986.090 The Search for Natures Coordinate System
986.091 Several things were certain: nature is capable of both omnidirectional disorderly, dispersive, and destructive expansion and omnidirectional collective, selective sorting and constructive contraction; and rays of candlelight are not parallel to one another. I decided to initiate my search for nature’s coordinate system by assuming that the coordinate system must be convergently and divergently interaccommodative. That the seasons of my New England childhood brought forth spectacular transformations in nature’s total interpatterning; that the transformations were not simultaneous nor everywhere the same; that there were shaded and Sun-shined-upon area variables; and that they were all embraced by a comprehensive coordination altogether made me dream of comprehending the comprehensively accommodating coordinate system that had no separate departments of chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, art, history, or languages. I said nature has only one department and only one language.
986.092 These thoughts kept stimulating my explorations for the totally accommodative coordinate system. Einstein’s conclusionthat the definitive, maximum possible speed of light rendered astronomical phenomena an aggregate of nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping, differently enduring energy events greatly affected the increasing inventory of my tentative formulations of the interaccommodative requirements of the cosmic coordination system which I sought. I was driven by both consciously and subconsciously sustained intuition and excitement. This was very private, however. I talked to no one about it. It was all very remote from that which seemed to characterize popular interest.
986.093 The youthful accruals of these long-sustained private observations, cogitations, and speculations were enormously helpful when I decided at the age of 32, in my crisis year of 1927, to abandon the game of competitive survival (a game I had been taught to believe in as thought-out, managed, and evolved entirely by others) and instead to rely completely upon my own thinking and experience-suggested inclinations …to find out how Universe is organized and what it is doing unbeknownst to humans. Why are humans here in Universe? What should we be doing to fulfill our designed functioning in Universe? Surely all those stars and galaxies were not designed only to be romantic scenery for human moods. What am I designed to be able to comprehend about Universe? What are we humans designed to be able to do for one another and for our Universe?
986.094 Expanding Universe: My determination to commit myself completely to the search for nature’s raison d’etre and for its comprehensive coordinate system’s mathematics was greatly reinforced by the major discovery of the astronomer E. P. Hubble in 1924. He discovered an expanding macrocosmic system with all the myriads of galaxies and their respective stellar components at all times maintaining the same interangular orientations and relative interdistancings from one another while sum-totally and omnisymmetrically expanding and moving individually away from one another, and doing so at astronomical speeds. This discovery of Hubble’s became known as Expanding Universe.
986.095 The only way humans can expand their houses is by constructing lopsided additions to their rectilinearly calculated contriving. People found that they could “blow up” rubber-balloon spheres to increase their radii, but they couldn’t blow up their buildings except by dynamite. They called their wooden “2 x 4,” and “2 x 6,” and “2 x 8-inch” cross-section, wooden-timber nail-ups “balloon framing,” but why they selected that name was difficult to explain.
986.096 My insights regarding nature’s coordinate system were greatly enhanced by two of Milton Academy’s greatest teachers: Homer LeSourd in physics and William Lusk Webster Field (“Biology Bill”) in biology. During the summer vacation of 1906, at 11 years of age I designed and built my first small but exciting experimental dwelling on our family’s small midPenobscot Bay island. Living all my youthful summers on that island, with its essential boat-building, boat-modifying, boat-upkeep, and boat-sailing, followed by five years as a line officer in the regular U.S. Navy with some of my own smaller-craft commands, some deck-officering on large craft of the new era’s advanced technology ships, together with service involving airplanes, submarines, celestial navigation, ballistics, radio, and radiotelephone; then resignation from the Navy followed by five more private-enterprise years developing a new building system, inventing and installing its production tools, managing the production of the materials, and erecting therewith 240 residences and small commercial buildingsaltogether finally transformed my sustained activity into full preoccupation with my early-boyhood determination some day to comprehend and codify nature’s omniintertransformative, omnidirectional, cosmic coordination system and its holistic, only-experientially-proven mathematics. In 1928, inspired and fortified by Hubble’s Expanding Universe discovery, I gave the name and its symbol 4-D to my mathematical preoccupations and their progressively discovered system codifying. In 1936 I renamed my discipline “Energetic Vectorial Geometry.” In 1938 I again renamed it “Energetic-synergetic Geometry,” and in 1970 for verbal economy contracted that title to “Synergetics.” (See Fig. 986.096.)