Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Fuller , R. Buckminster (1981), Critical Path, St. Martin's Griffin, Retrieved on 2013-03-16Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: philosophy technology humanism innovation Memes
16 MAR 2013
The Critical Path
H UMANITY IS MOVING EVER DEEPER into crisis—a crisis without prec¬ edent.
av upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently col¬ ored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.
Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also... 1 
notes
notesIt's all about energy, power, and innovation. Buckminster's clever perspective on human history.
16 MAR 2013
The British Empire Circled the World
With the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British Empire won "the world's power structures championship" and became historically the first empire "upon which," it was said, "the sun never sets." This is because it was the first empire in history to embrace the entire spherical planet Earth's 71-per¬ cent maritime, 29-percent landed, wealth-producing activities. All previous empires—Genghis Khan's, Alexander the Great's, the Romans', et al.— were unified European, North African, and Asian-... 1 notes
notesOrigin of why the "sun never sets" on this Empire.
16 MAR 2013
Malthus > Darwin > Marx
In 1800 Thomas Malthus, later professor of political economics of the East India Company College, was the first human in history to receive a comprehensively complete inventory of the world's vital and economic statistics. The accuracy of the pre-Trafalgar 1800 inventory was verified by a similar world inventory taken by the East India Company in 1810. In a later—post-Trafalgar—book Malthus confirmed in 1810 his 1800 finding that world-around humanity was increasing its numbers at a geome... 1 notes
notesThe train of ideas that lead to the Communism/Capitalism view of the world.
16 MAR 2013
The Energy Efficiency of Spheres
Environment-controlling buildings gain or lose their energy as "heat o cool" only through their containing surfaces. Spheres contain the most vololume with the least surface—i.e., have the least possible surface-to-volume ratio. Every time we double the diameter of a spherical structure, we in¬ crease its contained atmosphere eightfold and its enclosing surface onlyily fourfold. When doubling the diameter of our sphere, we are not changiring the size of the contained molecules of atmospher... 1 notes
notesLess surface area to insulate as they grow.
16 MAR 2013
Understanding the Language of Science
...humanity does not understand the language of science. Therefore it does not know that all that science has ever found out is that the physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely interreciprocating technology. Ninety-nine percent of humanity thinks technology is a "new" phenomenon. The world populace identifies technology with (1) weapons and (2) machines that compete with them for their jobs. Most people therefore think they are against technology, not knowing that the tech... 1 notes
notes"...the physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely interreciprocating technology"
16 MAR 2013
How the Computer Will See the World
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of pe¬ troleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.
History's political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred "idle people" as potential troublemakers. Yet nature neve... 1 notes
notesMillions of people wasting energy, driving to jobs that serve little purpose when they could be much more productive at home
16 MAR 2013
The Origin of Trigonometry
Trigonometry had to start with sea-people. It is the conclusion of British, German, and U.S.A. navies' experts that celestial—offshore—navigation be¬ gan with the South Pacific's island peoples. Much has been published on this subject. What is not as well pubHshed is the fact that the navigators on all those islands live entirely apart from the other humans in their native groups.
When the supposedly God-ordained chieftain of those islands finds his prestige and popular credence declin...
1 Is in the history of ship navigation.
16 MAR 2013
The Earth is an Energy-Collecting Body
The kinetic intercomplementarity of finite Universe requires that what disassociates here must associate there—and also there. High-pressure con¬ ditions at one point are balanced by low pressures elsewhere. The stars are all radiantly dissipating energy. The Earth, however, is a celestial center where energies from the stars are being collected and photosynthetically combined in an orderly molecular assembly as hydrocarbons, which are consumed by orderly designed species, and then self-mu...Folksonomies: thermodynamics
Folksonomies: thermodynamics
1 notes
notesStoring energy in molecules and molecular machinery. Is the transformation of the Earth into a Star in this passage metaphorical?
16 MAR 2013
The Scientist-Artist
We may soon discover that all babies are bom geniuses and only become degeniused by the erosive effects of unthinkingly maintained false assumptions of the grown-ups, with their conventional ways of "bringing up" and educating" their young. We now know that schools are the least favorable environment for leaming. The home TV is far more effective, but we are al¬ lowing the big money-making advertisers to poison the information children assimilate in their four to five hours a day of spontane... 1 notes
notesAnother complex and unique passage from B.Fuller.
16 MAR 2013
Zero is Freedom
It is also clear that beginning with Plato's pupil Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and the latter's practical philosophy, the geocentric concept of the celestial system was, after 200 B.C., becoming more and more formally adopted by the "world's" flat-minded power-structure "authorities," despite contradic¬ tory complexities. The difficultly explained geocentric cosmic systems' plan¬ etary behaviors and Sun motion was not considered by the authorities to be an objection since, as they rationalized... 1 notes
notesThe emptiness allowed for freedom of calculations that would usurp the authoritarian powers.
17 MAR 2013
Science Threatened Monarchical Power
Following the death of Christ and the preaching by his disciples, the promised prospect of salvation for all believers raised the Christian priest¬ hood to unprecedentedly powerful popularity. The combined religious and martial emperorship found its authoritarianly formulated credo (meaning "I believe") threatened by the B.C. Greek scientists' ever-unorthodox thinking and discovering. "Science," as Sir James Jeans said two millennia later, "is the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of... 1 notes
notesThus emperors sought to destroy learning and evidence-based reasoning.
17 MAR 2013
Geometry Divides the World
This meant, then, that the Greeks, in attempting to communicate their mathematical conceptioning, defined the circle as "an area bound by a closed line of equal radius from one point," the triangle as "an area bo)ound by a closed line of three angles, three edges, and three vertices." The Greeks talked only of the area that was "bound" as having validity and identity, while outside (on the other side of the boundary) existed only treachenerous terrain leading outward to boundless infinity—a... 1 notes
notesBy describing shapes as bounded, the Greeks reflected (or influence?) our thoughts about our own boundaries.
17 MAR 2013
Life Before Science
As recorded in the stone carvings of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the history of worid society begins with humanity at large knowing nothing of physics. chemistry, or biology. Humans recognized but few safe edibles. Humans had witnessed many lethal poisonings by superficially attractive items plucked from the mysterious scenery. Infection was rampant. Average survival was in the neighborhood of twenty-two years, or about one-third of the once-in-a-rare-while-demonstrated, biblically mentioned "thre... 1 notes
notesWas so tortuous that the Egyptians had to believe in an afterlife to justify it.
17 MAR 2013
There is No "Up" and "Down"
This flat conceptioning is manifest right up to the present in such every¬ day expressions as "the wide, wide world" and "the four comers of the Earth." As mentioned before, "up" and "down" are the parallel perpendicu¬ lars impinging upon this flat-out world. Only a flat-out world could have a Heaven to which to ascend and a Hell into which to descend. Both Christ and Mohammed, their followers said, ascended into Heaven from Jerusalem.
Scientifically speaking (which is truthfully speaking...
1 There is only "in" and "out." The Sun does not go "down," but rather the Earth revolves us away from it.
17 MAR 2013
Fire is Unwinding the Sun's Energy from the Trees
Nobody is bom a specialist. Every child is born with comprehensive interests, asking the most comprehensively logical and relevant questions. Pointing to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What is fire?" I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the tree's log. The Earth revolves and the trees revolve as the radiation from the Sun's flame reaches the revolving planet Earth. By photosynthesis the green buds and leaves of the tree convert that Sun radiation into hydrocarb...Every year the trees store the sun's energy in a ring. When we burn the tree, we are unwrapping that energy.
16 MAR 2013
Buckminster Fuller's Advice to a Youth
The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done—that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or Try making experiments of anything j^
Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are inten...Find things that need doing, but aren't being done, experiment, and understand that words are tools.
17 MAR 2013
The Origin of Interest
The international trading became the most profitable of all enterprises, and great land-"owners" with clear-cut king's "deeds" to their land went often to international gold moneylenders. The great land barons underwrote the building of enterprisers' ships with their cattle or other real wealth, the regenerative products of their lands, turned over to the lender as cccollateral.
If the ship did come back, both the enterpriser and the bankers realized a great gain. The successful ship ventur... 1 notes
notesFrom when bankers would hold cattle as collateral, and the cattle had calves. The calves were the interest.
18 MAR 2013
The Privatization of Science
At this point the Wall Street lawyers and Strauss persuaded Eisenhower that the United States Bureau of Standards' scientists were in competition with private enterprise and must be curbed. Strauss assured Eisenhower that the corporations would take on all the bureau's discarded scientists. What the Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists realized was something momentous—to wit... that in the new 99.9-percent invisible reality of alloys, chemistry, electronics, and atomics, scientific and te... 1 notes
notesAfter WWII, private enterprise took over science from the government, taking it away from the common person as well.
18 MAR 2013
Cosmic Accounting
Only cosmic costing accounts for the entirely interdependent electrochemical and ecological relationships of Earth's biological evolution and cosmic intertransformative regeneration in general. Cosmic costing accounts as well for the parts played gravitationally and radiationally in the totality within which our minuscule planet Earth and its minuscule star the Sun are interfunctionally secreted. Cosmic costing makes utterly ludicrous the selfish and fearfully contrived "wealth" games being r... 1 notes
notesThere is more energy coming from just our one star than anyone will ever need, there is no scarcity of energy for our planet.
18 MAR 2013
Humans are "Tool Complexes"
Humans are tool complexes—hands for certain tasks, feet, ears, teeth. etc., for others. Using their human tool complexes, human minds, comprebending variable interrelationship principles, invent detached-from-self tools—the bucket can lift out more water from the well than can a pair of cupped human hands—that are more special-case-effective but not used as frequently as their organically integral tools. Humans invent craft tools and industrial tools. The latter are all the tools that c...Similar to a memeplex body of knowledge or a biological complex of living things.
18 MAR 2013
Buckminster Fuller's Rules for Knowing if He Was on the R...
I assumed that nature would "evaluate" my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature's principles, I would find my work being econom¬ ically sustained—and vice versa, in which latter negative case I must quick¬ ly cease doing what I had been doing and seek logically alternative courses until I found the new course that nature signified her approval of by pro¬ viding for its physical support.
Vherefore, I co... 1 notes
notesIf he was creating artifacts that would help the human race survive, nature, he found, would provide for all his needs.
18 MAR 2013
Buckminster Fuller on the Concept of God
My definition of the word believe means to accept an explanation of phys¬ ical phenomena without any experiential evidence. At the outset of my re¬ solve not only to do my own thinking but to keep that thinking concerned only with directly experienced evidence, I resolved to abandon completely all that I ever had been taught to beheve. Experience had demonstrated to me that most people had an authority-trusting sense that persuaded them to believingly accept the dogma and legends of one rel... 1 notes
notesHe believes the word fails to capture the awesomeness of the universe.
18 MAR 2013
The Geoscope
Because the real planet Earth is revolving around its north-south polar axis, so, too, is mini-Earth. They are both thus revolving without effecting any change of the observed position of Polaris—the North Star—in respect to mini-Earth's north pole. Therefore, the observer at the center of the Geoscope feels spontaneously the celestial fixity not only of Polaris but also of all the other stars as seen outwardly through the Geoscope's triangular windows. Because outwardly of Geoscope's equ... 1 notes
notesAn enormous proposed model of the Earth that would teach children their orientation on our planet. With such an understanding, the term "sunset" would be replaced with "sunclipse."
