¶ Dome: Rationale for the Big Dome
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Dome: Rationale for the Big Dome:
"I do not talk about innovations until I have reduced them to practice and am certain that the principles involved are eternal and reliable. If I have proved a structural principle to be safe and effectively realizable, I can consider larger and as-yet unrealized ones because I also have experimentally proven my comprehension of the principles governing structural magnitudes. For instance, I know that the bigger geodesic domes become, the more efficient they are.
“There are several principles that integrate synergetically to produce the increasing efficiency with size-growth. When we double the size of a geometric object symmetrically, a cube for instance, we increase the edge measurement from one to two, this means that the surface area increases as two to the second power, which equals eight. This means that every time we double the size of a geodesic dome, the volume of atmosphere inside increases by eight, while the surface increases by only four. This means that with each size doubling we have eight times the number of molecules inside but only four time the amount of enclosing surface or roof and side walls through which any given molecules of air, inside or outside, can gain or lose heat.”
