Imagine a guy figures out that the geometry he learned in school was not nature's geometry. Buckminster Fuller did that. He called nature's geometry "synergetics," to distinguish it, maybe, from the wrong-headed ancient mathematicians.
Their geometry was based on a flat earth, with trees and buildings that were perpendicular to it, and therefore parallel to each other. Guess what? The earth is not flat, and the trees are not at right angles to it. Bucky also objected to school geometry's basics - the point, which has no length, width or depth, the line, which is a collection of those nonexistent points, and the plane, described by those lines. Who cares? Well, nature's geometry doesn't use squares or cubes very much. Fuller shows how triangles and tetrahedra (a four-sided figure, all of whose faces are triangles) are much more stable and less likely to collapse because of a self-reinforcing structure that squares and cubes do not share.
NASA's construction of the International Space Station is based on this, using his invention, the octet truss. Quick quiz: 1) Looking at the sky, what direction is the moon? 2) On the moon, looking at the sky, what direction is earth? Bucky informs us that there's no "up" or "down" in Universe.
He was a most original thinker, and
Fuller's Earth is the best introduction to his mind-altering ideas. Richard J. Brenneman deserves a lot of credit. He gives the reader a transcript of Fuller explaining his "explorations in the geometry of thinking" (Fuller maintained that thought has shape.) to three youngsters, and then answering questions they put to him.
If you want more, other books by Fuller himself include
Intuition;
And it Came to Pass, Not to Stay; and
I Seem to Be a Verb. R. Buckminster Fuller was known as the planet's friendly genius. I cannot recommend Fuller's Earth highly enough.
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