Bucky Group 23b - Geometry

It is a bit uncomfortable sitting on the floor this Sunday, as it rained heavily in the morning and the floor was still moist. It was still raining when I was jogging through the forests, prior to the reading session.

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The Bucky Group meets almost every Sunday at MacRitchie Reservoir in Singapore, rain or shine. The Group has been meeting like this since 1994! Sometimes, when it rained too heavily, the session is conducted under the shelters of the cafe up on the hillock.

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I think the Group has stuck together for the last 14 years because of the common aim of life long learning, and a healthy lifestyle of exercise and the need to take a stroll in nature at least once a week.

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Besides, the Group has a very dedicated leader Joo Hock, who is so passionate about Bucky's philosophy that his wife has assured him that she will pray for Bucky on his behalf him in church. We recognise his dedication and nicknamed him as 'the teacher'. When I first met Joo Hock, he told me that life didn't mean very much until he found out about Bucky.

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Din, a Singaporean Muslim Malay entrepreneur who runs a fork lift maintenance company, and one who has confessed to have hated school when he was young, is nicknamed "Best Student", as he is the most earnest and enthusiastic among us in learning about everything Bucky. Din is also a vegetarian and admires the Buddhist religion as it preaches no killing. His logo for his company "BS Forklift Services" ("BS" for "Best Student") is the Taoist Ying-Yang sign.

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Din is also the one who ferries me from my home in the East of Singapore to MacRitchie on Sundays. Along with me, he also fetches my friends Eric, a Midwest American who has lived in many parts of the world, and Chris, a multi-lingual Taiwanese-Brazilian lady, to the Bucky Group sessions. Thank you Din.

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I was introduced to the Bucky Group, by a friend who builds sandcastles as a profession. Back then, I had just returned from living in Europe after a long stint helping big banks to outwit hackers.

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Two Sundays ago, we didn't do any readings. Vasu cheekily quipped that the Teacher was not there at MacRitchie, because the students were not ready! :) Vasu, who also acts on TV, among many other things he does, is a good one with such witty twisters. Anyway, without the teacher, we chatted freestyle and proceeded with our breakfast at the Rainforest Cafe. *tsk* *tsk* [Besides cutting hair, Joo Hock also facilitates training workshops during weekends.]

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This Sunday the teacher is here, so we continued with our readings on "Utopia or Oblivion".

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[...more later. Talk about breakfast, I'm going to get some... :) ]

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Long breakfast that one... Actually, it is because I have to go back and read the book for more clarity. That took me a few days. :) Bucky's texts are very comprehensive and often needs a lot of deliberation.

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In the text for this weekend, it read about the consequence of the inability of the cartesian coordinate system to geometrically model the fourth power, that scientist abandoned the possibility of doing so. To make matters worse, the attempt to erroneously model electricity as flowing water in pipes further convinced scientist that visual models in science are not possible in abstract situations. So physically conceptual models became all suspect.

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However, Bucky's own investigations of nature's coordinating system led him to think that it must be one that embraces an omni-rational geometry and arithmatic, because of chemical structuring rationality. ie. that chemical composition work in whole numbers. Particularly with Avogadro's Law of Gases, that individual elements, show the same number of molecules in a given volume under identical energy conditions of both heat and pressure. From here, Bucky found the common conditions of chemistry, physics, arithmatic and geometry - a wedding of number and volume.

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So if all the conditions of energy were the same, what would such a condition look like in vectors? It would mean that all vectors would have to be the same length. All of them would have to be running into each other at the same angles. So, we can make realistic, multi-dimensional, visible, tangible models of equilength vectors all running into each other at the same angles. It came out to be the tetrahedron-octahedron complex.

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That's also how oranges are stacked up.

Examine the oranges closely and you will discover that it correspond exactly to the octet-truss below.

The octet-truss is basically made of tetrahedrons and octehedrons. I found a real-life example at the MRT exit at City Hall, Singapore.

See how more efficient it is compared to doing otherwise in my previous post "Design Follies"

We stopped here. We decided to go to the Rainforest Cafe for our breakfast this morning.