250.01 Discovery
250.02
Discoveries are uniquely regenerative to the explorer and are most powerful on those rare occasions when a generalized principle is discovered. When mind discovers a generalized principle permeating whole fields of special-case experiences, the discovered relationship is awesomely and elatingly beautiful to the discoverer personally, not only because to the best of his knowledge it has been heretofore unknown, but also because of the intuitively sensed potential of its effect upon knowledge and the consequently improved advantages accruing to humanity’s survival and growth struggle in Universe. The stimulation is not that of the discoverer of a diamond, which is a physical entity that may be monopolized or exploited only to the owner’s advantage. It is the realization that the newly discovered principle will provide spontaneous, common-sense logic engendering universal cooperation where, in many areas, only confusion and controversy had hitherto prevailed.
250.10 Academic Grading Variables in Respect to Science Versus Humanities
250.101
Whether it was my thick eyeglasses and lack of other personable favors, or some other psychological factors, I often found myself to be the number-one antifavorite amongst my schoolteachers and pupils. When there were disturbances in the classroom, without looking up from his or her desk, the teacher would say, “One mark,” or “Two marks,” or “Three marks for Fuller.” Each mark was a fifteen-minute penalty period to be served after the school had been let out for the others. It was a sport amongst some of my classmates to arrange, through projectiles or other inventions, to have noises occur in my vicinity.
250.11
Where the teacher’s opinion of me was unfavorable, and that, in the humanities, was — in the end — all that governed the marking of papers, I often found myself receiving lower grades for reasons irrelevant to the knowledge content of my work — such as my handwriting. In science, and particularly in my mathematics, the answers were either right or wrong. Probably to prove to myself that I might not be as low-average as was indicated by the gradings I got in the humanities, I excelled in my scientific classes and consistently attained the top grades because all my answers were correct. Maybe this made me like mathematics. But my mathematics teachers in various years would say, “You seem to understand math so well, I’ll show you some more if you stay in later in the afternoon.” I entered Harvard with all As in mathematics, biology, and the sciences, having learned in school advanced mathematics, which at that time was usually taught only at the college level. Since math was so easy, and finding it optional rather than compulsory at Harvard, I took no more of its courses. I was not interested in getting grades but in learning in areas that I didn’t know anything about. For instance, in my freshman year, I took not only the compulsory English A, but Government, Musical Composition, Art Appreciation, German Literature, and Chemistry. However, I kept thinking all the time in mathematics and made progressive discoveries, ever enlarging my mathematical vistas. My elementary schoolwork in advanced mathematics as well as in physics and biology, along with my sense of security in relating those fields, gave me great confidence that I was penetrating the unfamiliar while always employing the full gamut of rigorous formulation and treatment appropriate to testing the validity of intuitively glimpsed and tentatively assumed enlargement of the horizon of experientially demonstrable knowledge.
250.12
My spontaneous exploration of mathematics continued after I left Harvard. From 1915 to 1938 — that is, for more than twenty years after my days in college — I assumed that what I had been discovering through the postcollege years, and was continuing to discover by myself, was well known to mathematicians and other scientists, and was only the well-known advanced knowledge to which I would have been exposed had I stayed at Harvard and majored in those subjects. Why I did not continue at Harvard is irrelevant to academics. A subsequent special course at the U. S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and two years of private tutelage by some of America’s leading engineers of half a century ago completed my formally acknowledged “education.”
250.20 My Independent Mathematical Explorations
250.21
In the twentieth year after college, I met Homer Lesourd, my old physics teacher, who most greatly inspired his students at my school, Milton Academy, and who for half a century taught mathematics at Harvard. We discovered to our mutual surprise that I had apparently progressed far afield from any of the known physio-mathematical concepts with which he was familiar or of which he had any knowledge. Further inquiry by both of us found no contradiction of our first conclusion. That was a third of a century ago. Thereafter, from time to time but with increasing frequency, I found myself able to elucidate my continuing explorations and discoveries to other scientists, some of whom were of great distinction. I would always ask them if they were familiar with any mathematical phenomena akin to the kind of disclosures I was making, or if work was being done by others that might lead to similar disclosures. None of them was aware of any other such disclosures or exploratory work. I always asked them whether they thought my disclosures warranted my further pursuit of what was becoming an ever-increasingly larger body of elegantly integrated and coordinate field of omnirationally quantified vectorial geometry and topology. While they could not identify my discoveries with any of the scientific fields with which they were familiar, they found no error in my disclosures and thought that the overall rational quantation and their logical order of unfoldment warranted my further pursuing the search.
250.30 Remoteness of Synergetics Vocabulary
250.301
When one makes discoveries that, to the best of one’s knowledge and wide inquiry, seem to be utterly new, problems arise regarding the appropriate nomenclature and description of what is being discovered as well as problems of invention relating to symbolic economy and lucidity. As a consequence, I found myself inventing an increasingly larger descriptive vocabulary, which evolved as the simplest, least ambiguous method of recounting the paraphernalia and strategies of the live scenario of all my relevant experiences.
250.31
For many years, my vocabulary was utterly foreign to the semantics of all the other sciences. I drew heavily on the dictionary for good and unambiguous terms to identify the multiplying nuances of my discoveries. In the meanwhile, the whole field of science was evolving rapidly in the new fields of quantum mechanics, electronics, and nuclear exploration, inducing a gradual evolution in scientific language. In recent years, I find my experiential mathematics vocabulary in a merging traffic pattern with the language trends of the other sciences, particularly physics. Often, however, the particular new words chosen by others would identify phenomena other than that which I identify with the same words. As the others were unaware of my offbeat work, I had to determine for myself which of the phenomena involved had most logical claim to the names involved. I always conceded to the other scientists, of course (unbeknownst to them); when they seemed to have prior or more valid claims, I would then inventor select appropriate but unused names for the phenomena I had discovered. But I held to my own claim when I found it to be eminently warranted or when the phenomena of other claimants were ill described by that term. For example, quantum mechanics came many years after I did to employ the term spin. The physicists assured me that their use of the word did not involve any phenomena that truly spun. Spin was only a convenient word for accounting certain unique energy behaviors and investments. My use of the term was to describe a direct observation of an experimentally demonstrable, inherent spinnability and unique magnitudes of rotation of an actually spinning phenomenon whose next fractional rotations were induced by the always co-occurring, generalized, a priori, environmental conditions within which the spinnable phenomenon occurred. This was a case in which I assumed that I held a better claim to the scientific term spin. In recent years, spin is beginning to be recognized by the physicists themselves as also inadvertently identifying a conceptually spinnable phenomenon — in fact, the same fundamental phenomenon I had identified much earlier when I first chose to use the word spin to describe that which was experimentally disclosed as being inherently spinnable. There appears to be an increasing convergence of scientific explorations in general, and of epistemology and semantics in particular, with my own evolutionary development.
250.32
Because physics has found no continuums, no experimental solids, no things, no real matter, I had decided half a century ago to identify, mathematical behaviors of energy phenomena only as events. If there are no things, there are no nouns of material substance. The old semantics permitted common-sense acceptance of such a sentence as, “A man pounds the table,” wherein a noun verbs a noun or a subject verbs a predicate. I found it necessary to change this form to a complex of events identified as me, which must be identified as a verb. The complex verb me observed another complex of events identified again ignorantly as a “table.” I disciplined myself to communicate exclusively with verbs. There are no wheres and whats; only angle and frequency events described as whens.
250.40 The Climate of Invention
250.401
In the competitive world of money-making, discoveries are looked upon as exploitable and monopolizable claims to be operated as private properties of big business. As a consequence, the world has come to think of both discoveries and patents as monopolized property. This popular viewpoint developed during the last century, when both corporations and government supported by courts have required individuals working for them to assign to them the patent rights on any discoveries or inventions made while in their employ. Employees were to assign these rights during, and for two years after termination of, their employment, whether or not the invention had been developed at home or at work. The drafting of expert patent claims is an ever more specialized and complex art, involving expensive legal services usually beyond the reach of private individuals. When nations were remote from one another, internal country patents were effective protection. With today’s omniproximities of the world’s countries, only world- around patents costing hundreds of thousands of dollars are now effective, with the result that patent properties are available only to rich corporations.
250.41
So now the major portions of extant inventions belong to corporations and governments. However, invention and discovery are inherently individual functions of the minds of individual humans. Corporations are legal fabrications; they cannot invent and discover. Patents were originally conceived of as grants to inventors to help them recover the expenses of the long development of their discoveries; and they gave the inventor only a very short time to recover the expense. Because I am concerned with finding new technical ways of doing more with less, by which increasing numbers of humanity can emerge from abject poverty into states of physical advantage in respect to their environment, I have taken out many patent claims — first, to hold the credit of initiative for the inspiration received by humanity’s needs and the theory of their best solution being that of the design revolution and not political revolution, and second, to try to recover the expense of development. But most importantly, I have taken the patents to avoid being stopped by others — in particular, corporations and governments — from doing what I felt needed doing.
250.50 Coincidental Nature of Discoveries
250.501
What often seems to the individual to be an invention, and seems also to be an invention to everyone he knows, time and again turns out to have been previously discovered when patent applications are filed and the search for prior patents begins. Sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds, of patents will be found to have been issued, or applied for, covering the same idea. This simultaneity of inventing manifests a forward- rolling wave of logical exploration of which the trends are generated by the omni- integrating discoveries and the subsequent inventions of new ways to employ the discoveries at an accelerating rate, which is continually changing the metaphysical environment of exploratory and inventive stimulation.
250.51
I have learned by experience that those who think only in competitive ways assume that I will be discouraged to find that others have already discovered, invented, and patented that which I had thought to be my own unique discovery or invention. They do not understand how pleased I am to learn that the task I had thought needed doing, and of which I had no knowledge of others doing, was happily already being well attended to, for my spontaneous commitment is to the advantage of all humanity. News of such work of others frees me to operate in other seemingly unattended but needed directions of effort. And I have learned how to find out more about what is or is not being attended to. This is evolution.
250.52
When I witness the inertias and fears of humans caused by technical breakthroughs in the realms of abstract scientific discovery. I realize that their criteria of apprehension are all uninformed. I see the same patterns of my experience obtaining amongst the millions of scientists around the world silently at work in the realm of scientific abstract discovery, often operating remote from one another. Many are bound to come out with simultaneous discoveries, each one of which is liable to make the others a little more comprehensible and usable. Those who have paid-servant complexes worry about losing their jobs if their competitors’ similar discoveries become known to their employers. But the work of pure science exploration is much less understood by the economically competitive-minded than is that of inventors. The great awards economic competitors give to the scientists make big news, but no great scientist ever did what he did in hope of earning rewards. The greats have ever been inspired by the a priori integrities of Universe and by the need of all humanity to move from the absolute ignorance of birth into a little greater understanding of the cosmic integrities. They esteem the esteem of those whom they esteem for similar commitment, but they don’t work for it.
250.53
I recall now that when I first started making mathematical discoveries, years ago, my acquaintances would often say, “Didn’t you know that Democritus made that discovery and said just what you are saying 2,000 years ago?” I replied that I was lucky that I didn’t know that because I thought Democritus so competent that I would have given up all my own efforts to understand the phenomena involved through my own faculties and investment of time. Rather than feeling dismayed, I was elated to discover that, operating on my own, I was able to come out with the same conclusions of so great a mind as that of Democritus. Such events increased my confidence in the resourcefulness and integrity of human thought purely pursued and based on personal experiences.
250.60 Proofs
250.61
I know that many of the discoveries of synergetics in the book of their accounting, which follows, may prove in time to be well-known to others. But some of them may not be known to others and thus may be added to the ever-increasing insights of the human mind. Any one individual has inherently limited knowledge of what total Universe frontiering consists of at any one moment. My list embraces what I know to be my own discoveries of which I have no knowledge of others having made similar discoveries earlier than my own. I claim nothing. Proofs of some of my theoretical discoveries have been made by myself and will be made by myself. Proofs may have been made by others and will be made by others. Proofs are satisfying. But many mathematical theorems provide great living advantages for humanity over long periods of time before their final mathematical proofs are discovered. The whys and wherefores of what is rated as mathematical proof have been evolved by mathematicians; they are formal and esoteric conventions between specialists.