapter in which I said that, historically, great scientists, individual scientists, make discoveries the academy doesn’t accept right away, but later on they do accept. Then it gets to be in the schools, then it gets to be in the general atmosphere of everybody’s thinking. At this point engineers and inventors within that atmosphere of thinking make some invention, and then gradually some industry takes on that invention; and that takes quite a while. There is a lag. Finally, various things are being produced and they bring about a new environment under which social changes have to occur, and politics, then, has to take care of the take up on the new orientation of man all brought about indirectly from the original scientist’s thinking. And, I said, again my third chapter was I developed a hypothetical picture of how humanity would be living. It was called “E=MC to the second power equals Mrs. Murphy’s Horse Power,” and then I was looking at the every-day life of Mrs. Murphy under the circumstances of everybody being completely convinced of the validity of Einstein’s thinking.

His equation had not as yet been validated, as it was later, by fission, at the time that I was writing. Anyway, he said he did approve of those two chapters of my chapter explaining how his philosophy was interpreted into his action and thinking. But he said, the third chapter about Mrs. Murphy’s horse power and his words were I’ll imitate him, because I can remember this so very well. And he was very gentle, and he said of this third chapter: “Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive of anything I have ever done having the slightest practical application.” And he went on to explain that he had evolved his thoughts as possibly being useful to the astronomers, to the astro-physicists, to the cosmogeners and the cosmologists, but that it would have any practical application none. And, at any rate, he did approve, and they did go on with the publishing of the book. This was very interesting, because this meeting occurred about a year and a half before Hahn and Stresemann discovered theoretical fission. And then there was a whole set of events which followed this which people are very familiar with. And then the German Jewish scientists getting the word as quickly as they could out of Germany, because they thought it would be used immediately for armaments in Germany, and the word did come to America. And there were theoretical studies, and then came the conclusion of the scientists that fission was actually possible. So, there was the quandary of the scientists because politicians don’t listen to scientists on how to get word to President Franklin Roosevelt. So they all decided that Einstein was by far the most highly accredited of the scientists. So they asked him to go see Franklin Roosevelt. And Franklin Roosevelt did appropriate what was at that time an incredible amount of money, $85 billion for the great Manhattan project. And then through the Enrico Fermi pile and all the history which most of you know.

But, what was interesting to me was that I heard from this man, two years before the theoretical fission is envisaged, that he didn’t have the slightest idea of anything that he had ever done having even the slightest practical application. Because the first practical application of the Enrico Fermi pile completely validated his theory of the amount of energy that was being stored in a given mass. So, it was the very essence of what was going on. So the first practical application was Hiroshima. And having heard that from that man just before it occurred, I realized the unhappiness and the consternation that he experienced when the first practical application was Hiroshima. In fact, his last days were spent greatly devoted to trying to get the scientists to realize their responsibilities, and how they were being exploited. And his consternation brought about the development of the Association of Atomic Scientist, and the publishing of the ATOMIC SCIENTIST BULLETIN, and so forth.

And he expressed himself very vigorously about his great unhappiness about this. But to have heard from that man before he realized that there would be a practical application, it would come into the political field, was a very extraordinary experience.

But, I do have the personal confidence, then, that when I interpret Einstein, and talk about him, which I do very frequently, I did have his personal approbation of my capability to do so. I am giving you then, a hypothetical example of what Einstein employed as a strategy of thinking which brought about Bridgman’s development of the word “operational.”

Now, I am going to give you then a man in a railroad train going west across the desert. And his train is going very fast. And he leans out of his window and drops a flaming apple, and he has, there is a friend with him and so forth, and they have a sextant to measure angles, and they have stop watches and so forth, and he observes what he sees in a total azimuth of observation of the angle in which this light forms. Obviously, the flaming apple goes the opposite direction from him, and he sees it doing that, and he records with the stop watch exactly what angle of motion there was sum totally as he looks back at it, going back like that and a little back towards the track and he has a stop watch reporting exactly how long it was in each of those positions at the various azimuths of observation.

Then, we have another man who at the same time was standing way to the north of the train which was going west in the desert, and he had his observation instruments, his angle measuring devices and his stop watches, and he sees the flaming apple go west instead of east. And he sees, it actually goes down a little towards the track, towards the land, and he makes all his measurements, exactly what it did, and he describes that in his total frame of reference.

Then we have another man who was standing on the track, way to the west as the train approached, and all he saw was this flame hesitate like this, and go in towards the earth in just a straight line going like that towards the center of the earth. And he measured everything with his angle azimuth and his stop watches.

There is another man standing, it happened that the train was going over a trestle, and there was another man standing below the trestle, looking up and really seeing this whole thing, and he makes his observation of what he sees. You’ll find out the total angles of observation, all the timing, everything came out, each one was really very, very accurate, AND THEY ALL CAME OUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY.

Part 2

And, for this reason, then, Einstein felt that all the circumstances must be reported, and not just what it is you happen to find on your scales there as you weighed the phenomena, what went on within the test tube. This brought about Bridgeman’s feeling that there should be a name for the inclusion of the unique circumstances under which the observations are made, and he then gave the name “operational” which he used to differentiate from a school of philosophy that was then had been in operation, coming from a man named Pierce at Harvard, called the school of pragmatism. In other words, it was pragmatic, but he wanted to use another word than pragmatic, so he used “operational.”

Since that time the word “operation” has come into very popular use in military ways and everything else coming from scientists, but that is where the word began.

I am, in my geometry explorations, as you see me getting into structures and so forth, discovering that the process of thinking produced a geometry. It was just the process of thinking about our experiences, and that our experiences were omni-directional, so when we divide the experiences into all the ones outside and all the ones inside it created a geometry. It just automatically produced a polyhedronal, some kind of definition of what produced the insideness and outsideness. So a geometry has been developed by being very careful to remember, at the outset, everything really I can. What I personally was conscious of in doing when I was participating in what I called, what we call, thinking. And there are many other things I am sure that went on that I am not conscious of, but the point was that these were the things I was conscious of and they lead to a great many clues. So that’s all “operational” procedure. So all of my geometrical exploration from there on, is what I call really it’s all OPERATIONAL MATHEMATICS. I have absolutely no axioms. There is nothing that is said to be obvious. Where our eyes are too superficial, we now know how small the spectrum electro-magnetic range of frequencies you and I can tune in, so we just cannot see adequately to say, “that is self-evident.”

Now, I find that mathematics can play games, assuming certain conditions to obtain, which I will not play. Now, I am an “operational,” and I often like to use the word “experiential.” I find that experiences can be inadvertent, they happen to us, and then there are the experiences which are deliberate. So I call one, it is “experiential” when it is happening to us, and I make it “experimental” when we set up when we manipulate the conditions arbitrarily.

Now, in my carrying on with you, doing what I am doing on this particular occasion, I am almost 80, within a few months of 80 now, and I am operating completely extemporaneously. I do not have any notes, and I have made up my mind to, because we have tried on several occasions before at various schools around the country quite a number of years ago, where I was asked to exhaust my thinking, my spontaneous thinking before a class of students; and where I would not repeat myself, except to do important reviews to bring back in a strand of thought, which I had introduced later that needed, that you had to be conscious of tying it in. And, I was asked to exhaust my thinking, all the thinking which both the class and myself agreed, was not in the general way of thinking where I had any sort of unique viewpoint as a consequence of my operational procedure in developing my thoughts and self-discipline.

In the previous experiments we have made we had one that came to 52 hours, and because I am older though I may be able to condense things a little more, I probably we are all having such an acceleration of experiences, as I opened with you last night the input of information is so great, that I probably will take a little longer now than I did before, so we made an allowance of about 60 hours. But I also arranged my affairs in such a way that I will have the least possible intrusion into this pattern while I’m doing this, so that I will be able to really remember from day to day everything I’ve said over the total 60 hours. So I’m going to be really working on, I’m working on a mental tapestry, and I am introducing thoughts, and so forth, and I am bringing in threads and you’ll find me continually weaving. But working on the grand strategy I introduced to you yesterday working from the whole to the particular. It is a synergetic strategy; and requiring, then, statements of the whole and some of the known inputs, and finding out other things as we go. This is the grand strategy.

So, that’s enough for an “operational” statement about what you find me sitting up here doing, and because this is a very unprecedented affair, unprecedented affair is just to have this beautiful video tape. I don’t know if you’ve been looking at the quality of the picture. It is really superb! And on video tape you’re able to do what you do is just tape like tape recording a voice, you can run it over again. We can come back again later on where I’ve been talking about some object that we don’t have models of, or pictures handy, and we can superimpose it back in the film at the right place. It is a very beautiful and lovely medium. And, so we are getting then a really very faithful recording of a completely live experience of you and I. I HAD TO HAVE FACES BEFORE ME. HUMAN BEINGS BEFORE ME, SO THAT I COULD REALLY FEEL THEIR EYES, AND I COULD NOT HAVE PEOPLE WHO CAME IN AND OUT. If someone new appeared in the audience, I would then spontaneously want to bring him up to date with what the rest of us were thinking, so that we’ve had to have fairly clear-cut plans of how we would carry on here. I think all of this is important to have in the picture because that’s operational information. In other words, personally, I do not look upon our undertaking as from somebody trying to create a beautiful moving picture. Where they are just interested in the photogenics or whatever it may be, and certain dramatic moments, and getting the audience to feel in certain ways. Therefore, I do not go by protocol or anything to try to erase anything that seems to be any kind of a form-marring item. I think all of those things are going to be very important, operationally, in whatever goes on here. This is we are all dealing in that extraordinary phenomena called “reality.”

Now, today I’m going to do some more reviewing of things in fairly large ways. There is something that is very much in evidence in the room here, and I have not talked about, and it relates to our word “structure” of yesterday. And that is, you see models around here which are these compression members do not touch each other, and if you try them, you’ll find that these are flexible cables between them. They are not stiff little wires, and they are not rods they are literally completely flexible threads. And they are high tensile threads Dacron so they will not stretch. But we see then, a complex of compression struts that do not touch each other, and the only thing that is continuous is the tension.

Now, I became very fascinated in my early days of getting into structures and actually building things, and particularly dealing with boats and the very great strength of the rigging and strength of your ship compared to the kind strength that is usually exhibited in houses.

And the differentiating of the rigging of a ship into the compressional spars and the tensional cables and stays, halyards, all the things you operate a ship with. So, I’d like to think a little about any structural system. We introduced those words yesterday, so now you know what I’m talking about there, and we find that in the structural system is a complex of energy events which interacted with one another produce a stable pattern; but some of them were trying to explode and some of them were trying to come together escape the system, and others were containing the system.

And, I find then, this phenomena, compression and tension, that is always and only co-existent. I think lots of people say, I have just a compression member. Well, their compression member is a high tide of a compressional aspect. But it does have radial tension in it, and we say I have a pure tension member, that’s not so. You’ll find that tension is also co-existent with compression. And to make that clear to you, I’m going to then point out to you for instance, I take a piece of rope, It’s very flexible, and the only way that it can give you any dimensional positioning stability would be when you have it tensed. So we take this piece of rope in our two hands and start tensing it. And the tighter I pull it, the more vigorously I pull it, the tauter the rope becomes. When we say “taut,” we mean, it’s girth begins to contract. That’s so as a consequence of my tensing it in this direction pulling on it this way. It is contracting this way that is, it’s girth is getting less it’s getting harder, you’ll find it tighter and tighter. That is, the more I pull it, the more it goes into compression in a plane at 90 degrees from where I’m pulling. That sounds familiar to you from yesterday that’s precession. The effects of the pulling, the result is 90 degrees.

I find that when I take a number of rods steel rods, and I found that they are very flexible if I push it this way they want to bend. I’m going to take a bundle of steel rods an eighth of an inch in diameter. They are four feet long, so that they are so long that they are very slender, and readily bendable if you push on the ends, towards each other. They are all the same diameter, and I am going to bundle them together in parallel one to another, a whole lot of them. Two of them will come into contact. I’ve made cross section thru them, they come into contact like that, and now they can’t get any closer to each other. They are actually tangent. A third one will nest in top of the two it makes it a triangle. I find that I can get six around one making the hexagon and so on. We went into that pattern yesterday. I can get another row around, and another row, and they get into a hexagonal pattern of closest packing. And I take a large number of these rods, and I’ve counted them out so they are going to come out in even hexagons not just partial rings of the outer set. And, I bring them together, and finally you keep doing this to them and you finally get into that closest packing very much tighter than they were at first. Now we put a tensile strap around them to hold them in their closest packing, so we wrap them all the way around, the whole length of this. Get it absolutely tight they bound together. Now, I made so many of them that we have a total bundle about six inches in diameter, and it is four feet long, so its length to diameter ratio is twelve to one. You find there is something in columns, compression columns that we call slenderness ratio.

Part 3

The Greek stone columns, they found they could go 18 diameters high before the column wanted to collapse one way or another that is the slenderness ratio the ratio of the diameter to length. And we have the steel columns that can get up, today, some of the very good steel, can get up to 36 to 1 before they now you see, when you load a column in compression, it wants to banana like that. It tends to go to arc of decreasing radius. Now 12 to 1, I made that bundle of 6″ in diameter and 4′ long, so eight to one is a very short column, it would be called, and it has really no tendency to banana at all. It’s pretty much like just one stone section in a Greek column.

Now, I’m going to put this column under an hydraulic press. You know the hydraulic press, top member coming down, fantastic power being exerted here. And as the pressure comes down on each of the rods that are in there, you know they want to bend, but because they are in closest packing they can’t bend towards each other. They can only bend away from one another that is the only possible freedom. So that is exactly what they start to do. And so, we keep loading it, and they want to go out like a cigar quite evenly. We have something called a neutral axis of a compression member. If you can load it very closely on the neutral axis then the load doesn’t try to make it banana one way or another, the slenderness could make it go almost any direction just a little tiny force, it will go that way. Now, we find then, very evenly loaded in its center and being a short column, it tends to become like a cigar all the rods on the outside can bend away from one another, that’s the only direction they can yield. Therefore as they do so, they were bound together, so it puts an enormous strain on the binding as they work against that binding, so while we are deliberately loading it in compression this way, the resultant goes into tension in a plane at 90 degrees. It’s exactly opposite of what we did with the tension member going into compression. Here again, our friend precession.

In engineering that is called the Prosler effect. Often when somebody’s name is being used, it obscures a function and it would be better to say precession than Prosler effect. Anyway, we have the generalized principle covering all of these. Now, having recognized these proclivities of compression members, I saw then a tension member, when I do tense it, tends then to go to an arc of greater radius; and here we have something quite different from the compression member trying to go to the arc of lesser radius. The tension member tries to straighten out, and tries then also to get all this effectiveness within the neutral axis. It tries to get in its own neutral axis to be, in a sense, most effective. Tension members really tend to gain strength as first used, and build up really quite a lot of strength.

Now, I found, that whereas there is a slenderness ratio in compression columns there was no limit length to cross section. There was no slenderness ratio in tension members. If you had a better alloy, they could be thinner and thinner. Yesterday I went into mass interattraction with you. The beautiful discovery of team play, really, of going from Kepler and Galileo to Newton, and we have then, there is a mass interattraction. And when we get to alloys of metal today, we know that the atoms are literally not touching one another they are simply in closer proximity, one to another.

I gave you the word “Synergy” yesterday and behaviors of whole systems as unpredicted by behavior of any of their parts considered separately. Chrome-nickel-steel is a very beautiful demonstration of Synergy in physics and chemistry. An alloy. We have a rule of thumb of man of yesterday, saying a chain is no stronger than it’s weakest length, and that seemed to be very obvious. By the same way then, if I mixed together a number of different chemical elements, our candy making would suggest that when you can melt the sugar the whole thing comes apart. The nuts come apart. The nuts didn’t fail, but the sugar comes apart whatever is the weakest element in that chain would be all you have to look at. The sugar in that peanut brittle, and so the sugar is the weak element, and the peanut brittle would be no stronger than the sugar.

Now, when we come to the metallic alloys, things do not happen in that particular kind of way. I’m going to take the chrome-nickel-steel, and we take in the testing materials for their strength. The tensile strength per cross section area, some kind of cross section area in America, the square inch. The tensile strength of a square inch of material, or psi., pounds per square inch, what is the cohesion of that material before it gets into two pieces? And, that is the most prominent of all the strength testings that are carried on to learn all about the structural strengths of materials.

So, when you are testing, there is a point where the material will yield, and that is considerable time before it fails, so the engineering usually then deals in that, you don’t want to get to a yielding point, because then things are going to be in trouble. So, I’m going to take then the one is called ultimate and the other is yield. Stones, masonry for instance, have only about 50 pounds to the square inch tensile strength to the masonry itself. The stone is 50,000 pounds to the square inch compressional strength, so stone has had an enormous ability to carry loads, but no strength at all in cohering it comes apart.

We have, then, metals taken out of the stone that brought then tensile strengths from the 50 pounds per square inch of masonry up to something like mild steel primarily the iron with some carbon, this has a tensile strength in the commercially available materials relative purity, where we get an ultimate in the mild steel of about 60,000 pounds to the square inch as ultimate, and yielding at about maybe around 50,000. We have the carbon, manganese and so forth in there in chrome, nickel, steel, the three prominent constituents are the iron and the chromium and the nickel. The chromium has a tensile strength of about 70,000 psi; the nickel about 80,000 psi; so the weakest is the iron at about 50-60,000 psi. And you say, then, we’ll put these things together and the weakest adulterates the whole, like the sugar, and you never can have any more strength than the weakest component. That has been the everyday thinking, and for this reason alloys have really surprised man tremendously, because as I said society does not think synergetically. It assumes that all you have to know is about the parts and they add up. Now, chrome-nickel-steel I find that it does not come apart tensily in the tensile testing at the weakest, or where the iron would yield. We find then let’s try the chromium side well it doesn’t come apart; try the nickel 80,000 we’re going to say a chain is now as strong as it’s strongest link; and we find that at 80,000 it doesn’t yield at all. In fact, we don’t get it to yield until we get to 350,000 psi! Supposing I say, I want to try to understand this extraordinary phenomena by saying, I’m going to say, “a chain is as strong as the addition of the strengths of all of its links.” Which everybody would say is absurd, so I’m going to take 60,000 + 70,000 and that gives me 130,000 + 80,000 gives me 210,000, but it doesn’t yield till 350,000. Now, how did that happen? Well, this is the way that it occurs:

I want you to think then about the geometries I gave you yesterday of structural systems, like the tetrahedron. I can take two tetrahedra of four stars each and I can interrelate them symmetrically so that they are now eight stars in critical proximity and they take the position of the eight corners of the cube, with a cube having two tetrahedra in it, because each square face had two diagonals and you could take the cube and add the red set of diagonals, and you’ll find that those are the six edges of the red tetrahedron; and you add the other diagonal of each race, the blue set, and that’s the blue tetrahedron. You’ll find the two come together with the eight points.

Now, remember our mass attraction. These atoms now there were only four, and their distance apart was the edge of the tetrahedron, which is on the cube, is the diagonal of the face of the cube. Now, each of these eight stars, the nearest one is a leg, or the edge of the cube away, not the diagonal away; therefore, the critical proximity has been very greatly increased; so each atom now has three other atoms much closer to them than the original three. They have four cases of each having three, and remember that the interattraction increases to the second power of the relative proximity. So the coherence has gone up enormously. Then we find that we have that cube now with the eight corners, we find that there are six faces, so I can take an octahedron which has six vertexes and they will exactly match the mid-faces of the cube, so each one of these elements coming in are just one of the such beautiful symmetry symmetrical structural systems of the atoms. So I then finally have all the interpositioning of them, all in the same distance from the same common center; and we find the mass interattractiveness has just gone up exponentially. That’s how we get the 350,000 psi. In other words, here we have an alloy that’s like the milky way. I take two stars in the milky way and I have another star included half way between the two, and the interattraction is going to be four-folded, because they don’t touch each other.

Now, I want you to understand, then, how then alloying is highly synergetic and really appreciate that word. So I find then, here is chrome-nickel-steel with its very high synergetic effectiveness of tensile strength, and these things really began to fascinate me very much. So I saw that tension members were not limited by cross-section relation to length, if I could get a better material, I could make them longer and longer and thinner and thinner. That’s exactly what went on in the history of suspension bridges. The first suspension bridges were actually made with great iron lengths very great cross section and very short span. You come to the Brooklyn bridge is the first one where we were using cable, and they used piano steel wire, which was one of those alloys. At a time when the mild steel was only about 50,000 and he got 70,000 with his piano steel wire; so he had relatively delicate cables carrying all of that extraordinary traffic with its enormous span.

Then we came to George Washington Bridge, and we had gotten very much finer, because the alloys had so improved. And each one of these bridges were getting up the Golden Gate and then finally Verrazzano we’re down to very, very good cables, where you not only have greater loads and greater lengths, but actually less sections of materials per given load. I saw then that we were approaching, because there is no limit ratio of length to cross section in tension, that we were approaching infinite length and no cross section at all! And I said, “is that talking nonsense?” So I said, well, because tension goes then tends to occur in arcs of very large radius, therefore I’d better think about some very big systems. So, let’s think Celestial here. Let’s think for instance about the earth and the moon. And I see we can fly a little airplane right through the line between the center of gravity of the moon, and the center of gravity of the earth, and nothing happens. You don’t sever anything. The fact that this then turned out to be the scheme of the Universe, where nature was using discontinuous compression and only continuous tension which was invisible to you and I because of this extraordinary mass interattraction which is invisible which made it so perplexing what those planets were doing, to those early observers. Apparently, then, the great structural scheme of Universe I found these enormous masses interattracting one another the earth and the moon with these enormous distances in between them.

Part 4

Then thinking a little more about what you and I just reviewed about compression and tension, I will notice then, that when I load a column I must try to stay on neutral axis so that it will not tend to bend one way or the other. Then I see that in loading that compression column it tends to be more and more of a cigar; and I find that if I keep loading it, under pressure, it’s finally going to get to be a sphere; and something extraordinary happens because any axis is a neutral axis. Up to this time there has been only one neutral axis, but suddenly any axis is a neutral axis, so that we find that ball bearings, spherical steel balls, became the best compression members that man has ever invented, for they carried this enormous load and continually distributed their loads so that any aspect is a neutral axis so any aspect will do. They are continually serving as you roll them around. So I found, then, Nature was compressionally optimal in the spherical. So then I said, here’s a scheme here the Earth is a sphere, and the moon is a sphere, and the sun is a sphere, and you’ve got atoms all what nature has is islands of spherical compression in a sea of comprehensive tension.

So we have then what we call discontinuous compression and continuous tension. There is the scheme of nature. And man was not building that way. Man is building entirely compression on compression brick on brick, and doesn’t seem to think with any other kind of logic. This made me wonder whether it would be possible to make discontinuous compression, continuous tension structures that was really what opened up this whole field. There are a great many people now dealing in these structures, but I call them tensional integrities. The integrity is in the tension, because it is continuous, it comes back to itself. It is always a closed system. Open then it will make trouble, it must be a closed system. And so, and then I shortened the words tensional integrity down to tensegrity. So we call these tensegrity structures. (He strums some of the tension components, and says) absolutely even distribution, so they have the same sound with anyone you’re playing. If you tighten one of them, they’ll all tighten absolutely evenly. And it’s like any pneumatic ball when you fill the whole ball, all the load is distributed absolutely evenly all absolute enclosure. Now, these are balls, but you can see the holes in them. All balls do have holes in them, and they’re too small for the gases and molecules to get out, but they’re full of holes. So, this is simply, really, a pneumatic structure. We’re going to get back to this a little bit more, but mainly I want to get to nature’s scheme of discontinuous compression, continuous tension. Nature is using tensegrity. And I find then, nothing could really make clearer to me the degree of inefficiency that is imposed by man’s non-synergetic thinking and his feeling you have to have brick on brick or stone on stone.

This taught me that I could possibly do much more enclosing, and be much more effective structurally, employing the omni-triangulation paying attention to all the things I have gone into with you about quantums of energy in the structures the six vectors, doing that with each one being push and pull, the twelve are always there. They are both positive and negative, each one of the six. So there is a fundamental twelveness there.

Now, I’m going to go into another mental exercise with you regarding schemes of structuring of Universe. And, I began to think then about, for instance, I always find social insights that seem to accrue to terminal information such as I am giving you. We do find out, what is the optimum? and the sphere then, gets to be the optimum then for compression. And the tension going unlimited no cross sections at all. And this is really the whole scheme of our Universe. That is our gravitational interaction.

I find, then, for instance, it is very interesting that in the regeneration of human life, the general design of the human beings, of the female and the male. I find the female, then, having the eggs within her, and the eggs are fertilized within her. The new life of the female continually comes out of the female. She opens up, and a new life comes out of that life, and a new life comes out of that life. This is not dissimilar, in fact, it is the same principle that was discovered by Goethe the German poet-scientist, very much of an expert in a number of scientific subjects. But he was the first to point out that the vegetation that the tree, is a wave phenomena.

I am going to bring together several things now that Goethe did not, but you and I can put together from the experiences we already had in this room, where we came to the discovery of a tetrahedron being the simplest structural system in Universe. And, I want you to think now about, say for instance, a Greek column, and think about putting a piece of stone on a lathe and revolving it in order to get it round. They had different tricks for making it round. So the top of the column is the same diameter disc as the bottom of the column. I’m talking about any one piece of that stone.

Now, the fact is, that stone has very high compressive capability. Actually we found that it has 50,000 pounds to the square inch. Supposing our 50,000 pounds that is 25 tons. I would like to carry a 25 ton load, and I have a great section of a Greek column one piece of stone made as a cylinder a cylinder of stone. And I find that what I can do is to have a load of 25 tons, so I just mark off in the center of the top of the cylinder, a diameter that has an area of one square inch. Then I am going to take that stone from that top, and then I am going down to its base, I can keep shearing off, until I get a cone a cone of stone, and there is at the top there enough cross-section there to take care of the 25 tons. All the rest of it gets stronger and stronger, but because it has, the base is stable, as the tetrahedron is, a three-point landing. This is very important really. You’ve got to think about that a little.

If I have this standing by itself it tips over like that, but two of them standing they can tip over towards each other, they might tip anyway, but I can let them tip towards each other, and if I do that, I wish I had another stick. Maybe I can just do it with my arms. Here’s another column and another column on my knee and they fall towards each other. Now they have two points on the ground and they act like a hinge they can fall this way or that way, but only in a plane. Before they could fall in any direction, now they can only fall articulate in a plane. Now I’m going to have a third column the third one’s kind of loose like that, two of them fell together, and the third one fell towards them and suddenly they come together and you get that tripod and for the first time we have stable. That is we cannot have that stability until we get the three of them. Those are then, the three legs of our tetrahedron, but they, as you load them they want to thrust and come apart. So we find we have the three tension members are a finite or closure. You must actually close the ring at the bottom and they can’t come apart anymore. So, we have the three compression thrust and the three tension keeping them from thrusting.

So we have in that stone cone, now, I have enough compressive strength for he 25 tons, which is a whole lot it could be a 25 ton truck is a very big truck. And can chisel away simply all the rest of that stone all the rest of that stone is unnecessary. The base is wide enough then to give me that three-point stability. So it’s a cone, and I find that I can go even further. I pick three points on the base 120 degrees apart and I can then massage away cut away the cone and have left the tetrahedron, and I have all the stability and all the compressive strength. It finally gets down to the tetrahedron. Now, the Greek column, you realize, in a sense, emperically that’s deep in with you, and human beings just fooling around with sticks, and coming to tripods and so forth as they did long ago, at camp fires and so forth, what they could do with pieces of wood and these twigs.

Then, there is a necessity from time to time for the load which you are going to carry is more than just that 25 tons, so you want a wider section. So we really could get that with an octahedron. Remember the tetrahedron then had a beautiful wide base for its stability, this way; but the octahedron has an equal triangle at the top. So if we had a full load which you wanted to use this much of the cross section, we’d use the octahedron and it would take care of both, because then we find in the octahedron a very interesting set of conditions. Here is a load, these two are falling towards each other, you have all those set of hinges in there, and everything is in optimum position of comfort about the thrust, so that we really have two cones or two tetra, come point to point producing this kind of inter-stability.

Now, I want to introduce then the stabilization of columns and the tetrahedron and give you a little feeling about, I said, the poet Goethe introducing wave phenomena into the concept in a tree; and Goethe didn’t talk about the tetrahedron, but I point out to you that all trees grow, there is actually then, the top of the tree of this year, and we have the cambium layer. So each one is a cone around, so the next year is a cone on the outside of that cone. A series of cones. And in fact we find that if you were to pare away, the tree dies, many of the tree you find is literally the tetrahedron there. The three main roots going out like that and there are three facets here coming really to a cone, so the next year is a little larger tetrahedron on top of it, and another tetrahedron on top of it. We get, then, to where the branches are also tetrahedra has something called a wing root. And the bottom of the wing you have two parts, the top are the hinge part; and then the member coming down here to the bottom the wing root. It’s just the tetrahedron. One points down and two on the top for the hinge. As is the wing root of all great branches of trees. So we have a cone coming out from the cone. So we have coming out of this total surface here, the cambium layer suddenly breaks open into a new tetrahedron coming out of this branch. And on that branch breaks open a new tetrahedron again keeps opening up. The inside is coming out, and it gets to be a twig. And then on the end of that twig you see a bud. And the bud keeps opening up and the leaves coming out, and out of it then comes the blossom. And then suddenly the blossom gets fertilized there is the fruit. Finally out of the fruit comes a seed. And finally it goes off. But, Goethe pointed out, this whole thing is a wave thing opening from the inside out.

I want to bring back then, I spoke about the female, and the new life is on the inside continually coming out and the new life comes out of the next female; it is a continual opening up wave. I also then point out to you the difference between the male and the female.

Part 5

The male then becomes discontinuous. He comes islanded. He is a hunter. The female and her young and so forth, are in great continuity their family, but the male goes off to be the hunter the fighter. He is the islanded. She is central. This is very fundamental in social behavior. Now, I just, basically find then that the woman is tensive. Just fundamentally. Just the sex act. She pulls in, and the man is compressive. He thrusts. She pulls. And it’s just real fundamental what we call being female is to pull to walk away, to attract. I find the male tending to do this to punch. She does the other way. I can’t help but find it very important to notice these things this way. I don’t see any pure males or pure females in human beings, so there are all kinds of often males can get to be quite attractive as well. They do have the attraction. But the point is that there seems to be a predominance of this kind, and it seems to have something to do with the great integrities of the fundamental complementarity that I gave you yesterday. Where we only just learned in our last less than twenty years, less than a score of years that complementarity is dissimilar is not mirror image.

So, the unity is plural and at minimum two, I began to find to be a very fundamental way of thinking, and that was a phase that I began to adopt long, long ago. And I was told at the time of World War II, when the Manhattan project came along and physics was trying to understand a great deal, that my use of the phrase “Unity is plural and at a minimum two,” was then ventured into by the quantum physicists, and they found it suddenly opening up all the doors that they had to get into the fundamental twoness.

Now you are experiencing with me a sense of the incredible interrelatedness of our total experience, and yet the apprehending, comprehending, incisive comprehending, of the differential, of the intercomplementations I am going to go a little more into that tensegrity and think about it. I find it extremely interesting to me in my experience with the structures, and humanity and their building, that the only reason that geodesic domes do what they do as they carry as they get enormous spans that we have not been able to get into before the largest clear spans of man have been way transcended by the geodesics. And they apparently can go on to any size, because they are tensionally cohered. And compression is discontinuous in the fundamental principle of the structuring itself, so that tension has no limit to size, just as you can have the interrelationship of the galaxies, and those millions and billions of light years even apart. And still have the tensile integrity so that there is no limit to size of tensegrity structures. All the engineering of society, built then brick on brick, is entirely compressional strategy.

Engineering has taught structural engineering has taught compressional strategy. And it is thought of in terms of the earth being a compressional unit. You dig a hole in the earth and you take a solid compression column and you put it down in the hole, and put a little earth in again, and now you simply have a formalized compressional extension. You find that mast that is standing there, you can also hold the ends of it, as the winds will, and acts like a lever and can pry it loose. So what man, then, did, having developed the compressional continuity of the earth and the compressional column, then he took tension stays, a minimum of three, and suddenly found they could offset the wind with those tensional members making our friend the tripod in tension.

We find then, men building boats so they had a solid. They thought of the boat as a solid compression continuity. They stepped the mast, and then put tension stays. Compression is primary, and tension is secondary a helper. The mast will stand up alright by itself, but if you’re really going to put real loads, great wind loads in your sale, then you have to have the tension stays to give you greater advantage. And so there were enormous numbers of those stays at every level of those great square riggers, you see, a set of stays making short mast sections. Because between the sets of stays, is a full column length. Now, as you look at square riggers, then, you begin to feel the tension and compression logic that I have been giving to you.

Now, in thinking about, then, the engineering that I have experienced there have been a number of large buildings to be built with geodesics. And all of them have to if they are big buildings, they all have to be processed by engineers. I have to bring in consulting engineers who are certified for that particular purpose, and I have been able to get some extremely good ones in Boston and Cambridge; and they’ve gone thru a great many buildings with me, and we have to then go thru building departments and meetings with the engineers who check the work that’s going to be installed. But the engineering logic, then, requires a complete, paying no attention to anything, but a compressional continuity. But as I said, tension can be a helper. But it is a compressional logic. It is not a tensional logic with compressions as local helpers, which is the way the Universe is put together, both microcosmically and macrocosmically. The engineers who work with me now, have really finally come to realize that the tensegrity structure is the explanation of the geodesics, but it is not in the engineering teaching as yet. It is not in any of the codes. Therefore it cannot be participated in. This made me realize I could get into very much lighter buildings.

But, I wanted to get the engineers into strategic positions to be able to take advantage of the tensegrity. And I recently have written a paper. Here is the paper which I think will greatly help because you can go over to another form of engineering which is called “pneumatic engineering” and “hydraulic engineering.” Some fundamental qualities now that we are going to find again regarding structures, and are a minimum of basic structural systems in Universe of yesterday.

I want you to think now of tetrahedron again, our friend tetrahedron. I’m going to take two tetrahedra. They could be an octahedron and a tetrahedron. They could maybe join something like that. We could have then, two of them this is the hinge this would be a universal joint as long as there is some kind of pull between them for the mass attraction, so they can’t come apart, so it acts very universally. Now I have a hinge, that can only do this. With three of them touching each other, it now becomes rigid for the first time.

Linus Pauling, a great chemist, received the Nobel Prize twice once it was a peace prize; but the first time was as a chemist. And Linus Pauling’s Nobel Laureate paper reviews the history of chemical structure. And he goes back to the first one of the chemists who had noted certain, just like the early, early human beings noting that five lights in the sky behaved a little differently from the others.

We have chemists, then, noticing, in the inorganic chemistry, certain things going on, where there seemed to be an abundance of the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 in relative proportion to the way things were associating and disassociating. That man, Frankland and it was a relatively short time ago, just at the end of the 18th century and early in the 19th century we then have Kemkelay and Cooper, and they make a little more of a discovery of the relationship of the oneness, twoness, threeness and fourness. Then there comes a Russian scientists operating in France named Beutlerev, and Beutlerev was the first to ever use the word “Chemical Structure” and he related them to the oneness, twoness, threeness and fourness, and he spoke about these as bonds. And being in France, the bonds was the word valance. And there were single valent, univalent, bivalent, trivalent and quadrivalent. Now this valency, then, incidentally there was about a 35 year hiatus and no more progress in chemical structures after Butlerov when suddenly a man named Van’t Hoff, a Dutch man came along, and he said that he thought the oneness, twoness, threeness and fourness had to do with the tetrahedron’s four points and four faces. He was called by all the chemists and other scientists, charlatan, a rogue, and he was called every horrid name you could call a human being and he was not daunted, he went on, and he was able to give optical proof of the tetrahedronal configuration of carbon. And he was the first chemist in history to receive the Nobel prize.

Now, we have then the tetrahedron suddenly entering into our chemistry, and our phenomena of bonds and valences. So I simply give you then, this would be univalent, this is bivalent, trivalent, and all four of them together, two tetrahedra nesting in one another, congruent with one another and that is quadrivalent. The only real difference between a carbon I gave you yesterday and took the vector equilibrium and turned it into four tetrahedra congruent with one another, do you remember, and it was quadrivalent, and it was like the difference between soft carbon and a carbonous diamond, when it gets to be quadrivalent.

We have then, I mentioned yesterday, in the grand synergetic strategies of the known behavior of the whole and the known behaviors of some of the parts, finding about others, and going thru the Greek triangle, and then Euler’s beautiful topology; and then I said Willard Gibbs introducing in chemistry the Phase Rule where you have the interrelationship between chemistry in its liquid, its crystalline, and its gaseous state. And we found that Willard Gibbs phase rule had to do in some way, it looked like the same kind of a formula as Euler’s “this plus this equals this plus 2,” and I’ll then give you that the liquids, I want to go in the gases, I’m going to take a number of tetrahedra, the same size like this, and I’m going to fasten the tetrahedra together corner to corner. So this tetrahedron touches one other. And then at the next corner goes another tetrahedron. They are continually interlinked where each tetrahedron touches one other each corner touches just one other corner. If you do that and make a model you’ll find that there is a whole lot of space in between them, and they will flop around as a total aggregate, and they will fold into one another. They’ll act very much like these are the way gases act. Gases are highly compressible. There is an interlinkage. There is a viscosity, there is an integrity, but it is highly compressible. But the gases distribute their loads, due to the flexibility, all loads are immediately distributed so you have air in a tire, or air in a balloon, or air in a football. And just punch it in one place and the air immediately distributes the load to all of the tensile enclosure absolutely evenly. So a great truck can have only a very few pounds of pressure and air inside because it distributes it so perfectly thru the whole load. And the bigger the casing then the more tensile surface it distributes to. So, we find then pneumatics consist of these univalences.

Part 6

Now, I’m going to say, take the tetrahedra and fasten each one to another tetrahedron, but with two of them touching a hinge between them. You find each one of these tetrahedra in here are touching another tetrahedron at two points. They are edge to edge with one another. Here’s a tetrahedron in here, and it’s edge to edge with this tetrahedron here. When you do that, when they are edge to edge, then it makes a fills all space this way, and seems to be very stable. This is exactly like the liquids. The liquids are non-compressible. They already are in the form of the closest packing, so they can’t be compressed any further. But because they are hinged together, the hinges transmit loads, so liquids transmits any load, at any point, as in pneumatics, distributed to all of the tensile system.

Then we get to trivalent, then for the first time there is no hinging, no universal joint. They are absolutely rigid. They no longer distribute loads. Now these are the fundamental qualities the crystalline is absolutely rigid, does not distribute loads. The liquids distribute loads. And the gases distribute loads. But the gases are compressible and the liquids are not. This brings about a very important way to think.

But, I’ve got you now thinking about a tree as a set of tetrahedra coming out of tetrahedra, as basic structures. But also then you’ll find that what makes a tree able to do what trees can do if you’ve ever tried to pick up any great weight let’s say a 30 or 40 pound suitcase and you’re trying to hold it out horizontally, and you’ll just find that you can’t do it. And yet you’ll find a tree holding out a branch, and some of these branches if you weigh them, weigh up to as much as 5 tons. And to be able to hold out as much as five tons horizontally in a great wind, and yield to the wind and not break off it’s a fantastic structural capability. Man has never done anything like it before. Well, it’s done by a very simple way, because Nature then has in the crystalline you have a triple bond, and therefore you have the greatest tension. The liquid has two bonds, they are a little more viscous more tensile strength than the gases which have only one bond they come apart. So that the greatest tensile strength is accomplished by the crystalline. Therefore Nature ships in a seed the instructions for further crystal production, and what produces the crystals is really local waters and atmospheres and local chemistries. So these crystals grow, and the crystals then act as sacks for liquid, and so the tree is just filled with the liquid. And I gave you yesterday the tree also having to have roots so that it could not blow away when exposing all that leafage to take on the sun energy impoundment through photosynthesis. So that we have osmosis and the water goes only one way valving, pulling from the roots into the tree to fill all these sacks. So the tree is using the crystalline entirely in tension to enclose the liquids, and the liquids then completely distribute the loads throughout the tree. They valve it out in the sky just bit by bit to turn it into more rain to come back on more trees, so more of this process can go on elsewhere. But the water is entrapped in there, and therefore it will distribute its loads locally. So there is then, this absolutely non-compressibility of the liquids in distributing loads that makes that tree able to do this extraordinary task.

If we get an ice storm, off comes the branch. It can no longer it become crystalline, and it cannot distribute its load. Man has not built any buildings in that way. They have used entirely that crystalline continuity concept of compression on compression, so our building is incredibly inefficient. And so, I am now trying to understand a little about what goes on in tensegrity structures, and I will come then to the analogy with hydraulics and pneumatics of load distributing. Because we do have continuous tension and discontinuous compression.

I want you to think about what goes on inside a sphere when you blow it up. Let’s say a basketball a balloon. You keep introducing more air. There are then, molecules of the gases, and you’re getting them crowded in there. Now, all these gases are full of fundamental kinetics, and they are continually doing like this. With every action having its reaction and its resultant. So, every little molecule of gas that is going somewhere in there is doing it by shoving off from another molecule going the other way. Think about two swimmers. You’ve probably done swimming in a tank alright, and you dive and you get to the other end and you double up your knees and shove off from the wall, and you come out again. But two swimmers can meet in the middle of the tank, and shove off of each others feet. They double up and off they go, using the other one’s inertia. This would be typical of the way that molecules are behaving in pneumatic structures.

Now, we find that the molecules, then, are not simply going they don’t go to the center of the sphere and then explode outwardly. This would be a pulsative affair take time for them to get in and the thing would be vibrating like that. They’re not doing that. They are ricocheting around inside. So each one is starting to go this way, another one goes that way, and the two hit the wall. And they can’t go any further. They push the wall outwardly, and then they bounce, ricochet off, and hit the wall again, so they are acting like little chords inside the sphere.

Now, also, to introduce another principle, which is dealing in great circles and spheres, and the word GEODESIC. Geodesic means the most economical relationship between events between any two events. The great circles on spheres are geodesics. There is a shorter distance between any two points on a sphere on the great circle than there is on any of the lesser circles. A great circle is defined as a line formed on the sphere by a plane going through cutting through the center of the sphere. The equator is just such. Each of the planes of longitude go through the center of the sphere so those are great circles.

I want you to we have then on here also lesser circles. We have the latitudes. They are not great circles. We come up here to 80 degrees North Latitude. I’m going to take my dividers and open from the pole to the 80 degree North Latitude, and I strike this little circle. I’ve got my dividers fixed at that opening, and I go down to the equator, and put it on here, and I strike this same circle. So we have then the equator running like this, and the circle superimposed on it. Where the little circle, lesser circle, crosses the big circle at “a” and “b,” and you’ll find it a much shorter distance between “a” and “b” on than equator that it is going all the detour of 90 degrees and then coming back this way. I just want you to visualize quickly how great circles are the most economical between points on a sphere, and the chords of great circles are even more economical.

So, we find that the molecules bouncing around inside the sphere, will not go around in latitudes, or lesser circles. They just automatically have to get into bouncing in great circles. That becomes very exciting to discover. So, they’re not just going around in layers. If they were going around in layers like this, this whole thing would flatten down really easily that way, and it has all this omni-directional stability due to the fact it is using the great circles.

Now, I get one great circle around here, and we find that every great circle crosses every other great circle at two points, so that this great circle of longitude crosses then the other longitudes at the North and South Pole always 180 degrees apart.

So I’ve got a great circle here, and another great circle there. Then I get suddenly a third great circle, the equator, and that makes a triangle. North Pole, equator, equator. Now we’ve found that two is unstable, and something I didn’t say to you yesterday about the necklace and the triangle, that I would like to introduce right now, because it is very, very relevant to the understanding about that triangle.

I said, why and how did that necklace, consisting of three compression members, rigid and three flexible tension corners, how and why did it stabilize this pattern? I find that any two of them coming together are fastened one to the other like two knives of a pair of scissors, with a common fulcrum a lever. And the further you go out on the lever arm the more effective those shears are. Therefore, if we want to have a bolt cutter, you go way out on very long arms of good, strong steel. We find that each side of a triangle, compression member, is taking hold of the ends of two levers, and with minimum effort because it’s on the ends of the lever, stabilizing the opposite angle. It gets really very exciting again to see how beautiful is this least effort that is being demonstrated by that necklace triangle.

Part 7

Coming back, then, to triangles, and understanding it is the third side that stabilizes the opposite angle. So, I had two great circles crossing each other at an unstable angle at the pole here. The minute the equator crosses it, it triangulates it and it immediately stabilizes it. So these are interference patterns going on here, and it sets up a triangle. Then, the fact that there is one triangle, then you find that it automatically then makes I said, I had the equator, and I had these two here, and suddenly I have the third, and suddenly you get the octahedron shows up. It automatically makes the octahedron. So you get four triangles eight triangles here. And these triangles, even though the first two may have been at some odd angle like that, not a full 90 degrees, and the second, where the equator crosses may be not. But because of the very high frequency interference, they keep trying to average. They work back towards the octahedron.

We find then this same thing happens with the icosahedron where we have six great circles instead of the three of the octahedron. And the six great circles, here they are, and here are the triangles where you can see them getting to the point that they can’t get any closer. The triangle can’t go that way any further, and it can’t go the other way, because here is a triangle up here see this triangle. And this triangle down here, and these are going spreading to the center of each of the centers of gravity of each triangle, so all the variables are in there. These, then, represent the ways in which I said the icosa gave you the most volume with the least energy investment, again this is the least effort. We find then, fundamentally, the molecules of gas inside of a pneumatic structure, get to doing exactly the pattern we’re looking at here. This thing you’re looking at, incidentally, is called in the British Museum, the oldest toy known to man. This particular one came from Rangoon, and through Thailand and Rangoon, these are used instead of pneumatic balls, and they play, and they hit the balls, and they bounce beautifully. And it distributes loads incredibly beautifully.

So now I have here a very fascinating matter. Because I found that the pneumatic structures are producing icosahedral great circle interaction patterns. This hit me very hard because it was a pure geodesic structure. And I received a letter and some photographs from two scientists at General Dynamics. It was quite a few years ago, and they were two scientists who were working on re-entry cone problems for the rocketry and space vehicles. And they get into this enormous heat of re-entry, the friction and so forth, and they were trying to get it to where they were making experiments with titanium, which is, as you know, gets the greatest lightness, and has very, very high strength. And, they made two hemispheres of sheet titanium, one about a half inch less in radius than the other. In other words, an inch less in diameter. And they had one concentric with the other, and they sealed up the base between the two, so that there was a half inch space between these two hemispheres. Then, with a pneumatic pump a vacuum pump, they pulled out the air existing between the two thin shells. This meant that the bottom, the smaller shell, the atmosphere was able to get inside of it, and coming inside of it, it then pushed the inner sphere outwardly because the atmosphere came inside the sphere and pushed it out. It exhausted the air between the two, therefore the same atmosphere on the outside of the outer sphere, pushed it in, and it dimpled in under an absolute geodesic pattern the pure icosahedron. And they found that what we call the frequency of the modular sub-division depended upon the relative thickness of the metal, if we made the metal thinner we had higher and higher frequency tensegrity, icosahedral geodesics. They thought I’d be really pretty pleased, and of course I was.

Now, what I’m coming to then, the way we really explain geodesic structures must be hydraulically rather than crystalline, because crystalline structures do not distribute their loads, and these do. The very beauty of it being the fact that they, as I say to you, tense any one of them, and they’ll come out the same tuning all over.

Next (slide). We’ve had quite a lot of interconnection here today. We begin, then, to think of a Universe in which there are great potentials of humanity, and we immediately have great insights that man is then accomplishing tasks he needs to do building such as we are in here today, looking at our great cities. Where I now know that, actually experimentally, that I can give you 300 buildings for one for the task they have to do against the best-known alternate engineering strategy, then just for one thing, tensegrity, spherical structures. Where spheres, in their own right, enclose the most volume with the least surface. Have to pay attention.

Now, I hope, and I’m saying this right now in our meeting, because I want you to feel with me as we explore more and more, you find openings all around with problems that you know are facing humanity, and you begin to see there are options and outs that he is not exploring. And if you begin to add up those options and outs that he’s not employing, you suddenly discover it is highly feasible to take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known, and I know, and I’m talking about big patterns. Little man on our planet, not working on cosmic accounting, but having started naked, helpless, ignorant, finding his way by trial and error, is still at a level of sort of average error of viewpoint which is perfectly logical. There is no bad or good man in here. You can’t get anywhere in your thinking if you impute malevolence to individuals and so forth. I find then that it is then, still assumed by humanity, as self-evident, that there is nowhere nearly enough life support to go around. So people are always worrying about their population. People that are “in” worrying about all these other people coming around to jeopardize their peaceful stability, or enjoyment of their advantage. We have then, because of the working assumption that there is nowhere nearly enough to go around, this is why we have politics.

Each political and politics is inherently biased they simply say, there is nowhere nearly enough to go around, but I have the most logical and fairest way of coping with fundamental inadequacy. It is a horrible matter. But, if you come along with me you’re going to get a better chance of carrying on, and your family will have a better chance of surviving. That’s the only reason we have politics, and you automatically take an absolutely lethal bias if it’s going to be your side or their side. You gradually find that man can do a little bit more, so you say, well you and I get together. Apparently both of us can get along alright, so you get a little larger groupings, and all humanity finally enormous blocks of now approximately three or four major groups saying “it has to be you or me.” We’re finally getting down now to two great big one. YOU or ME. And for this reason, we do have the great nations of the earth, annually for the last two decades, the United States, Russia, China and NATO alone, their appropriations annually sub-total more than $200 billion a year getting ready to kill. All the highest capabilities of man being focused on how do you kill; on the working assumption that there is never enough to go around for everybody, therefore there is no use in having social legislation, because there is no expenditure you can make that is ever going to take care of everybody. So they don’t try to spend it that way.

Wonder why politics sometimes can seem to be so cruel in not taking care of the poverty they say “there’s just not enough.” I now know, really know very well, and I’m sure when you’ve finished with me, you will go out and do a lot of checking, but you will have gotten many many insights in the direction where you could see what I’m saying could be true.

I’ll just give you something very simple in the relation end of that structure and environment controlling. Man developing environment controls for humanity. Where you don’t want to have something as an insulator you don’t want to have a prison. You don’t want to have that Greek sphere where there’s no traffic between the two. You want to have some kind of an environment control so that what you need can come through when you want it. It’s a sieve. It must be a valve to not try to insulate you you need water to drink, because you can’t drink it all when it rains. So you want to have a holding pattern where you then interrupt, shunt, and hold and valve into your presence in the magnitudes and frequencies that correspond with our needs, while also being utterly thoughtful of the rest of the ecological balance of all the other things that have to go on if life is to go on, if human beings are going to go on. So that water can be very well handled, and just a holding pattern, because gravity is pulling it so just don’t let it move that fast, you run it through all the useful channels necessary. So I see then, environment controlling is a valving phenomena where we have things coming at us from all directions, and like to have an omni-directional environment valve, that can cope with the very frequencies and magnitudes of the various of all the things we want to intercept and turn to man’s advantage. It’s a very different way of talking from the old architecture or something that’s going to give you distinction out on main street or whatever it maybe, or something you’re going to make money out of. We’re talking about how are you going to make life work, and trying to find out why humans are here, and what we ought to be doing to abet while we’re here, and how we employ the principles we’re discovering in the most effective manner.

(Break)

So I talked about the grand strategies of all political systems assuming it has to be you or me, and the enormous commitment towards the negatives and the killing. And this is really opposite of Synergetic. It is really me or you rather than realizing that there could be something when you and I get together. It doesn’t make any such allowance. And I, also gradually am exposing to you grand strategies of Nature’s way of solving problems showing you that she has principles that are operating in Universe. That she always does things in the most economical way. She uses the most efficient, and you and I having been born naked and helpless and finding our way, doing many inefficient things as we go, simply because we do have a prime built-in drive of hunger, procreative urge, thirst, curiosity all these built in. We’re given this program so that we’ll do it. We were, as I say, quite clearly designed to make those mistakes, but also then, designed to be able to discover principles and to discover that you can be more efficient, that nature is using the most economical.

So, as we begin to get a little closer to nature, which unquestionably means getting considerably happier, that we’re going to find ourselves getting considerably more efficient. And I just wanted you to be aware of that as I talk, and I talk about the biggest kinds of patterns. I introduced to you yesterday the idea that Nature is doing some very big things, that society didn’t know were going to happen. I’ve introduced you to society having a vanity, and once it happened, not really having the beautiful lesson that it really could learn if it realized how completely it did not anticipate that. Therefore, society would not be assuming it was having to find all of the answers right away, but to realize the Universe is getting along pretty well, and we may be able to check in, we may become members of an operating system where we begin to really consciously participate in employing our higher faculties to really get on with Universe. We may really have such a function ahead. But we have not qualified yet. We are embryo and I would like you to keep feeling that as we go along.

Part 8

Also, then, I’d like you to keep thinking about, on your own part, your own life, what you begin to feel you might do with the information of finding you can do things more efficiently and more effectively. How can you, what can you do to contribute to the total evolution of humanity, and getting it ready to operate competently in a high function in Universe, by helping each individual to higher advantage to be more efficient, to be spontaneously more efficient, to make it logical to be more efficient to make it a joy to be more efficient.

The more we really learn about big patterns then the more comprehensive we are, and the more we learn how these patterns operate, the more we can really anticipate how we could take advantage of the principles that are operative, to bring them to the advantage of humanity. To try to make humanity a success, try to make the whole ecological system a success, to begin to participate in what apparently Nature is always doing, eternally regenerating.

I find that I have to use these words, “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. I gave you “science” as setting in order the facts of experience. I gave you “design” as against the happening to you, where you do it deliberately. Where, using principles then, employing order, we try to anticipate the needs of humanity, anticipate the needs of nature in general, try to anticipate the accommodation of the total intercomplementarity, using these principles then to actually begin to participate in the evolutionary formulations of nature, so we don’t just have to wait and take it for granted that someone else is going to provide this thing for us, that some one else is going to invent. That each one of us has then an increasing intuition and an obligation to employ these principles in an effective manner on behalf of all humanity, and on behalf of the Total Integrity of Universe Itself in its eternal regeneration.

I’m obviously deliberately thinking about my strategies and I’m operating entirely intuitively and spontaneously, and I’m really looking around to see if there is anything that I feel, just small points, to make before going to another large scene.

I’m now going to do a little reviewing of , as I did yesterday, what is it that I’m conscious of when I say I am thinking. I’m now going to come down, to I said, if we try to find one word, just one word alone, that identifies our experience of the phenomena called life, I’d say the number one word would be AWARENESS. And then I’d also say, no otherness, no awareness, because there has to be something to be aware of. I find this very, very fundamental. And it relates very much to the complementarity. And the otherness would be, not exactly the same. Because it would bring about a tendency to differentiate as the observer from the observed. I find it fascinating to think about AWARENESS. I say, no otherness, there is nothing to look at, nothing to sense. So there would be no life under those circumstances.

I want to think about a rather simple model here of, I’m going to have an entity, and I’m going to make it a spherical entity. It’s an island entity, and there are no aberrations or forces operating on it, so it tends to be spherical. And there is otherness, but it, for the moment, is not aware of it. Suddenly there is mass interattractiveness, and then an otherness that gets attracted. So we have another sphere being pulled towards the sphere. And there’s just sort of aware that something is a difference in light that you are experiencing. There’s something going on here. It can’t really be differentiated. There’s no shadow or anything for the moment, because I don’t have any source of light, but this otherness, and its mass attractiveness. The two spheres finally come as close as they can to one another, until they are tangent, and they begin to roll around on one another. As seen, if you and I could see this from a distance, it would look like a dumb bell just two spheres tangent. You would not know whether they were rolling on each other or not, but you and I know that if we take two spheres and put them they can just roll around on each other very readily. And now there is a third otherness is in Universe and it gets attracted to the first two. And it is a third sphere and it comes in I’ll just take a couple of spheres here, so you can get this feeling. I just want you to get a feel of these, how they can roll around on each other. And now there is a third sphere that gets attracted, and it comes and touches one of these, and begins to roll around on it, and it gets into the valley between the two. Now it’s suddenly equally attracted by both of them, and suddenly we have a triangle. And triangle, is, remember, basic structure, so this has extraordinary stability. No longer can they roll anywhere around here, because we find I’m sure you’ve had experience with gears. You have two gears of the same diameter, same number of teeth, and apart you have one turning clockwise and they’re meshed, and the other one is turning counter clockwise. They go along very nicely.

If we have four gears a train of gears, it’s called, a positive, a negative, a positive, a negative then it goes great, but if I have odd numbers of gears three for instance. These two can be going like that, but then the one that comes and touches in here, can’t gratify both directions, going this way and that way, and they lock. When we have odd numbers of gears in a train, they lock. So we find these three spheres can no longer just roll around. But the one thing they can do notice this one touches two others here, so it can roll in that valley like that, rolling around here. What happens is, if this one does something there is a friction here and makes the other one do it. So we find that all three of them begin to, like a rubber donut, they evolve like that. They can do that very well. So the top is evolving outwardly and the bottom is turning inwardly. So, it’s just kind of like a rubber donut, keeps going around.

Now a fourth sphere appears in Universe, and it doesn’t make any different exactly what size it is, and it lands on here and rolls around her, and gets in this valley, and it suddenly goes in the nest between the others. And once that fourth one is there, it locks it so that it can no longer evolute or involute. So suddenly we find that the four spheres are making the tetrahedron again, and suddenly the structure is stable, as the four interact to offset any other freedoms of motion here.

Just for fun, I was asked about eight years ago to go to the University of California at Los Angeles where they were having the art departments of all the University of California branches along the coast, annually choose one of them where they’ll have an art festival that they all come together at. I was asked to the art festival at Los Angeles, and they asked me after having lectured, did I want to have a “happening.” So we went into they’ve got a big field house and I brought a great many spheres, the Styrofoam spheres, and skewers toothpicks and rope string, and I started by having this in Universe., It doesn’t see any otherness. It doesn’t even know what it’s doing, it’s just running around I was running around the floor with this just like one of the balls, and the other one appears and they get together and add three of them and then four of them locked together. There was a little child of a couple about two years old. And this child saw me do this and ran out from the parents, out on the floor, and I was running around with all these balls, and the little child started picking them up and doing exactly the same thing. It was really very interesting how this little two year old had found just what I was doing. It was just the way it’s own curiosity made it behave.

And, after the show was over, there was NBC had a team of cameramen and directors, and they said “We’ve been waiting until it was over so we want to make a moving picture of you.” And I said, “Did you take that picture of the episode of that little child?” And they said “Of course not,” and I said, “”Well, you can’t make any picture of me ” just to give you a little idea of my feeling about recordings. Because I do care about the live, and the way things really do happen. I care a great deal about the way things happen in this room right now.

Now, I’m going to point out that I was dealing here with spheres, and when I did a tetrahedron here before I had some points, and the four points had interattractiveness and they did give me systems. They defined an insideness and an outsideness . But we really came at things in a little different way here.

And then, I can also finding this really fundamental twoness, I could really have had this sphere and this sphere could interconnect, and this sphere and this sphere could interconnect. And these spheres are just a little too large for my hands., that’s the trouble. I’m going to have to, no, take two spheres and two spheres, they’re touching each other, they are pairs dumbbells. And what I want to do is to bring them together, not to make a square, but we have PRECESSION. The inter-pull makes this precess and actually makes it rotate 90 degrees, and suddenly then these two nest on these two. And if you look at a tetrahedron, it’s made of two pairs of spheres, and there is a positive and a negative pair. They really do this to each other and they do this precessionally.

Part 9

We’ll learn a little later on that this is very important this precessional association, the way things comes together rotatively like that. Now, I’m going to also then come back to something I did talk a little about yesterday. The six edges of the tetrahedron as acting the six represented one unit of quantum these six vectors. And, I made an experiment with my own personal body in relation to degrees of freedom. Being brought up in a good community, I went to a good school, and I learned considerable about physics and so forth chemistry. I was very intrigued by the concept of the interattractiveness of the masses and so forth. And I said (also as I got into Navigation in the Navy), if I’m looking at something like the Pleiades or Andromeda, it’s approximately just one little point, but you learn that that’s a whole constellation. You’re looking at incredible numbers of stars. But they are so far away that they appear to be one star. And thinking, then, about mass interattraction and so forth, I said, if they are pulling me, I don’t think each of those stars separately a million billion stars in there, are pulling on me separately. They really would be, they are so far away that parallax sets in and they really in effect are only one pull. We do have then in astronomy this phenomena of parallax, and it is continually operative, where things do pair together. So I said, “I wonder how many lines are pulling on me in the Universe.” It’s always pulling on our earth a little more so, but “I wonder how many are pulling on me, or how many are pulling on our earth?” Are each one of those stars there pulling separately, or do they group up possibly into pulls? And due to the fact that they are non-simultaneous, possibly the interpullings do integrate in some extraordinary kind of timing way of coming from different periods of time. So I said, let me think about I’m going to look at those stars and I look out and I see a hole in those stars, and some place where it looked like I might accelerate, I might go out and get away from all the stars, and I go further and further away from all the stars, and I find that it gets to where it all looks just like one. But there still would be mass interattraction, so I would be very much as if, like a ball on a string. We call it a tether ball. We have a mast and a string and a tennis ball on there, and you can hit it. And that ball can go all kinds of ways. But the one thing it can’t do is get away from the Universe. So there is just one restraint on it. But you can find it can make all kinds of shapes spheres, all kind of it can describe anything there.

Now, I’m going to say, I don’t think, experience suggests to me that we really will find a hole thru those stars till I finally get thru a billion times 100 billion stars that surround us, that we now know of already. If I were to take the numbers of atoms in this room surrounding me here, and in those pretty thick walls, I’d get into that kind of number. So that I probably wouldn’t find any hole out in the stars. It’s much more likely that I might be able to take all the stars in the heavens and divide it by looking there is the milky way and take two halves of all the stars, and sort of divide them into two teams so they pulled on me, kind of evenly.

So, I took my ball that had a string on it, and I put another string on it, and I fastened I got you to take a hold of one end and I take the other end. So the ball is in the middle. It’s like a ball that’s in the middle of a violin string. It can still move, but it can only move in a plane. It can make figures of 8 and clover leaves, etc., but only in a plane.

So, I said, I don’t think I really can divide the stars up, even in that way. More probably I’ll have to get more teams. I’m going to take three pulls on me. So I took a third string on this ball in the middle between you and I. I took a third string and pulled it, and you pulled it over there. And I now see that it can still move, but it is like a ball in the middle of a drum head. It can oscillate only in a line. That interested me. One restraint allowed me to have sphericity. Two restraints made me a plane. And three restrainings produces a line. So then I said, I’m going to pull the drum head one way. I put a fourth line on the ball and pulled it vertically, and it suddenly seems to be immobilized, as if I muted the drum by pulling the skin just one direction. But I made a model where I made a steel tetrahedron with four corners, and had four thin, steel rods come into a central ball at the center of gravity of the tetrahedron. And the steel ball, and I pulled those rods tight. They were very thin so the slenderness ratio, and I found that the ball, if I put a plumber’s Stillson wrench on that ball I could rotate it in place. I could not move it away from any of the four corners, but locally it could rotate. In fact put it on several ways and it kept rotating, so it was locally rotatable. Why? Because you found that any two of these rods were coming into the surface of the sphere. They were not coming to the center of the sphere you couldn’t get to the center of the sphere. You’re bound, as long as there is any sphere there at all. There’s one coming in here, and one in here like that, so it makes a trapezoid there was a distance between where they hit the sphere. And a trapezoid is unstable. It’s a four-side figure. So I found that in order to stop it from doing any rotating like that locally, I had to take each of the four rods that came in and turn each one into three rods from four corners. And each one had to come in, the three came in tangentially, making in effect four tetrahedra coming in tangentially, and then, for the first time, it could not move. And so, sum totally, I found that 12 rods were necessary to completely, to eliminate all degrees of freedom.

I wanted to confirm that in another way so I then began to think about a bicycle, and a bicycle wheel. Bicycle wheels are fascinating because bicycle wheels manifest man getting into tensegrity in his structures. The old fashioned solid wooden wheel, just a number of plates boarded together like that for one thing. Then we got into what you called the artillery wheel, and they found you could put holes in the solid wheel instead of having just holes, you could deliberately have columns, a series of columns running between the outer rim and the hub. And the columns had to be, then, what you call a stout column, or a short column, so you would not get into the critical slenderness ratio or they would bend.

So each one of them is a pole, like pole vaulting, as you go over the bar, they give you another bar, and they keep going along on these columns. Then we came to the wire wheel, and the wire wheel is very different because the load is the wagon, and the wagon, then, goes out to it has its spindles here and the hubs. And you want to support them at the hub the wheel is there to do that. So in a wire wheel, you hang the load by a thin wire, which otherwise would bend with any compression on it. But you hang the load from the top of the wheel down to the hub. So, if there was just one spoke as the wheel went along, then suddenly the whole thing would crash.

We find then, if you want to have your bicycle wheel worthwhile light, you have an awfully lot of weight to pump as you pump your own bicycle, so you’d like to have the wheel weigh as little as possible. So you’d like to have the rim good and thin. And the rim is a mast, it is over a bent mast going round and coming back to itself, so that what I want to do is shorten up the unsupported length of the rim. So I’m going to have a hub and one tension down from the top to the hub, and then go 120 degrees on the wheel and have another spoke over here, and another here, so I’ve got three spokes now. They are just wire spokes to the hub. Well, I find they act like that drum head. They’ll oscillate, the whole thing will oscillate in the wheel, and be completely unstable and unsteerable. So that won’t do. I want to see what I can do if I had two skins on the drum head, and I put a spacer in between the two, then you muted it by putting a positive and a negative. So I could have six spokes now, and three come from one side of the rim into the hub, and three from the other side. So there are three emanating from the end of the hub. Instead of having them like this, have them turned like that. They then have shorter sections of unsupported rim to stabilize it.

But I found that didn’t work, because as the six came into the hub, again they came in where, again, I’ve shown you this circle before. They came in forming a trapezoid. So there is a little section here where the hub could torque locally. I found that I had to take each of the six came in there, and break each one into two and have each one come in the pairs tangentially, one taking care of the rotation this way, and one taking care of the rotation that way.

Now it is perfectly possible to put of those six, that I could only take two of them and cross them to take care of this torque you say, but then you find if you do, that you unbalance the wheel has to have symmetry of structuring all the way thru, and if you have an oddity like just one pair across the top then you’ll find that she’s going to wobble like that. She’ll have what you call, dynamic instability. So that it takes a minimum of twelve spokes for a wire wheel. It took a minimum of twelve restraints to immobilize me in Universe. So I find then, these seem to be the six positive and the six negative of the same of our old friend the tetrahedron. The tetrahedron, then, as we saw yesterday, can turn itself inside out, and so then this is the positive and negative side of the same tetrahedron.

I gave you yesterday the dimpling in, that the tetrahedron can turn itself inside out if it has rubber legs. I just move one vertex, just one vertex had to move and if the legs are rubbery it will do that. Then, we looked at the octahedron, and found that the octahedron simply one half of it nested back into the other half. And in the icosahedron there is a local dimpling.

As we get to the even larger numbers of a (could I have that sphere please) as we get to higher and higher frequency of triangular subdivision, going beyond the icosahedron, which this does, then you find, this gets to be what I call local dimpling, and the higher the frequency the more local the dimpling. So you begin to understand then, the tetrahedron turns itself completely inside out, and here we’re going to have less and less effect as you get the positive and negative here of the dimpling.

Now, I want you to think in largest possible context of our Universe, and our Universe, which is continually transforming everywhere, but everywhere transforming at different rates; and I gave you the importing-exporting of energies, of the Boltzmann effect, where energy is given off by this beginning to form new, and they begin to be new local systems in Universe new stars and then they begin to gradually get to the point where instead of being, I use the word “syntropic” in contradistinction to the great second law of thermodynamics, “entropic”, where they’re giving off energies, they are a place where energy is being imported, and not only imported but sorted and being put into increasing order.

Part 10

And now, thinking about things in a very big kind of pattern, and thinking about our own, what it is that you and I are experiencing, recalling that just a year ago we had the Copernicus celebration, it’s 500th year since he realized that we were also on a planet, not on a platform in the Universe with everything going around us. We come, then, to the realization of the our little planet there really is, and this is really very important for you theoretically, we now know then that this is a little planet of this sun, and many of the things I talk about are very familiar to all of you. This is a well-known data, but I want to point out to you then also, that there are also these conditioned reflexes of humanity, where we’ve had explanations from people who love us very much, and we love them very much, and we get to being told by people who love us very much, “You’re going to find this very pleasant and so forth this is going to be bad,” developing all kinds of prejudices and so forth, and fixities of reflexing.

I have tried, I’ve had the advantage of speaking to bodies of distinguished scientists on a number of occasions. And I’ve always asked the scientists if any of them can raise his hand and say I do not when most people see the sun setting, that they do not see the sun setting, but they see and feel the rising of the earth to be rotating around to obscure the sun. All of them agree that they see the sun setting. And we all agree that science has known for 500 years that that is not what is going on.

So I want to point out, that there is a complete difference between the theoretical knowledge that you have, so science and all society has a great deal of theoretical knowledge, but the sensing is the way they reflex. And they have been told and conditioned for a very, very long time that the sun is going around the earth. And they are also thinking of they know it is a sphere today, but you’ll find humanity still talking and thinking flat earth. It still uses “wide-wide world”. To each local local person is still feeling it’s flat out here. And, I know the people in China are not upside down, but the point is, I feel this way. And because it is so flat, it goes to infinity, therefore, what goes on locally is very important. And there’s room to get rid of anything you don’t like. And man has been operating that kind of way.

And, it’s also been part of the experience of dealing in infinity, that infinity is going to have a lot more resources to take the place of what you’ve already wasted, and used up. Man has been very tightly tied up to those conditioned reflexes. And as you begin to go along with me during these few days here together, I want you to always be deeply aware of those conditioned reflexes that are working against man’s taking advantage of the theoretical knowledge we have, because I’m going to expose you to more and more discoveries of principles that are operative that could make it possible to make man a great success, because I really have now taken inventory sum totally of how much you need to have environmental control. Have taken inventory of how much energy you need to really carry on. Enjoying having all of humanity enjoying all the earth continually, and looking out for all the generations to come. And we find it highly feasible. But we see that humanity is tied up in patterns that did not make it very clear whether we are really going to break thru, whether we are going to overcome the conditioned reflexes. Maybe there are a great many older people going to have to die before we really free ourselves, but that’s the evolutionary rate, and we find Nature does have her checks and balances, and she does have gestation rates. She doesn’t have any immediate anything. And each one has and the bigger ones take the longer. The most important ones take the longest, so what is the biggest way you and I are trying to be as conscious as we can about how we participate, and what are the challenges to our employing this information on behalf of the others.

Now, in this kind of a big patterning, I want to today to try to think about something I’ve mentioned two or three times. How and why human beings are here. Why we are designed the way we are. Why the biosphere and the greater ecology system is designed the way it is. And why this little tiny planet with all this great complexity on board of it is present in our Universe, and why invisible you and I are an incredible complex of beautiful technology. And that’s a point you might as well think about now, and think about all thru my talk.

That technology is, then, the integrity of inter-relationship, interoperativeness of principles. An ability to accommodate the transformations, and the ability to complement and it is the enormous complexity of interaction of generalized principles which make possible an eternally regenerative Universe. Where the principles are, then, always characterized by these degrees of freedom, with now known 92 regenerative chemical elements. And having discovered just in this century that each of those chemical elements, when incandescent, as we said yesterday, had a unique set of frequencies, electro-magnetic frequencies they give off. These are invisible colors to you and I, invisible frequencies that we don’t have the tuning capability for, but they are tunable and recognizable by photographic emulsions. So that we have been able then to identify each one of them. And we have, then these incredible behaviors of incredibly high frequencies, way beyond any sensing on your part or my part, and with every one of the events of the inter-transformings, there are always six positive and six negative degrees of freedom.. There are an enormous number of options of nature.

Because I want you to just think about that pattern. I said that with every event there are always six positive and six negative. If I were to make a drawing of that then, this is a game of chess. But it is an omni-directional game of chess-and every time you get a move, you get six moves. And it’s going to be in respect to an orderly Universe. So you have this move, and you can go like that. You can go like that, and like that, and come back where you started because you had six. Or you could, same six, you could go, like that, that, that, that, that and maybe over here. There are an extraordinary number of varieties of consequences with every move you can go six. And they are not in a plane, so they can also then be this way. As a consequence of Universe having to use six positive and six negative degrees of freedom with every move, we have differentiation of positioning. And the very fact that there is differential interpositioning identities, in our sensing is accommodated by this. It means then there are so many of the varieties and options and choices these are equally economical, because Nature is always the most economical. These are the most economical vectors, so there are six positive, six negative, equally economical options at every event. So it is anything but a “yes”-“no”, “stop”-“go.” Man tends to think linearly that he is going to get chopped that he’s going to get a red light or a green light but it’s not that way at all. It has so many degrees of freedom and the frequency at which the next move comes is so high that you can come out daisies, you can come out elephants, you can come out galaxies.

This to me is incredible, that it has so much freedom. It seems to me to be absolutely free. The tendency of man, then, talking about sort of a free will but he does have all the physical options, in effect can do anything. But some of the things will take longer than others. In effect he can do anything, but some will just take longer than others.

Now, here are we human beings in this kind of a pattern, and with the minds discovering those principles, and discovering that there are a plurality of them and that they are all interaccommodative. And they are a plurality of interaccomodative behaviors are designed, that we human beings discovered that we are given the faculty then to have access to some of the design of Universe itself. That we don’t know of any other phenomena having this capability makes me really have to pay a lot of attention to that human being here.

I want to think a little more about those human beings. What do we know about them in relation to other living species? all the other enormous number of organisms, botanical and zoological. And, one thing I can say is the following: that all the other species have in evidence very important integral equipment built into the organisms which give special advantage in special environments. So maybe this particular kind of a vine which grows superbly in this particular area of the Amazon. Like some insect can do extraordinary little things locally in special environments, with just the special equipment for it. So a very strange looking creature is carrying all that special equipment. So we find the bird, then, designed with integral wings for his real, his medium then, is the air. In gases he can fly beautifully. But when he’s not flying he cannot divest himself of his wings, so the wings then, when he tries to walk around are quite encumbering.

We find then all living species having some of this integral equipment for special environments. We found a number, however, of creatures with brains the way human beings have, and those brains are also sensing mechanisms and they are feeling. And the brains, as I said yesterday, always correlating and integrating the information of the different senses. And human beings have larger brains than any of the others, so they can put away and store information regarding more special case experiences than the others, but then the human has that mind. We don’t have any knowledge of any other creature having that phenomena. We don’t find any evidence that any of the other creatures are deliberately employing principles. They are flying, and in the low pressure, their wing is beautifully designed for them to do it, but they have not designed it that way.

Now, what I find then is that the humans are then given the capability to get enormous amounts of information, and this ability to discover principles, and to be really, then, very much at the center of things, where the individual, then, discovers the principle of pressure differential in gases, the Bernoulli principle, developed the wing foil, where the pressure differential the negative lift. And human beings, then, can invent wings, and they produce those wings using other principles, and alloys and so forth. They are able then to put on wings and fly many times faster than the birds, and then when they’re not using the wings, to take them off and not be encumbered, and let somebody else use the wings. And wings can go from generation to generation. The same organism can be used by others. In other words, they begin to develop their own organism. We are given the capability to employ principles and actually participate in some way in the evolutionary events of Universe. Because we do produce these artifacts they do alter the environmental behaviors. But we are given that capability.

Part 11

Now, again, I said that all Universe is technology. And, the technology is going on all the time, and you don’t know what makes the fingernail grow, but it’s a beautiful technology. The fact that you aren’t familiar with that technology doesn’t make in non-technology. And, I find human beings using the word technology today as if it were something very new, and something that has just been introduced by man. And they find it bad, simply because the technologies employed by man so far have in the ignorance of man, thinking it has to be you or me, been used selfishly trying to get special advantage for “my side.” And particularly in developing weapons that are just for killing. They have been used very, very negatively. This does not mean technology is bad. This hand, then, can do some very superb work very advantageous to you and I to all the people in here, or it can do the terrible thing of killing and breaking.

So, it’s the way that human beings abuse the technology that has brought about, that has been inadequate and fearful powerfully conditioned reflex, misinformation, have made human beings misuse the technology. But I want to be sure we don’t get caught in any trap where we say that I’m against technology or something like that, and I’m going to go back to pre-technology. You never will. As long as there is going to be a turnip growing there, there is incredible technology.

And so, it is simply going to be a matter of how do we employ it. Are we really thoughtful? Are we really considerate about all the other reciprocities that have to go on ecologically? Those are the things. Are we considerate of when we talk about comprehensive anticipatory design science do we pay attention to what the Universe is trying to do? Are we conserving the Universe? Are we using the income energies? Are we using the permitted, or are we trespassing and using up some of the equipment? It’s a very different matter to use the energy and to use the lever, rather than burning the lever up in the fire.

Now, next thing. Thinking about humans having these capabilities of using principles, and being really the center of things, this also brings me to the very interesting realization that human beings really are now being at the center of things, this also brings me to a very interesting realization, that human beings are now being at the center is very different from being on someplace, positioned on a line or on a pipe. You cannot really improve on the center. I hear people talking about possible genetics possible bad experiments being made by scientists in trying to alter the human being. All I know is there is no way you can really improve on the center. You can if it’s linear you can make the man high jump a little higher, but you cannot get closer to the center than the center. And really, our function is to be at the center of the information to discover the principles, and to employ those principles. And that is absolutely the way we function We are at the center.

Our whole thinking is that way. It’s omnidirectional observation. If Universe found it expedient to have human beings really specialists, she would have had them born with a microscope on one eye and a telescope on the other, and they could have gotten on great. But, we were not meant to be that way. We were meant to be, then, omni-medium, omnidirectional, omni-environment operative, and we were given principles then to permeate and occupy larger and larger environments to finally get off board of our tiny little planet, and get over to the next operating that moon going around the earth, like this, going around the sun together, so we need to get a ferry across between these fast moving objects. And, we’ve been able to do that and we’re going to go much further. We’ve been probing information much further. Quite clearly, human beings are some kind of a local Universe operator with a mother ship to operate from. And putting together all I can about all the total information I’ve received, I’ve come to the working conclusion, as Einstein did, that energies given off here reassociate there and we have to pay attention to the fact that the physicists have no experimental evidence of energy either being created or lost. It apparently is eternally regenerative does go through negative discontinuity phases and reappearing there. And we’re dealing not in things anyway. We discover we’re dealing, really, in pure principle. While the physicists admits there is no particle, he is dealing in events, and events are in pure principle. And we get to where the information in the physics really gives us then positive and negative weights. And when you take the total of all the weights of physics positive and negative, that are clearly identifiable today, they all add up to “0” that we are really dealing in absolutely pure principle. And there is something that goes on in the design of this Universe these principles are operative, that do give seemingly positional aberrations by which there does seem to be a difference of view of you and I, that each of us might be some kind of one-way in which the Universe may have come out. Because the Universe had all of those options, and each one of us may be a very fast running hand of one way of playing the game of Universe. And each thing will look just a little bit different to each one of us.

Then, when I come to thinking about the thinking, and about all of the information we do have, I have to come to something I gave you yesterday that there are lags in rates of recall. Not only are there lags in rates of recall, but there are lags in rates of apprehending you know there’s a double take. I did see something. Your senses told you something first, but then you turn and look at the thing a little more, and then you look at it a third time. Sure enough, there is somebody I know. But, there is lag in here.

The fact that there is lag means we were never really right on with the extraordinary velocity with which things are operating. That is, we are always a little out of phase with whatever the really great principles are themselves, because we are inherently aberrated. And so that we find, what begins to become very fascinating as we get into Synergetics and all the geometries that we have, that you will be inspecting with me here. And our book is just about to come out with the Synergetics.

It is to discover that really nature has aberrational limits, and she pulsates from the vector equilibrium that’s absolute “0,” where the aberration will never let us stay in the center. We cannot get to the pure center. But Nature pulsates through the positive and negative from it into various degrees, and all these different kinds of intertransformabilities, with very, very high frequencies of doing it. So that what we have as an awareness one way of being sort of aware of Universe really checking up on its own principles, and checking up on it’s own integrity of holding together while it can aberrate. It’s really quite a fascinating piece of thinking here as we come to that kind of a challenge.

Now, in big patterns, we have the Boltzmann concept of the energies exporting and importing, fortified by the Einsteinian feeling those energies out, actually collected and bring about the scenario Universe of the new formulations, and the dying off of the old the comings apart and the comings together. In such a pattern, which the scientists, and particularly astronomers, astrophysicists have been aware for a very long time they have realized, of course, that all the stars are visible to you and I optically by virtue of being entropic all the energies they give off. So they give us high notice of their presence by virtue of giving off.

This would mean, then, that where energies are being imported and collected, give off nothing. And there would be nothing for you and I to see. So we are only aware of the giving off part, but they assume there must be collecting parts in order to have the eternal regeneration. So, the only possibility would be we bounce something off something, but everything is in such motions that by the time the information comes back you bounce something off something, many generations have gone by, and somebody forgot they ever sent something out there. But suddenly it became very interesting to realize, that when you don’t think about earth as standing still in the middle of the Universe. When you really get your senses going along with your knowledge, that we are then a little collecting we’re an importing center of Universe, where the sun’s radiation and this other star’s radiation, is being impounded by the photosynthesis. Just think of that extraordinary matter. The energy is being given off by the sun as we have been able to see in the most recent photographs we have from space with the least aberration of optical aberration. These extraordinary flames that are going out incredible distances, but with enormous irregularity. And you and I on our planet, just far enough away so life doesn’t get dehydrated and burned up by this enormous radiation, and the radiation coming through the atmosphere. We would be burned up if we get outside of it just nakedly, so they have to have all the space suits when they do go out there. But the sun radiation is then refracted and bent by the Van Allen belt and by the ionosphere, and bent enormously by the atmosphere bent into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, so that then we get the non-lethal concentrations of the energy being separated out and getting bent more by the waters of the earth. And so many bendings that finally the sun radiation instead of being bounced off reflectively of a polished ball, getting bent, bent, bent and impounded on our planet, with that energy being caught as heat, and heating up the waters of the ocean three-quarters of the earth being covered by water, and three-quarters of the earth being covered by water, and water taking on heat and losing it, yet letting it off more slowly than any other substance. So it is very stabilizing energy impounder of the water, stabilizing heat operating around our earth to such an extraordinary extent that the annual variations, as you all know, do not really add up to 1 degree Fahrenheit over very enormous periods of time. If it gets just a little variation, it works towards an ice age, or a little away from the ice age.

So we find, then, that within this extraordinary thermal balance, all that beautiful sun radiation would say those clouds there would get in the way, so there is great irregularity of the receipts, and yet they get bent and get into this beautiful, orderly heat. Absolutely so superbly balanced, that you and I consisting very much of the same ingredients as the sea water, that you and I, if in good health, no matter what our age, no matter what clothes we’re wearing, no matter where we are geographically, if we are in good health, have body heat of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. We are in an incredible energy balancer. And, not only did Nature make the tree hydraulically, but she made you and I hydraulically. And so, the beautiful firmness of our flesh, is then that hydraulic pressure, which is non-compressible, and it distributes its loads so you and I can run into all of these things and not get hurt. And we are given, then, body heat of 98.6 degrees so we won’t freeze, so the load distributing can go on. And we’re given, just think of the delicate balance we are in here compared to the temperatures that are operative once you get out of that biosphere INCREDIBLE piece of design.

Now, finding us then, impounding the sun radiation and the vegetation impounding it for the human beings, because the human beings can’t do it the mammals can’t. And what they do is to take those random receipts because there are the clouds going by and so forth, different kind of intensities of sun today all those random receipts converging into beautiful, orderly molecular structures incredible. This is exactly the opposite of entropy. Entropy is the increase of random elements, and here we are, syntropy syntropic I use the word “syn” here as I do synergy and energy. There are syntropy and entropy. There is entropy coming apart in disorderly ways, synropy coming together in increasingly orderly ways. We apparently have a syntropic center in Universe, where then the vegetation having impounded, made it move through hydrocarbon molecules and then other biologicals could take it on and they continually multiply as beautiful hydrocarbon molecules, and they get buried more and more deeply in the earth. You and I call it fossil fuels, but Nature is burying energy in an extraordinarily orderly manner in such a way that, as we find you can take out that petroleum and turn it into petrochemicals, you make incredible, absolute orderly controllability. It can come out any way in design. All this being impounded here, so we are at a syntropic center of Universe. Where sometime the energies would be impounded against possibly becoming a star and that would probably take, by the general records indicative, certainly another 10 billion years. from now; and by that time whatever you and I are as local information handlers, we’ll probably be very remote, so it’s perfectly alright for it to become a star. In the general scheme of things, at the rate at which we are learning to get around, this seems perfectly reasonable.

Part 12

Now, I want you then to think about, we’re on board of a syntropic center where energy is being collected, and where the energy is being randomness is being converted into orderliness by the biosphere, by everything around us. It keeps trying to turn it into order, and the biological growth is to make more order, to make more orderly babies the most extraordinary organisms. The incredibility of the beauty of all those designs, where there are the atoms multiplying the atoms in pure principle and all the behaviors absolutely reliable here.

Now, amongst then, all the biologicals, I said then, the mammals cannot impound that sun radiation, and they can multiply the hydrocarbons, they get to be pretty big and pretty fat a big tree. Then the hydrocarbons don’t get lost, even though the particular the operation of that particular organism, they call it it’s life maybe ends, but the hydrocarbons don’t get lost the syntropic process is really going on and going on in an extraordinary way, making better and better top soil here. And we find that the when we get to the topsoil of our earth, the chemical elements that are present in the top soil are not present deep within the earth, but we find that the 92 regenerative elements, 91 of them have been found on our earth, but most of them are near the surface of the earth. The great large abundance of the high variety of relative small ones are near the surface, apparently as star receipts from the rest of the Universe. When we go thru the tail of a comment, we get as much as 100,000 tons of star dust a day being deposited on the surface of our earth, so here we are a syntropic center receiving some extraordinary inventory of equipment from the rest of the Universe, and gradually discovering about principles that are operative, and amongst then all the biological we cannot multiply the hydrocarbon molecules as fast as trees, or elephants, but what we can do, we have this extraordinary mind. And as I said to you last night as we finished, what is common to all human beings throughout all history? PROBLEM, PROBLEM, PROBLEM SOLVING. WE ARE HERE FOR PROBLEM SOLVING. And we are able to solve it in principle, and none of the others can solve it in principle. And we have this access to this extraordinary design capability of Universe itself, gives us as far as we know by far the most powerful syntropic function in Universe. Boy, and that is quite a responsibility. And that we, in our ignorance and in our fear, looking out for two sides, can get into the negative and trying to kill, this seems very paradoxical. But I would think, quite clearly, we’re getting to a point where its so paradoxical it is about to cease.

In other words, I spoke to you about us all coming out of some common womb of permitted ignorance with enough cushion of resources by which by trial and error to make mistake after mistake, to learn what we’re learning. And this is, I find, a very extraordinary moment suddenly there is all around the world LITERACY. It just wasn’t there when I was young. When Russia had its revolution, just yesterday, I was 22 years of age when the Russian revolution occurred, and they were more than 90% illiterate, and they couldn’t get anywhere without licking that illiteracy first thing. All around the world that illiteracy is being licked. And nobody knew we were going to have this radio, and this beautiful diction, and you’d have gradually a leveling out of words how you do say the words. So we get that common speech that is proliferating everywhere. We have the extraordinary intercommunicability, and the rate at which we are all processing information and learning about these principles is just incredible.

When I was young, kids barely got on into high school. Some 1% could get on into high school. Hadn’t time, had to go off to jobs. See, in 1929, by then I’m 34 years of age, we’d be getting where about 1% was getting on into high school and going on and graduating from high school. There was a very small percentage getting to college. This is all getting changed. We’re getting to where everybody is entitled to go in and to get all through the school, and getting into college, and getting a Ph.D. This is absolutely a new moment of man on our planet. They used to say “You’re going to have to go to work just as soon as you can stand up darling.” And then when I was young they were still, in many places in the world, kids were going to work in the mines at 6 and going to work in the mills at 6 years of age. This is all changing.

Now, just in my lifetime we have doubled life expectancy. All the things that have been said that were absolutely fatal when I was young polio absolutely fatal. There was no way you could cure it. Meningitis. No way to cure it. Absolutely incurable. All of these things had been incurable, and suddenly we find we can cure it. So I find an absolutely different set of conditions obtaining, and instead of, then, of a pharaoh being informed by a grand vision and everybody else just follows what the whip does and tells them to do, we suddenly then we got to nobles in on the knowledge, and then we get to where the middle class is in on the knowledge and now everybody is in on it. This is really a very extraordinary moment, and that is really what our being here together is about, and that I really feel inspired to do what I’m doing. That our host is inspired to say use this equipment to make some recording. We are supposed to be doing what we’re doing here. I feel the extraordinary reality of our being here together. So, thinking about then our function in Universe with this beautiful mind, I wanted to find a good working example of an analogy on a scale that you and I can comprehend, because when I talk about Eternally Regenerative Universe, in which you and I just in a very small amount of time have been able to take it just I remember when Harlow Shapley first discovered a galaxy that there were galaxies other than our own. And this was, I was fully grown. And suddenly we have now, known, over a billion galaxies, actually photograph them. Incredible what’s going on here.

Now, and you and I just can’t think in, one of the reasons I showed you last night the picture of this expanding flame phenomena. Do you remember, expanding at a rate where just in a little over one day it’s radial expansion is the distance between the earth and the sun! And yet, it looks like it stays with absolutely no motion there, so we cannot really get the feeling, our reflexes are not allowed to participate really couldn’t, we’d burn up if we got in there.

So, here we are in this extraordinarily beautiful biosphere with operating conditions with it’s great delicacy and balance; and you and I are then hydraulically designed and so forth. I want you to think about a complex design accomplished by human beings. And I find the carelessness with which people talk about a Boeing 747 you know, “Oh, I know, an airplane, I’ve flown in one of those and they’re no good, ” or whatever. But the Boeing 747 is a very extraordinary device, and it goes thru the sky, thru the air, at a velocity equivalent to ten times the velocity of a hurricane. Now the resistance in the air increases as the second power, so the ferocity, the actual engineering ferocity of interaction of that Boeing 747 with the environment is 100-fold the ferocity of a hurricane, as you and I experience it just multiply that 100-fold, and yet so superbly designed as to stay nice and shiny and act as if nothing were going on. No trouble.

That man has been able to understand principles well enough to develop the alloys of those aluminum’s, using those mass interattractive principles, and so forth, to get to the point where he really does know what a wing root is. When a Boeing 747 goes, they say it’s a little bumpy fasten your seat belts it’s a pretty big thing there, weighing 200 tons, and they say it’s a little bumpy, 200 tons doing this. The fact is, when we’re going thru thermals, and the airs do not move horizontal to the earth, they are going up and down, up and down positives and negatives like this, you get enormous clouds there. You’re going thru a thermal rising about 100 miles per hour this way, and we are going down a 100, you’ve got 200 miles shear effect and it goes “a little bumpy.” The actual stresses involved are equivalent to taking the Queen Mary over Niagara Falls and they say “it’ll be a little bumpy here at breakfast this morning.”

That man has been able to handle those kinds of forces competently, to really master that much of information, and its use is incredible to me. Now, he’s going to bring this out of the sky, and have 150 tons hit the earth at 150 miles per hour. That usually smashes the eggs, alright. When it comes down and there’s music all playing, and everyone is putting on their coats, and paying no attention this incredible capability. Now, at that contact, something goes on here. What goes first? The pneumatic tires hit first, distributing the load. And then what happens? We’ve got hydraulic struts and there is enormous pressure on it, pushing water thru enormous systems using the friction of the system. We distribute that load. It’s the only place where man has actually done his designing as Nature has done her designing of a tree or a human being, with hydraulics, only in the landing gear of that airplane. But by virtue of that hydraulic distribution of the loads, and the pneumatic distribution of the load, we can do it, and do it in that beautiful way. Now, that Boeing 747 flying through the sky, getting people safely from here to there, up the front in order to be able to do it you have to have almost 1000 instruments. And those instruments are showing you every piece of critical information on that ship, exactly where all the stresses are, where the heats are, where the pressures are anything that is going to be known to be, even mildly critical, where there could be any variability, that information comes up on the dials. And along side of them are usually the secondary dials where you can just move something and balance the needle in that one, and automation takes over. There is beautiful metering going on, done again by man learning about the invisible kinds of behaviors of atoms that will give us all kind of electronic behaviors, so we get this under control. But, every once in a while, there is a lack of information coming in on those dials, and the Captain, Chief-Pilot, got all these assistants here, engineers and pilots, say “Captain, the information is not coming in something has really gone wrong here so he says “go off of automation everywhere, I’ve got to take over manually,” and he takes over, and only by virtue, as a human being, having access to principles of Universe, can he save that ship and very often he does. I would then say, if I were designing and eternally regenerative Universe, in contradistinction to a little Boeing on a little planet earth, an eternally regenerative Universe with absolute Integrity, where incredible technology is operative, I think you’d need local instrumentation, getting local sensing of what are the critical information. And you would certainly need, locally, a monitor; like that pilot up there who has access to the great rules themselves, in order to be able to solve critical problems. I THINK THAT’S JUST WHAT WE’RE HERE FOR. We’re here, and we are just at the point where we can really talk about it this way. It seems to keep merging that’s why we’re here. We’re meant to use every bit of this faculty we have for apprehending and comprehending and employing principles. That’s what we’re here for.

Now, I want to jump from that to thinking about something we spoke about earlier humanity, then, committed to the concept of nowhere nearly enough to go around. This is non-thinking. Bureaucracies great governments are great bureaucracies. And great corporations are great bureaucracies. And there is a struggle in there of what we call in the company politics, in the bureaucracy politics, “whose going to get the job?” Whose family is going to eat? Whose family is going to be safe? And, you know, these are the rules, and you know how the boss thinks about that, and you don’t do your thinking, you just say, how do I play it safe.

An enormous amount of humanity are in bureaucracy and not thinking. So this thinking capability we have is not being generally employed, except by little children. And little children spontaneously start thinking and ask the most beautiful questions. And then they get told, “Darling, never mind, you’d better not do that, it’s going to get the family in trouble, etc., etc, etc. And they get negative until, each child is a little less put upon in this manner, because the information that is coming in is so absolutely contradictive to the traditional way of looking at things, that the older world just can’t explain with conviction anymore, “You are wrong.” And so the child is beginning to think freely.

That really is typical of your generation. You are really doing your own. You are not endowed with something the generation before you didn’t have, but the generation before I was brought up my mother my father died when I was very young my mother would say, “Darling, this man is taking a lot of trouble to talk to you. He was a great friend of your father,” and I’d say I didn’t like what he was saying and mother would say “Never mind what you think, pay attention to this man, he does know what he’s saying, and he’s taking a lot of trouble…” And I was continually being told, “Never mind what you think, pay attention.” And I was being sent to the school where they were going to really show me, and so I continually found what I was thinking a little “out” from what I was being taught, so I assumed that I was just a freak, and I’d have to get on with myself as a freak. I don’t know how many of you have really had to think that way about yourself, but I thought, “I’ve got to live with a freak.”

Part 13

Now, you’re just not being told any more “never mind what you think.” And you have the thinking capability it always was there, and it’s just not being discouraged so much. This is, my biggest hope that we’re going to make it here is that this thinking is really being manifest and really being employed by the young world, and will it get going fast enough to really overcome the inertia’s of the bureaucracies, and the fears operative in those bureaucracies. It is very much a touch and go question.

Even though I now know that we have the option to make man a success I really know how, I know all the things we have to do design-wise, to get there. That we’ll do it, I haven’t the slightest idea. But I’m deeply moved as I begin to see one more manifest a little more out for us in the newer freedoms of that young world. Each child being born is being born in the presence of less misinformation. Each child is being born in the presence of a lot more reliable information, and they are paying attention. So that they are thinking with very good input of data…the operating conditions are very, very much improved all the time, and each child is a little better off.

I can go at any point the way I’m talking to you, of big patterns, I could really digress and get in great detail as you’ll find me on structures for instance, just getting down to the way the tree is designed or whatever it may be. I’m really quite deliberately avoiding going in any depth in these first days. I’m trying to as well as I can, keep at the bigger concepts. And I hope you begin to share with me the concept of the function of human beings. Whether I’m really right or wrong, I don’t have the slightest idea. Of course I don’t know, but it does not seem to be I don’t find any argument against it. And I find there to be a very great deal of argument for it. So for the moment I feel I can accept it as a hypothesis, that it is reasonable, that we are here then as problem solvers, and that we’re given, particularly metaphysical problems to solve in principle. Therefore, we’re going to have to get more and more courage to really go along with principles, and have less and less fear of upsetting the tradition and the game, and be less and less afraid of those who are afraid.

Now, I’m going to bring in one more, a principle that I talked to you about, and this goes back to 1927, in my life, when I was 32 years of age, and I became, I’d had by good fortune, really, an acceleration in finding out a great deal about what doesn’t work. And I had really been so enthusiastic about the people who loved me, and were telling me how to play the game, but I was not thinking, I was playing the game. And I learned to play the game very well, but then it came, really to a head-on crash, so that in 1927 we had our second child born, our first child having died five years earlier at the age of four. And the loss of that first child was just an incredibly sad matter. So suddenly a new child entrusted to us, and we were penniless, and I really felt very strongly many of the things you’ve heard me talking about here. I hadn’t anywhere near the time to make the nice models that we have; but my feelings were pretty strong in pure principle about these existing. And I felt that, quite clearly, all my contemporaries, had on highest priority in their lives, was that they had to earn a living. They hoped they might earn it in a way that would be pleasant to them, but pleasant or not, you had to earn a living. And that was very hard your generation is not overwhelmed that way, but we were really overwhelmed by it to such an extent, that I didn’t hear of anybody even think of contradicting it. Seemed to be so obvious, they just took it that way. And it began to occur to me that this is really nonsense, what we all ought to be doing is to say “What does my experience teach me, needs to be attended to; and if not attended to , humanity will be in great trouble, and if attended to successfully will bring great advantage to humanity? And what would I need to know more than I already know, other than having another experience to realize that it’s so, what more do I need to know in order to be doing something about it? And if I am going to do something about it, what is the nature of what I am going to do about it? Am I just going to try to tell people it’s there? To reform people? And I said, number 1, here, here I am, the fact is I am absolutely penniless, I have no credit, and I feel and see these things how do you carry on? And I said, it could be that the little individual the human being really has a very great advantage over great corporations, and over great states. What can the individual do that corporations can’t do? Corporations are legal entities. They can’t do what a human being can do. Number 1, they can’t think. Only human beings can think. And I said, only a human being then can operate on his own he doesn’t have to have anybody say yes or no. If he really thinks and sees that’s so, he can act like that. And luckily, he can, and time and again he can save this ship, but Boy! he has to go fast! And he has to operate with very enormous confidence in principle.

Now, so I said, alright, I see then that earning a living is in the way, and one of the principles that I was deeply moved by, having been in the regular navy, been in the early flying and so forth, really by the employment of principles. I really had enormous confidence with what you can do with principles the principle of leverage, or you can absolutely count on mass interattraction or whatever it might be.

So, I mentioned to you earlier, the fact then that the human life on board our planet I’ve mentioned to you earlier today the concept about man, possibly having a very important, really a very central function in Universe, as local monitor of problem solving. And in those terms assuming that human beings then are necessary, needed, not here just to be pleased or displeased, not doing things just from the viewpoint of ignorance of little man; but something to do with the great wisdom of the extraordinary integrity of Universe. Assuming then that that pattern of human beings being necessary and useful to the Universe, and the ability to have them on board requiring then that they do take on energy, and take it on in an associative and extraordinary way, we call it digestion, very course, crude words for what really goes on when we put energies inside and what goes on rooting to glands. We don’t know much about them. But the point is that in order to have that carry on, to re-energize us and so forth, we do have to have all this great ecological phenomena, because we need radiation, we need energy to start off with, and mammals cannot take it on thru their skin. I’ve talked about that with you before; vegetation having to impound the sun radiation, and vegetation having to be rooted, and I gave you all those reasons. And so, then, with the vegetation all rooted and incidentally the vegetation rooted there, and the chemical process of the photosynthesis giving off various gases, making other gases, but giving off gases and the gases given off by the vegetation would soon occupy the whole of the atmosphere, and the vegetation wouldn’t be able to carry on any more, because it needs another kind of input gas. Therefore, all the mammals are designed to take in the gases given off by vegetation, and convert it. We use what we want, and then what we give off is what the vegetation needs. So this is incredible reciprocity designed that human beings pay no attention to as they begin to open up real estate developments and knock down trees. Nobody is talking about the respiratory gas exchange, it’s not in calculating at all in town planning or engineering no body!

All right, we find then that vegetation rooted, and vegetation being rooted cannot reach other vegetation to procreate; and because it then can’t reach it, then we have all the insects, butterflies, extraordinary creatures, worms, crawlers, flyers, swimmers going back and forth between the vegetation which do all of the energy impounding, and going after something in that vegetation, and inadvertently cross-pollinating. So in order to have the whole thing regenerative we had to have the whole thing, all those creatures given chromosomic drives so the honey bee was designed to go after his honey. He just goes around from one flower after another, and inadvertently knocks off pollen. Again precessionally at 90 degrees. He goes this way, and the result is this way. Whether he gets honey or not is absolutely inconsequential nature gives him that so he’ll do this little trick, so the honey business is not the big thing is to regenerate the whole system.

I find, then, human beings being given hunger, and thirst, and all inadvertently to go after their honey. And they inadvertently, they didn’t mean to but the mere side effects again at 90 degrees they make babies over here. So then they’ve got a responsibility to the baby, and an urge to look out for that young. So they get the side effects here bothering them lot, and they’ve got to get at more of that honey, and so they learn then “I can grow peas, and he can make shoes, and he makes more shoes than he can wear, and I can grow more peas than I can eat we want to exchange. Get looking out for these side effects kids here, make an enormous amount of inter-changes, so, finally we sort of invent a unitary honey called money. So we go moneybeeing everybody’s always money-beeing, getting out there and earning a living. And, inadvertently, they are doing some logical things. And because we’re so preoccupied with fear, looking out for our young. And really, I find, primarily the fear of human beings is not for themselves. Human beings are really very brave. It really is for the ones they love, and who are really depending upon them. Then they get really very fearful. So we have then this fear in those human beings who are doing this, and so they produce guns, and that isn’t a very good idea. And in producing the guns, they really learn how to develop production capability, so they can produce non-gun. They can produce life support. And they begin to do some, they begin to take care of a lot more people, all the great changes and numbers of people and the advance, and the breakdown in the death rate, and the enormous increase in longevity all of these things are a consequence of their doing the right things for the wrong reasons, in this negative. You had to get him going. So, I don’t find ANY fault with any of these things the human beings have done, because I really see that Nature is in the fulfillment, and that is not the eternal way of carrying on, it is partly the due process of humanity getting to where it can really function here. So then I see that what Nature is really doing then is precessional. It is 90 degrees, and as I said the other day, the effect of bodies on motion on other bodies in motion, is to make them go into orbit, and not to fall in.

So this sort of going after, and falling into flowers and so forth is at 180 degrees where the big thing is this way (ninety degrees), so what man called his “side effect,” that is the “main effect” and this is the “side effect.” I said, what I see is now that Nature is trying then to maintain a regenerative system. If then, I gave up all together, the idea of wasting my time money-honey hunting, and I really commit myself to what needs to be done, and employ the principles, I may really find that since that is what Nature really wants to have happen, I may find that I get on. But I can’t make bargains, and there’s nobody to write any contract with me. I’ve got to go on my intuition and my sense of the truth. I’ve really got to go on my mind. And, I’ve got to continually say, “is this as far as I’m supposed to go?” If I get really frustrated, well, maybe this is as far as I’m supposed to go with this particular one what is my next high priority? What ought I to attend to. Learning then to move this one and move that one. And I had to make incredible mistakes.

But, in 1927, I did deliberately undertake to carry on from there, and forget forever again to earning a living. And I had an absolutely there’s a new child. I assure you that my family, my friends, and my wife’s friends, and family, thought that I was really an incredibly stupid and treacherous character. But, and it’s not easy to get people to understand. It takes quite a lot of time to get people to understand that precession, and to understand the kind of confidence I really had in it. But I said, if I can prove that the little, I’m just the right one to prove it. I want to prove what an average, healthy human being can do with the faculties we are given if he really disembarrasses himself of this nonsense of earning a living, in view of the sudden accumulation of information that was very different in my day from what it had been in my father’s day. I said, we’re probably at a critical moment where we’re supposed to be behaving differently. So, we need to have someone who is penniless to make the experiment to see if we can get on. So that’s exactly what I did.

Now, when I find myself being introduced to many audiences, because I do really meet thousands of them, and I’ve often used to being introduced in very generous ways using names like “genius,” and I hurry to point out that everybody is born genius, and if there is anything important about me at all, it is that I am a demonstration of what an average, healthy human being can do if he is disembarrassed of the nonsense that he has to earn a living, and really commits himself to what the Universe is trying to do. And I’m now so confident, having been going thru this for almost half a century, and I assure you that getting on was difficult. But it is a big slow cycle, and there is no place where you can ever say I am being supported now for what I did there. It is completely disconnected. It is simply a matter of acting in Integrity and you find somehow or other that you get on. There are a set of complete inadvertencies that begin to happen when somebody asks you to give a talk, and you didn’t know that they even wanted you to talk, and they have very surprising funds to do it. And so that takes care of this particular and you’re never ahead. It’s anything but a capitalist kind of game of building up. But just I find I really can take care of more and more activities of mine. My income has increased and increased through all these years, to really quite a large amount that goes through our books today. But I spend every bit of it, but I must continually be spending it what trying to make judgments that this might really get humanity somewhere.

And there are enormous numbers of young people who have very important ideas, and you’ve learned enough about this is that one that really might get humanity somewhere? So that’s the kind of game I live in, and therefore, at this point in my life I’m not I don’t feel that I am being treacherous to a young world when I say, you can really forget all together about earning a living, provided you really commit yourself to the other man. If you’re doing something just to sort of make you feel good, if you’re playing “ego,” you would like to be “Mr. Important” don’t do this. You can only do it if you can really commit yourself truly syntropically to the idea, and synergetically, it has to be everybody or nobody, and really out and out.

Part 14

Well, I’ve introduced to you lots of patterns, and I’ve been trying to explore principle, and I hope you I think I’ve had enough experience in what I’m talking about to say I can now eliminate this as being a coincidence about this, but I’ll tell you in learning to be able to say that, I had to make many, many mistakes. There are any number of times when I did get cold feet. Or somebody else getting cold feet on my behalf, saying “come over and take this job,” and I tried, and things always went wrong when you went off there. You had to really commit yourself absolutely to the complete deep end or it doesn’t work. So we have to work under incredible faith in the Integrity of our Universe. And when I began to have to do my own thinking, the number one question I had to ask was the following: I said, “You’ve been taught to believe this and that. Your grandmother loves you to pieces and she’s talking about something that went on in Mesopotamia 2000 years ago, and said “Darling, you’re too young to know, but there’s been a relaying of people who do love, and who do want to be truthful, and this is the way it seems to be.”, and I said, if I’m going to do my own thinking, I’ve got to give up all the beliefs that I ever had, and I don’t want to be unkindly to my conditioned reflex towards my mother and my grandmother, or people I really love to pieces; but I’m going to have to question everything and come back to my own experiences, or to the experiences of somebody who of my experience is faithful and tells me about his experience. Not about what he believes; or what he’s going to ask me to believe, but what do we experience?

So, I say, you have experienced all around you, all around the world, a fervor of human beings, and since there are all those churches and synagogues and an enormous number of human beings that really feel, apparently, that something is going on, there is something operating in Universe a little more important, and competent and reliable than that. But, if you’re going to do your own, in your own experience, do you have any reason to have to assume that there is a greater intellect and integrity operating in Universe other than that of man? I said, if I’m really going to ask myself that, I’m overwhelmed by it, because I really have learned about leverage. I really have learned about mass attraction, and I’m just overwhelmed at this beauty. It can only be discovered intellectually. It is entirely intellectual. There is quite clearly the manifest of an extraordinary Intellectual Integrity operating in Universe nothing to do with any shape or form, or anything, completely abstraction. It’s just and you and I can never quite get to the truth. We can say it a little better, so you and I KNOW then, and we can be inspired by it. So I’ve just made complete commitment then, back in 1927 to this Intellectual Integrity of Universe, and I say if I really shoot the works, I’ll know very deeply if you keep your sensitivity whether you’re really on or not on. You’re supposed to go this far, but when you stop and go, and what direction next you’re going to take up.

I think this is a very good time to stop tonight. I’ll tell you that as we go on, I’m going to get into really quite depth. For instance, I gave you exposure to map. I didn’t tell you how I designed this map or why it does not have the aberrations and the misinformation of the other methods of projection. I’ll be able to show you exactly why it has the least possible deformation. In going from the spherical to the flat there is aberration, but this has, the going again to limit case, this has the most evenly distributed error, so much so it is absolutely symmetrical. It’s just that there is no visible distortion in this map. There is distortion, but I’ve been able to keep it in magnitudes that are subvisible. I haven’t. The principles do.

So, I’m going to say good night, and I will keep searching. I didn’t know what I was going to say the first time, I haven’t known really what I was going to say all here I want everybody to realize the reality of this, and I sure hope the picture doesn’t take out a moment of thinking. Because I was thinking very hard in there, and you were thinking very hard. That is very much a part of this picture. And I am going to be able then to hold this tapestry together. And now I’ve said enough so I really begin to see and think about other things that I know, and I will not be quite as slow in introducing then, but things are really going to move very rapidly as we get into details of various areas. I will then get over to this Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science, and get into what it is you and I what I’ve learned as a strategy that the little individual can employ, and how he can be most effective on behalf of his fellow human beings.