Do we know, or are we Guessing, Speculating or do we have a Hunch about how Bessler's Wheels worked?

I sometimes wonder if Bessler had any qualms about publishing his Apologia Poetica and his Das Triumphans books.  Did he fear that he had provided clues that were too easy to decipher?  I know I am reluctant to give any hints about my current thinking for fear of giving anything away and I suspect most of us are of a similar mind.

However, I think he must have been pretty confident that the clues were too difficult to decipher otherwise he would never have published them.  But that raises the question are they too difficult for us too?  He must have thought that at some point people would work on his books in an effort to extract the original meaning he intended us to grasp; but that this should begin to happen three hundred years after his death was probably not something that occurred to him.

He published the books when he was at the height of his fame and confident that his wheel would be sold, in which case the books were just there to allow him to reveal that the clues had been there all along and only his own cleverness had kept them invisible.

I have been criticised in the past for publishing speculation without labelling it as such, thereby giving the impression that my speculations were factual. I hope I corrected that impression but I think there is a thin wall between what we think is fact, speculation, following a hunch and guessing.

Speculation is the consideration of some subject which leads to a conclusion or opinion reached by such contemplation. Often such speculations are impossible to verify, and one can say that it is the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.

Besides speculating, I have followed many hunches over the years most of which ended in a firm conviction that my hunch was wrong. Other hunches I chased have led me to believe they were correct or true, even though I did not have any proof.  Like all hunches these were based on a feeling or guess, based on intuition rather than fact.

Guessing combines elements of  hunches and speculation but is broader based.  For example you can guess the next roll of a dice but you can't speculate what it would be.  It won't be accurate at all because the dice has no memory of previous rolls, but you can speculate what the dice roll will be, based on, for example, looking at the statistical distribution of past rolls and so forth. But it just won't be very accurate.

So I think that speculation is an informed guess.   But a hunch is something extra; some unconscious conclusion about the way to the solution.  I often awaken in the night having had a sudden revelation about something I had been thinking about during the previous day or week.  Often it it proves unfounded in the cold light of dawn, on the other hand I have made some major discoveries which I was able to verify subsequently.

But some of the most interesting revelations have come to me as I was writing descriptions of my various discoveries. These have confirmed what I considered was hardly more than speculation at the time  and thus became facts.

So revelations can materialise out of the blue and I'm sure they stem from unconscious activity in a part of the brain which appears to be able to work unsupervised, independently and in a focussed way.

JC

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