From Robert Snyder's 80-minute documentary, "The World of Buckminster Fuller."
(c) Masters & Masterwork Productions, Inc. www.mastersmasterworks.com.
DVD available at mastersmasterworks.com
Stream available at http://amzn.com/B0178R4UJO

Transcript:

Another of the generalized principles are the principles of wave-behavior. Throw a stone in the water and you got a most beautiful wave see a circle emanate like and then they even though there's another big wave coming it had an integrity all of its own.

Let's identify man to start off with as what I call a pattern integrity and I'd like to make clear what I mean by pattern integrity. I'm going to take a piece of manilla rope and then I'm going to splice into it a piece of cotton rope. Splice on the other end of the cotton a piece of nylon rope. I'm going to make the very simplest knot that I know which is simply go around 360 degrees in this plane [vertical] 360 degrees in that plane [horizontal]. I'm not going to pull it tight, but there's that knot where the rope has not done this I have done it to the rope but anyway I can slide this knot right along it's still a loose knot I haven't pulled it tight. I slide it along the rope and now it leaves the manilla and now it's on the cotton now I keep sliding it along and now its on the nylon so suddenly it's off the end... we say the knot was a pattern integrity. It wasn't manilla; it wasn't cotton; it wasn't nylon. Though cotton and nylon and manilla any one of them are good to let us know about its shape and what its pattern was but it was not that it had an integrity of its own we drop a stone in the water and a most beautiful circular wave emanates. And I then try in milk it works just as well. I try kerosine. So I discover that wave is a pattern integrity. And then the next thing that I try I say, “I'd like to know about that wave apparently isn't just water and it isn't milk.” And so then I try sprinkling sawdust all over the water very neatly, make a beautiful film of sawdust, then I drop one piece of red popcorn on there and I put a transit and moving picture camera very carefully aimed at that red popcorn. We drop the stone over here in the water and the yellow sawdust makes a wave and suddenly the red popcorn goes from towards the center of the earth, in towards the center of the earth comes right back where it was they simply went in and out towards the center of the earth to accommodate the wave to let it go by just like a piece of rope accommodating a knot sliding along her.