¶ Balloon
RBF Definitions
"They are like the tensegrities. In the tensegrities you either have gravity, electromagnetism, and you don’t have any strings at all. The pneumatic bag then is full of holes and you can see them under a microscope. Therefore, it is not what we used to talk about as a solid membrane. Our concept ‘solid’ gets to be lessand less reliable the more we think about it, and the more we experiment. So if it is full of holes it is a net and not a bag, so let us call it a net. It is a net in which the holes are so small that the molecules are larger than the holes and they can’t get out. The molecules are gas and there is an integrity of the molecule of gas and it is one of these tensegrity kinds of integrity also, but it has a minimum dimension and it can’t get out those holes. The next thing we discover is what we call the pressure of the gases as explained by what we call the kinetics of gases. That is, the molecules are in motion. They are not rigid. There is nothing static here at all pushing against that net-- but they are hitting it like projectiles. Not only is there a critical proximity that shows up physically, but there are critical proximities tensionally and critical proximi- ties compressionally, that is, there are repellings, "
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #5, p. 186,9July '62
