Question: Hi Lyn, I'm from Philadelphia. I wanted to ask a question, because in Philadelphia, you have a lot of engineering school students, and one of the things that comes up is, that they have some extensive knowledge. They read books about how the human figure has elements of the Golden Section in it. But you can't seem to communicate Leibniz's idea of the "best of all possible world." You can get them to concede to a certain amount of order, and that the rest of the universe is chaotic, and that just doesn't seem to make sense to me. So, if you could explain it to me and the audience, you have a better proof, than what I could probably muster.

LaRouche: What's the problem of the typical engineer? There's two problems. One is generic, and the other is today's problem. The generic problem is that the society is not working. His problem is that he thinks he's out to make a career, that's why he's going to engineering school. He's looking for a job. And he's thinking about things that will get him that job, and that career. He's not really concerned about society as a primary goal. He may be interested in that, but he considers that the entertainment aspect of education, as opposed to the primary purpose. Pass the examination, get a good grade, get recommendations, get a good job. Right?

So, therefore, he is primarily engaged in manufacturing bullshit, as his engineering qualification. He's not concerned with truth.

Now, on the other hand, if he's serious, he can be challenged to be concerned about truth. Now, that's why we did this thing with Gauss. The Gauss 1799 paper has certain features to it, of historic implications, which raise precisely this question, as nothing else does. That is, you have, on the one hand, Gauss attacks Euler and Lagrange, who are fakers, conscious fakers. And, who represent the most hegemonic, most influential current in teaching of science and engineering in the world today. But, they're fakers. Now therefore, if you want to get an engineering student to think, you've got to cross that bridge, the fact that what he thinks are the best in the world are fakers.

How's it work? Well, first of all, this is not a human society, at least the way its culture functions. We don't think about mastering principles of the universe, in the way that the great discoverers did. We think about learning a formula, learning a gimmick, looking up a table of constants, looking up this kind of values. Hmm? Or, even worse, today, is engineers are now studying "benchmarking." It's the lowest form of life: benchmarking.

Benchmarking is taking a group of formulas, design formulas, reduced to computational form, sticking them in a computer, and trying to paste different ones together. It's called this "suburban utility vehicle," which tips over when you try to make a j-turn with it. The thing that killed some people in Ford's SUV vehicles. Almost killed some people with the A-Klasse car in Mercedes-Benz. A fake.

So, they're not learning design engineering any more. What's the difference? Say, Gauss and design engineering, as against Euler and Lagrange: What's the difference? The thinking of engineering school. As Gauss emphasizes, in his attack on Euler and Lagrange-- as Leibniz did, as Kepler did, before, and so forth; as Plato did, as Archytas did, earlier--emphasizes that what we discover, in principle is the discovery of an anomaly in the so-called "sense- perceptual view of the universe," a simple, mathematical-extension view: for example, doubling a line, doubling a square, doubling a cube, are typical problems which actually go beyond ordinary mathematics; they're geometric problems. And the geometric problem is that, when you make these operations, you actually are going outside the definition of the line, outside the definition of the square, outside the definition of the cube, in order to solve the problem. So, these are what Plato calls, in English translation, "powers," as distinct from "energy."

Now, what we think of as a universal physical principle, is what Plato called a "power." You discover a principle of the universe, which can not be detected by the senses as such, but which is a solution to a problem, you do recognize by the senses. For example, try to double a cube, without an insight into what's involved. You don't know how to do it. So, you can't do it mathematically. You have to do it geometrically. And, you can discover a solution, as Archytas did. And, the same solution that Gauss throws in the face of Euler and Lagrange, on this question of the complex domain: That all physical principles, of any importance, lie mathematically in the complex domain. The domain from which Euler and Lagrange excluded what they called the "imaginary numbers." It's in the complex domain, only, that physical principles exist.

The same thing is the problem with the doubling of the line, the square, and the cube. You can not solve these by mathematical extension. You can come up with a mathematical table, to show the calculation. But you can't discover the principle that way. The principles belong to the complex domain. They lie outside the realm of simple mathematical extension, or arithmetic extension.

The problem of the benchmarking is typical of this problem. You can not simply take mathematical tables and paste them together, to make a design. Because whenever you combine two designs, you're combining something which may involve a principle, as distinct from a simple mathematical extension. So, no digital computer is going to solve that problem for you. You actually have to design an experiment to test, experimentally, what the effect is of combining two technologies, which had not been combined before. And, that's the work of a design engineer, which is not some guy sitting at a computer, and trying to do benchmarking.

What has happened is, by training people in benchmarking in engineering, instead of design engineering--actually working out designs, what it means to work out a machine-tool design, for a test of principle of technology, we have created a bunch of idiots as engineering graduates: Because they're trained to rely upon the computer and benchmarking to make designs that probably won't work! And, they don't have the ability, which the engineer used to have-- or the good engineer--would have, to make a test principle design, would actually test--and now give you the calculations, and now give you the structure and the principles to solve the design problem.

So, that's the kind of problem. So, this is typical from the engineering standpoint.

The point is, is to get people to recognize, that we have to operate on the basis of discovery of universal principles. Not only the principles of modern mathematical physics, as developed from Kepler and Leibniz on, but also to understand that there are other principles in life: Like the principles of Classical musical composition; of Classical poetry; of Classical drama; also of history; and some things in politics; of economics. These are things, which apparently are not simply physical problems, in the sense of engineering problems. These involve social relations. But, the same thing comes up in this area.

So, therefore, it's to develop the mind to be able to address this kind of challenge--the kind of challenge, which is merely typified by Gauss's attack on Euler and Lagrange, which is crucial.

Therefore, the deeper problem, is to get people to be willing, to go through the process, starting with something like the Gauss problem, to understand what is meant by a "physical principle," a "universal physical principle." Or, for example, looking at Kepler: What did Kepler discover? How did he discover it? How did Gauss prove that Kepler's conception of the universe is correct, with his discovery of the orbit of Ceres?

These are the kinds of things that people must be fascinated with. Not because they're going to engineering school, but because they're human beings, who rejoice at being human. They say, "I'm going to university, what? To get the opportunity, to study something I want to study, for my own sake. Something which I know will be useful, if I master it. So, my purpose is not to pass the examination (even if I don't want to fail it). But, my purpose is, to actually get something which is useful to me, inside me. Which makes me a better person. With which I can understand the greatest discoverers of the past. I share the way they thought. I'm part of the continuity of what they did. And I'm a connection to the future."

The thing is, to think about facing a problem for which nobody has discovered a solution before. And discovering a solution. That's what you should aim to master: The ability to solve the problem that has never been solved before. By mastering the methods of discovery, which have been used successfully, by the greatest discoverers of the past. And, the key thing, in this area, is physical. To get away from the computer. Get away from the computer screen, for a while. And concentrate on constructing the experimental design. Pick a challenge of experimental design: Find one that is anomalous--and there are many of them, that are known, that are famous. Work on those, and find inside yourself, how your mind works, in solving one of these kinds of problems.

And we have people who are ingenious on this; sometimes they're not always well-educated. But, they're geniuses in the sense, that if they understand the principle involved, they will work out the solution. The most important thing to convey, in educating young scientists, for example, is simply the understanding of principles, and how principles are discovered and generated. And, the way you approach people, is not by challenging them on their career, as such; that's not their soft spot, that's not where they're vulnerable. They're vulnerable, when it comes to "Well, what kind of a human being does this make you?" Hmm? Are you a useful human being? If we dumped you on Mars, you know, with a life-support system, what are you going to be able to do there? With no computer.

So therefore, in this kind of matter, you have to motivate people on their human quality, not on what some teacher, who's creating on a multiple choice questionnaire, with a few plug-in calculations, is trying to indoctrinate you on. The person, who's fooled, is being sucked into the game. The game of the multiple- choice questionnaire, with a few calculations thrown in, in between the cracks. Whereas, what you really want to develop, is the ability to make an original discovery, when one is needed; or to give an original solution to a problem, where a solution is needed. And that is a human thing. It is not an academic problem. [applause]

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