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1. Ken Shaw says

   July 8, 2008 at 3:49 pm

   You’re exactly right about Bucky.
   I was the internal copy editor at Macmillan for Synergetics and quickly learned that nothing Bucky said could be taken seriously. His mind was loosely moored to reality, which let him throw off a stream of ideas. Many (most) were silly, but a few were revelations.
   For example, we think of the world having three dimensions (along the three axes of a cube). However, this is not inherent, but only because we think of the cube as the basic shape. If we take the tetrahedron (with four triangular faces) as the basic shape, then there are four dimensions (in and out from each face). It’s perfectly possible to construct a geometry with four dimensions (or, for that matter, with 24 dimensions by taking the dodecahedron as the basic shape).
   But Bucky’s interesting ideas were engulfed in a torrent of nonsense. He had a full-time amanuensis to take down his thoughts, winnow them and put them in a coherent order. Synergetics was completely the result of his.
   Bucky’s attempts to address scientific ideas were ludicrous. For example, Brower’s Theorem (which I had learned about from Martin Gardner’s Scientific American column) states that if you take a cup of coffee and stir it, there will always be one point that’s in exactly the same place it was before you stirred. See http://www.daviddarling.info/works/Mathematics/mathematics_samples.html. But Bucky stated it backward, i.e., that you could select a point in advance, and it would always end up where it started, which is obviously wrong. I called this to the attention of Bucky’s amanuensis, but he said that this didn’t matter to Bucky. He was interested in having ideas, not what they meant or whether they were mathematically correct. In Stephen Colbert’s idiom, Bucky was interested in “mathiness,” not math.
   Synergetics was nearly impossible to work on, because you had to turn off your intellect and knowledge, of the world and even of grammar. Bucky had his own diction, which he insisted on even where it was silly. I tried to change “a child walking barefootedly through a park” to “a child walking barefooted” or “a child walking barefoot,” and Bucky threw a fit.
   When we sent Bucky the galley proofs, he crossed out everything and gave us a new book. His amanuensis said he would do that endlessly. We reset the type and told him we were going directly from that to the finished book. The result was he rewrote it again and published it as Synergetics II.
   You can gather Bucky’s interesting ideas, as they did at the Whitney, but you need to slog through shoulder-deep garbage to find them. Synergetics is a paradigmatic example.
   Ken Shaw