Níquel em Buckminster-Fuller (1997 [1975])

109.00 Chrome-Nickel-Steel. (Buckminster-Fuller 1997 [1975]:62)

109.01 Synergy alone explains metals increasing their strengths. All alloys are synergetic. Chrome-nickel-steel has an extraordinary total behavior. In fact, it is the high cohesive strength and structural stability of chrome-nickel-steel at enormous temperatures that has made possible the jet engine. The principle of the jet was invented by the squid and the jellyfish long ago. What made possible man’s use of the jet principle was his ability to concentrate enough energy and to release it suddenly enough to give him tremendous thrust. The kinds of heat that accompany the amount of energies necessary for a jet to fly would have melted all the engines of yesterday. Not until you had chrome-nickel-steel was it possible to make a successful jet engine, stable at the heats involved. The jet engine has changed the whole relationship of man to the Earth. And it is a change in the behavior of the whole of man and in the behavior of whole economics, brought about by synergy. (Buckminster-Fuller 1997 [1975]:62)

109.03 The augmented coherence of the chrome-nickel-steel alloy is accounted for only by the whole complex of omnidirectional, intermass-attractions of the crowded- together atoms. The alloy chrome-nickel-steel provides unprecedented structural stability at super-high temperatures, making possible the jet engine one of the reasons why the relative size of our planet Earth, as comprehended by humans, has shrunk so swiftly. The performance of the alloy demonstrates that the strength of a chain is greater than the sum of the strengths of its separate links. Chrome-nickel-steel’s weakest part does not adulterate the whole, allowing it to be “dissolved” as does candy when the sugar dissolves. Chains in metal do not occur as open-ended lines. In the atoms, the ends of the chains come around and fasten the ends together, endlessly, in circular actions. Because atomic circular chains are dynamic, if one link breaks, the other mends itself. (Buckminster-Fuller 1997 [1975]:63)

109.04 When we break one link of a circular chain continuity, it is still one piece of chain. And because atomic circular chains are dynamic, while one link is breaking, the other is mending itself. Our metal chains, like chrome-nickel-steel alloys, are also interweaving spherically in a number of directions. We find the associated behaviors of various atoms complementing each other, so that we are not just talking about one thing and another one thing, but about a structural arrangement of the atoms in tetrahedral configurations. (Buckminster-Fuller 1997 [1975]:64)

112.00 The distance between the stars is now in terms of the leg instead of the hypotenuse. The second power of the hypotenuse is equal to the sums of the second powers of the legs, so we suddenly discover how very much more of an attraction there is between each star to make each one more cohesive in the second power augmentation. There was no such augmentation predicted by the first power addition. Thus, it is no surprise to discover that the close interassociation of the energy stars gives us a four folding of the tensile strength of our strongest component of the alloy chrome-nickel– steel of 350,000 p.s.i. in relation to nickel‘s 80,000 p.s.i. Gravity explains why these metals, when in proper association, develop such extraordinary coherence, for we are not really dealing in a mystery – outside of the fact that we are dealing in the mystery of how there happened to be gravity and how there happened to be Universe. How there happened to be Universe is certainly a great mystery – there is no question about that – but we are not dealing with any miracle here outside of the fact that Universe is a miracle. (Buckminster-Fuller 1997 [1975]:64/66)

BUCKMINSTER-FULLER, Richard. 1997 [1975]. Synergetics: exploration in the geometry of thinking. New York: Macmillan Publishing/Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.