An Introduction to Synergetics

Synergetics is a philosophy wherein geometric concepts serve as central metaphors.

Scenarios, perhaps rendered as computer animations, provide a glue language, a visual vocabulary serving to complement the thousand-plus, often densely worded passages.

R. Buckminster Fuller intended to include more pictures in the original two volumes than eventually made it to the final cut. Those that remain play a central and expository role, and much of the discussion surrounding them describes their dynamic or transformational aspects.

For example, in the Jitterbug Transformation, polyhedra are related by metamorphosis, as momentary snap shots in the flow of time.

Although synergetics is metaphysical, it nevertheless aims to supply concepts that might prove useful to mathematicians and scientists.

Fuller sought to explain the mircoarchitecture of the virus by means of his geometric investigations, was always on the lookout for other points of contact between his self-discipline, and the discoveries of his contemporaries.

Fuller repackages some well-known geometry in new and original ways, plus adds his years of hands-on experience working with architectural structures and models of various scales and materials.

When eternal principles become "time-size realized" as special case events, the pushes and pulls of real world forces enter the picture, and synergetics is very much about these tensions.

Fuller was a fully committed experimentalist with himself as guinea pig B in a universal laboratory. His chief question was "what difference might the little individual make, acting alone, beyond that of institutions?"

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