In culty backwaters, or call it a swamp, where the sausage gets made, we have our little niche controversies.
Perhaps goaded by Braingate, the controversy swirling around the two elderly gangsta presidents (were their faculties still intact? Not really, at least in Biden's case), and the subsequent coverup, some latecomers to our party have decided to retell the story around Bucky.
According to them, our guy was too Alzheimery by the 1970s to really know what he meant in Synergetics, which means the rest of us have been engaged in a coverup, trying to make Synergetics seem more coherent than it really is.
This new "Bucky was senile" faction wants to purge S3 (an important constant) from the future curriculum, to spare people the need to understand what it's all about.
They say because Bucky was close to senile by the time those two volumes were published, he was able to confuse himself about this nonsensical number (~1.06066... or 2nd root of 9/8).
But was he really that confused? We're talking about two conceptions of unit volume and comparing them. Both the cube and the tetrahedron will need to be sized, when the other is unit. We'll need a conversion constant in other words, like a currency conversion constant, between Tetrahedron Dollars and Cube Dollars.
If a tetrahedron's six edges are all twice that of a cube, then that difference in volume, one of proportion between them, is S3. The difference is only about 6%.
I think what makes readers doubt the sense of Synergetics is that what it does to the cube seems too drastic: a cube of edges 1 no longer has a whole number volume of 1, but of 1.06066...
That can't seem right to anyone already brainwashed to think "right angles rule" and "cube is king", the predominant orthodoxy.
Surely you're joking Mr. Fuller!
