Big try at gravity wheel

[Grimer]

Thanks, Red Sunset. That's the nicest compliment I've ever had for a post. 


And extraordinarily magnanimous considering I chewed you off about your
comment on the church. Sorry if I overdid it. 


If you look up cycloid pendulums you will find that attempts have been made
to build them for timekeeping. Unfortunately the practical difficulties were greater
than the theoretical advantages.

[Red_Sunset]

Thanks, Red Sunset. That's the nicest compliment I've ever had for a post. 

And extraordinarily magnanimous considering I chewed you off about your
comment on the church. Sorry if I overdid it. 
.............................................

No 'thanks' is required,  Grimer ,
We are all human and try to show human behavior, it doesn't always work out as intended
I know "religion" is a sensitive topic at any time, by not following my own advice, your response was rightfully expected., no offense intended nor taken.

"practical difficulties were greater than the theoretical advantages",

with engineering & technology advancement, is just a matter of time to overcome difficulties, so long the principle is sound.

Red_Sunset

[Grimer]

Grimer, if gravity is not conservative, then how do you account for very sensitive and well repeated torsion balance tests where large suspended masses have been shown to attract with forces indistinguishable from G*m1*m2/r^2?

I fear you've failed to follow the argument, Mark.

[Grimer]

The situation can be understood in terms of Stafford Beer's restatement of Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety .....


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)


..... as "Variety absorbs variety"


Just as a football team of 11 members can always overcome a team of 10 members (assuming equal skills, obviously) so also a higher derivative of motion can always control a lower derivative given the right mechanism.


In the cases of the Bessler, Keenie, Uncle's toy and RAR we have 3rd derivative energy (jerk) overcoming the second derivative energy (acceleration) of Newtonian Gravity.


I have never met Stafford in person but we did correspond and he read some of my stuff. He proposed that we wrote a joint paper. Unfortunately his heart attack intervened and the project had to be shelved. I believe our correspondence is in his archive.


Here is a video of one of his talks on Variety.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDRudRhNgy4

[Grimer]

Ain't Google search wonderful. I've actually found it. 


==============================================================


CHALLENGE TO PARADIGM, JULY 76 -END 1978 - Box 85 
This project was all about a book which was to be called "Challenge to Paradigm", which was to have several contributors-

Martin Canny
Brian Eno
Frank Grimer
Humberto Maturana
Alan Mencher
Charles Scudder
Francisco Varela

Not all of these people knew each other and SB kept them in ignorance of the identity of their co-conspirators by using nick -names. The fields covered by the proposed book included - Aesthetics, Anthropology, biology, botany, government, immunology, management, materials science, mathematics, neurophysiology, physiology, psychology, scientific method. The intention was that it would not just be a collection of interesting papers but a continuous narrative that expounded the view that the systems approach really works. "When it works paradigms are over thrown - and that's what constitutes the challenge". The records on this project in the collection are in an orange wallet folder within which the correspondence between Stafford and the other authors has been divided into separate slip files (one for each person), the contents is therefore dealt with in this manner -





CHALLENGE TO PARADIGM (letters to Wiley and all participants)

* several copies of letter from SB to all "players" dated 24th 
Jan 1978
* original letter setting out the project and the contents as contributed by each author
* letters between SB and James Cameron (Wiley) regarding publication of the book.


==============================================================