9 Buckminster Fuller Quotes on Science

Buckminster Fuller quotes on science

8. It seems to demonstrate that periods of industrial activity in technical syntheses of principles, data, free energy and energy as 'matter,' find highest employment by the fear-amassed credits of warfare. Therefore the assumption approaches fact that war promotes the major technical advances of civilization... What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science. (1947)

9. Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

11. The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow.

27. Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.

29. Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, 'We're going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe.' - They defined the physical universe as 'an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events.'

42. We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

43. The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case. ... The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.

50. Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken seperately.

98. Up to the twentieth century, 'reality' was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum ... humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.