UFiM Online Part 1

Due to a very unsatisfactory editing capacities in this blog I have prepared the post using GoogleDocs and it is available here. You can leave comments within that file or if these fail, send around an email:-)

Universal Forces in Mechanics Online

I have a great admiration for the work of George Adams, a student of Rudolf Steiner who made great progress in making the thought-forms of projective geometry accessible to a larger audience and showing how they can be applied to new perspectives in understanding both the outer world of Nature and the inner world of the human being. He is best known for his work on plant morphology (with Olive Whicher) "The Plant Between Sun and Earth" (London, 1952) based on the polarity of space and counter-space.  Less well-known is is later work on the foundations of mechanics, where he applies the same spatial polarity to the polarity of kinematics and dynamics, so often mentioned by Rudolf Steiner in his scientific lectures.

I'm very grateful that I have the chance to present some of this work at an upcoming seminar entitled "Universal Forces in Mechanics" that will take place Feb. 22-24 in Gloucester, England.  The title is taken from a set of essays that George Adams wrote in the late 1950's devoted to this research in re-interpreting rigid body mechanics in the light of projective geometry. An English translation of these essays is available here.

As part of this learning initiative, I am also offering an online course focusing on the mathematical content of the cited essays.  This blog entry provides participants with a "base station" where the various resources can be made available and where feedback can be registered using the comment facility below.

Paul Courtney has provided an English translation of a section of George Adams' "Strahlende Weltgestaltung" (1934) referenced in "Universal Forces in Mechanics" on p. 5. You can access it here. It's devoted to the theme of "projective polarity with respect to a triangle." I recommend reading that first. Thanks, Paul!

Then you might find it interesting to play with an interactive geometry demo  here, devoted to the same theme. You can interact with the figure and inspect the code used to create the figure. You can even edit the code that creates the figure (click on the menu symbol to the left of the drawing canvas and choose "Edit". The code appears below the canvas.) More information about the software environment used can be found at beta.observablehq.com.

Please leave comments and questions below.

• "There are no stupid questions", and,
• "If you're wondering about something there is a good chance the others are either wondering too -- or should be."