Hot air.

My husband is being haunted by the ghost of Buckminster Fuller.

I admit I didn’t know that much about the guy.  If it weren’t for buckyballs, I might never have really noticed or cared that he is credited with the invention of the geodesic dome.  I suppose that, up till a couple of days ago, if you had said to me, "Who’s Buckminster Fuller?"  I’d have said, "An architect, I guess."  Buckminster Fuller had never really entered my consciousness at a very high level. 

The other day Mark had to go to an offsite training course in a newfangled management technique or decisionmaking algorithm or teambuilding exercise or similar, the details of which are not important here (does anyone really believe the details are important anywhere?  I hear the free lunch was pretty good).  What he really remembered from the day was that another employee of his company gave a speech in which she cited, in the effort to provide an example of a useful technical insight, a quote from Buckminster Fuller which went something like "Wind doesn’t blow, it sucks."

This infuriated my husband.  I am actually a little bit worried about him.  Apparently he spent parts of the next three days in deep investigation of why she said that, didn’t anyone try to stop her from saying that (the answer is apparently yes), what was the exact context of that quote, and who the heck is this Buckminster Fuller guy anyway that he would say something so prepopsterous.  The reason for my alarm:  this sounds like something I might do, if I were the one working in the corporate world, and it would probably lead to my getting castigated for "not being a team player" or similar.  (There are a number of reasons why I have retreated from market activities, of course, but I can’t deny that one of them is a complete inability to put up with b***s**t in the name of being a "team player.")

Looking for the quote, I Googled "Buckminster Fuller" that evening while Mark cleaned up dinner and ranted, and noticed that the first search result page was peppered with very silly assertions, such as "Buckminster Fuller was probably one of the first futurists."   I smelled "guru."  After Mark mined Amazon.com’s "Search Inside This Book!" feature to find more details about quote, he got even angrier.  From Bucky Works:  Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas For Today by J. Baldwin, a passage about that quote (still haven’t found an exact rendition of it):

A single sentence might contain the seeds of an entirely new vision of physics…

When B ucky announced that wind "sucked," …he was serious.  Talking about the wind "blowing" deflects the thoughts of speaker and listeners alike from what is actually happening.  No force can push a huge parcel of air around Earth any more than you can push a flock of ducks into a barn.  Push—compression—is local.  Push doesn’t operate over long distances.  In any case, what could be doing the pushing?

Nothing is doing the pushing:  wind isn’t pushed.  When you face the wind, you have your back to its cause.  A distant low pressure area pulls denser air to itself, just as a bucket of feed in the barn will bring in the ducks.  Suck—tension—can operate over vast distances.  Suction is not deterred by obstacles.  A northwest wind is actually a southeast suck.  Our parents  and teachers have told us wrong…. If our teachers couldn’t get wind right, how can we trust anything else they say?

One might ask the same thing of old Bucky.  Don’t get me wrong — to say "the wind is blowing" is indeed imprecise except in a literary sense.  It’s an anthropomorphic characterization.  But then, so is "sucking."  When conventional wisdom is inaccurate, the polar opposite of that conventional wisdom — the simple refuge of the reactionary — is likely just as inaccurate.  Accuracy is found by rejecting the soothingly simple — do not confuse it with the "elegant." 

What happens, of course, is neither blowing nor sucking:   the wind flows.     And indeed it is a local phenomenon, in response to the local pressure gradient.  And — never mind the duck analogy —what is up with this "push doesn’t operate over long distances" thing?  Has the author of this never heard of electrical (Coulombic) repulsion?

Apparently old Bucky was one of those gurus with just enough technical jargon and knowledge under his belt to attract the trust (in technical matters) of a wide following of people who don’t know any better, including J.  Baldwin.  Perhaps Fuller was, in fact, an astute philosopher.  I am not qualified to judge that.  But I think I’m qualified to say that he overstepped himself when he spoke as an authority in, say, fluid mechanics.  Either that, or he fell victim to one of the worst of science’s temptations, that of making inaccurate technical assertions, cloaked in the respectability of technical language, to gain the adulation of a non-technical audience.