Albert Einstein

Excerpts from R. Buckminster Fuller's book Cosmography

In his daring concept of universal evolution as constant motion, as put forth and written into (unwitting) poetry by Einstein, we have then the greatest conceptioning and greatest communication by a human being to other human beings not only in the 20th Century but possibly in any other of the centuries. Therefore I see that Einstein is certainly the great artist of the 20th Century. Einstein becomes the prototype scientist-artist of the not only the 20th Century but of the now looming 21st Century.*

I have speculated a very great deal about the significance of Einstein and his epistemology. I have written and lectured about him for many years.

Only in the context of my direct experiences with Einstein do I have a right to talk of him. Because he told me directly that he approved of the way I analyzed his teleological processing of experience into thought and the latter into systemic formulations and formulae, I have had great confidence in continuing to do so for the past forty-eight years.

In 1930 Einstein wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine, "The Cosmic Religious Sense: The Non-Anthropomorphic Concept of God." In this article, Einstein wrote that Kepler, Galileo, and other scientists who had been labeled heretics and cast out by the Roman Catholic church seemed to him to be much more imbued with a faith in the exquisite intellectual orderliness and sublime integrity of Universe than were the topmost Roman Catholic clergy. Einstein said, "What faith in the orderliness of Universe must have inspired Kepler to spend all the nights of his life alone in contemplation of the stars." Einstein reasoned that humans cannot undertake that kind of total isolation unless they are deeply inspired and have absolute faith in, and a clear sense of, the integrated significance of that orderliness. This integrity Einstein spoke of as God. It was a nonanthropomorphic god, not shaped like humans or any creature whatsoever. Einstein described the demonstration by humans of such faith in the orderliness of Universe as constituting the cosmic religious sense.

Deeply inspired by that article, I started writing my first major book in 1933. I named the book Nine Chains to the Moon because I had found that a head-to-foot chain of all human beings on planet Earth would reach back and forth between the Earth and the Moon nine times. I hoped the "Nine Chains to the Moon" concept might encourage locally preoccupied humans to dare to think more cosmically.

Nine Chains to the Moon began with what I called a "tentative cosmic inventory" of the 1933 limits of what science knew, which was very, very little, about both the macro- and micro-Universe and its intermediary operational behaviors. I carefully checked far and wide with scientists regarding inclusions in the cosmic inventory. I faithfully listed everything considered important regarding all the experientially obtained information on the macrocosmic physical-phenomena limits thus far attained. When Nine Chains the the Moon was to be reissued forty years later, I looked at that inventory again and was shocked at the paltry limits of 1933 technological attainment and the meagerness of pre-World War II scientific knowledge.

Einstein's essay "The Cosmic Religious Sense" was published as Chapter 2 of my book, with the permission of its author and publisher. For my third chapter, I considered how a man like Einstein, with that kind of philosophy, thinking as he did, happened to develop the concept of relativity and how he come to his many other preeminent conclusions, such as his revolutionary equation E = mc2.

Looking into the facts of Einstein's everyday life, we find, for instance, that he was not only a schoolteacher but also for quite a while an examiner in the Swiss patent office.

Having taken out a great many patents of my own, I am aware of the process of writing a patent claim. One starts with a general review of the most advanced state of that particular invention's art and then discloses what one has discovered as a technical means for solving a problem, which technical means has never before been conceived of, realized, or proven.

As a patent examiner in Switzerland, a country that had developed the world's best timekeeping devices and led the world in the production of clocks, watches, and chronometer, Einstein must have read a vast number of patent claims on timekeeping devices. Implicit in these invention claims was the fact that nobody had ever found an absolutely accurate timekeeper. Inventors might develop improved accuracy, but none could attain perfection, which is true to this day. All this must have led Einstein to realize that Newton had to be entirely wrong in assuming a perfect uniform time to be a phenomenon instantly, simultaneously, differentiallessly operative and absolutely accurately observed throughout all the Universe. I felt sure Newton's error in assuming a universally and simultaneously uniform time impelled Einstein to start thinking along different lines.

I then concluded that a man who had Einstein's kind of philosophy and Einstein's kind of patent-examiner-of-timekeepers experiences would naturally think a great deal about relativity of nonsimultaneously and always differently viewed time experiences.

Next, I posited to myself, as best I could, not knowing Einstein personally at that time, how and why he might have come to formulate his various working assumptions; I had my own intuited explanation of how he formulated his epoch-initiating concepts.

Chapter 4 expressed my realization that in the world of science, when somebody does make a great breakthrough, "the Academy" is slow in officially acknowledging that breakthrough and acquiesces only when convinced by experiential evidence. Only then does the scientist's discovery or concept appear in school textbooks.

After the discovery is incorporated into textbooks, the new concept has finally arrived and enters the thinking environment of the everyday educational system. At this point, technological innovators commence thinking and speaking in terms of the new knowledge and its possible significance in solving old problems. Following the invention of an appropriate new artifact, there is a time lag before an industry adopts that invention. I call this lag the gestation rate, after its analog in biology. Only after a gestation period do the various new technological tools and goods springing from an invention change the everyday socioeconomic climate and physical environment. Eventually the altered environment induces everybody to think spontaneously like the scientist whose reasoning led to the original breakthrough.

My 1927 studies in techno-invention lags relative to various fields of scientific exploration and industrial endeavor showed me that it would take at least fifty years for Einstein's thinking to become everybody's "frame-of-thought" reference.

. . . Einstein proclaimed that there are only two prime motivations for all human initiative: fear and longing. Acquiring the costly technology for producing national-defense armaments alone is the politically assumed number-one mandate, a mandate based on national fear. Such a survivalist mentality inadvertently also produces life-supporting technology, but it takes a quarter of a century longer than it would if humanity first recognized the public longing to attain sustainable peace for all humanity and directly used that same high-technology production for livingry rather than for armaments.

I am convinced that nature uses different gestation rates for both biological and technological phenomena. I am also convinced of the infallibility of nature's revolutionary intertiming design of these different gestation rates.

In my personal strategy, I eschew all promotion for this reason. I have no desire to develop the "premature babies" of industrial technology. As a consequence, I have no literary agents, no lecture bureaus, no advertising or public relations people, no sales agents of any kind. Neither myself nor anyone on my staff is allowed to solicit supporting grants. I have no sales people who go out to sell me in order to fund an operating budget. I ask no one to listen to me or to look at what I have produced. I speak to people only when they ask me to do so. When, however, people ask me what it is they see that I have produced, I give them my very best explanations. These personal operating principles are based on a kind of self-sufficient mechanism that I have always appreciated in nature's designs, and some supply side economists have admired in human institutions. These rules of thumb have carried me through many crises during the past fifty-five years.

My economic survival pattern was based on my fortunate assumption that nature would support me and my work but only if I eschewed all politics and worked entirely in artifact invention and development and only on behalf of all humanity.

In view of all the foregoing, I saw the work of Albert Einstein as that of an individual who seemed to have been uniquely inspired by a clear vision of nature's generalized principles. I found myself to be inspired by an awareness of the evolutionary significance of the human mind's winnowing out of those generalized principles and the synergetic consequence of the objective reintegration of the Universe of principles into a myriad of in-Universe special-case-evolution-through-problem-solving technology.

The era of human exploration and operation in the 99.99 percent of reality nondirectly contractible by the human senses is coincident with Einstein's realization that evolutionary change is normal and that the normal speed of all electromagnetic radiation is 186,000 miles per second.

This view completely altered for humanity the concept, established by Isaac Newton, that the physical norm is the state of rest. In this view, the physical norm is changeless, and thus, change is to be avoided.

When Einstein's concepts were first introduced, Professor Percy Williams Bridgman of Harvard, the pioneer in cryogenics, sought to understand why Einstein had caught the whole world of science so far off physically comprehensible balance. Bridgman concluded that the difference between the viewpoints of conventional science and Einstein (and their consequently employed methodologies) was that in contrast to science's attempt to isolate experiments within "controlled conditions," Einstein was always comprehensively considerate of all environmental conditions and events attendant upon the experiment.

Bridgman called Einstein's methodological concern with both comprehensive and incisively focused-upon information "operational procedures."

I was excited to learn from Dr. Bridgman in 1947 of Einstein's operational procedures, for without knowledge of Einstein's having done so. I had come to share similar concerns and had in 1927 spontaneously adopted similar comprehensive concerns in my own work.

Operational procedures eliminate all recourse to axioms, the "it-has-always-been" or "it-is-assumed-to-be" truisms commonly employed by much of our educational system, particularly in those areas of education that most people think of as having long ago been infallibly explained by mathematics, physics, engineering, semantics, geography, meteorology, and cosmology.

I am convinced that academic science's comprehensive, three-dimensional, perpendicular-parallel, nonintertransformative, coordinate mathematics of "framed" referencing of all physical experiences is so awkwardly alien to nature's four-dimensional convergent-divergent, discretely tunable, coordinately constant system as to render present-day academic science's mathematics unnecessarily complex and understandably incomprehensible to the majority of clear-thinking youth. As such, present-day science's inscrutability prevents us, who are laboring under the political-religious axiom that a fundamental inadequacy of life support exists on planet Earth, from spontaneously apprehending what has transpired in the invisible reality and thereby comprehending why and how it is now technically feasible to take care of all humanity at a sustainable higher living standard than any humans have heretofore experienced.

On the other hand, I am confident that I have discovered nature's own coordinate system. This most economical and popularly comprehensible, mathematical, intercoordinate, formative, energy-matter intertransformative, and deformative system is definitively presented in the approximately thirteen hundred pages of Synergetics and Synergetics 2. These volumes enable an individual to comprehend design science effectively and adequately.

* UNESCO TIFLIS, 1968. p. 12. From the Synergetics Dictionary.