One of the Synergetics People in our Coda had the honor of meeting Arthur Young, who helped give this younger guy a challenge and some direction: decipher Synergetics. Young and Fuller’s opus on his shelf. Like many operating in the absence of much secondary literature, he was hoping he could help us make some.
Fast foward and we’re doing a lot better where secondary literature is concerned, but we’re still weak in the animation department. Having just seen some state of the art claymation, I’m even more acutely aware of how we missed the boat with the A and B modules, the T and E modules, and the S. But like in the Pudget Sound ferry system, there’s always a next boat.
The A module is such a simple dimple concept, and has everything to do with how I implement my quadray coordinates. The 2nd root of 6 over 4 appears in Synergetics, as do a lot of mathematical expressions.
One might suppose that a guru of the positivist futurist variety would be inspiring to would be geeks, and you’d be right. But when does anyone hear about A and B modules in elementary, middle or high school. After that, it’s prolly too late.
One might conclude that “positive futurism” is inconsistent with a major brand of “I told you so” economics, with its self-fulfilling prophecies. Hyperstitiion they call it: the craft of making things be so. Economics is called the dismal science for a reason. To stay dismal, one needs gravitas. Short of that, one becomes merely an Eeyore, the moody donkey in Winnie the Pooh books, a burdened White Man.
Searching up Arthur Young with the gossip bot got me to thinking: could his Theory of Process connect to Arnold Mindell’s Process Work?
I also found along the way, researching Arthur Young, that Igor Sikorsky (1889–1972), another helicopter designer, had likewise wandered off into Christo-spiritual ruminations. Could it be that smart engineers gravitate to metaphysics? Who woulda thunk it. And then there’s Wittgenstein. His first sense of a calling took him into engineering.
Quoting the bot;
Engineering to logic
The historical sequence is especially striking: while still at Manchester, the foundational issues raised by mathematics began to take hold of him. He then sought out Gottlob Frege, who directed him to Cambridge and Bertrand Russell; by 1911 he had effectively left engineering for logic and philosophy.ww1.manchester+1
It is sensible to see a continuity, not merely a biographical accident: early aeronautical research required using models, formal constraints, and relations between a physical system and its representation. Scholars have argued that this supplied an intellectual background for the Tractatus’s “picture theory,” according to which propositions model possible states of affairs—although that claimed causal connection remains an interpretation, not an established fact.direct.mit+1
The important distinction is therefore: Arthur Young designed an actual Bell helicopter; Wittgenstein investigated a propeller-tip-jet aircraft engine, a principle later reused in some rotorcraft. How do you think Wittgenstein’s engineering concern with a model representing a real mechanism might have predisposed him to make logic about propositions “picturing” reality?
