BUCKYVERSE

986.050 Unfamiliarity with Tetrahedra

986.051 The distorted conditioning of human reflexing and reasoning persisted in overwhelming the academic point of viewand still does so up to this moment in history. This is nowhere more apparent than in the official reaction to the data and photographs taken on planet Mars by the planet Earth’s scientists from their multistage-rocket-dispatched Mariner 9 and Viking orbiters:

But even at the present limits of resolution, some surprising formations have been seen, the most inexplicable of which are the three-sided pyramids found on the plateau of Elysium. Scientists have tried to find a natural geological process that would account for the formation of these pyramids, some of which are two miles across at the base, but as yet their origin is far from being explained. Such tantalizing mysteries may not be fully solved until astronauts are able to make direct observations on the Martian surface.[^36]

986.052 In 1977 the NASA scientists scrutinized the robot-photographed pictures of the close-in Martian scene and reported theto them surprise presence on Mars of two (two-mile-base-edged) three-sided pyramids the size of Mount Fuji. The NASA scientists were unfamiliar with the tetrahedron. They remarked that these forms, with whose simplest, primitive character they were unacquainted, must have been produced by wind-blown sand erosion, whereas we have discovered that tetrahedra are always and only a priori to nature’s processes of alteration of her simplest and most primitive polyhedral systems.

Figure 17: Fig. 986.052 Robot Camera Photograph of Tetrahedra on Mars: On their correct but awkward description of these gigantic polyhedra as “three-sided pyramids” the NASA scientists revealed their unfamiliarity with tetrahedra.
Figure 17: Fig. 986.052 Robot Camera Photograph of Tetrahedra on Mars: On their correct but awkward description of these gigantic polyhedra as “three-sided pyramids” the NASA scientists revealed their unfamiliarity with tetrahedra.

986.053 Also suggestive of the same blindness to nature’s reality suffered by the academic world and the scientists who lead it, was van’t Hoff’s late-19th-century identification of the primitive significance of the tetrahedron in the structuring of organic chemistry. (See Sec. 931.60.) His hypothesis was at first scoffed at by scientists. Fortunately, through the use of optical instruments he was able to present visual proof of the tetrahedral configuration of carbon bondswhich experimentally reproduced evidence won him the first Nobel prize awarded a chemist. The Greeks of three millennia ago and today’s “educated” society are prone to assume that nature is primitively disorderly and that symmetrical shapes are accomplished only by human contriving.