In the 1970s, a physicist named Dr. Lückert taught at the Gesamthochschule Siegen, Gummersbach department (today TH Köln, Campus Gummersbach). He belonged to that generation of university teachers who were still called "Bauräte im Ingenieurschuldienst" (construction councilors in engineering school service) and whose traces do not exist on the internet. What remains of him are three sentences he gave to his students — not as exam material, but as thinking tools for an entire lifetime.
The sum of all evils is constant.
We must pay a price.
We must die a death.
The First Principle: A Conservation Law for Problems
Physicists know conservation laws. Energy is not lost, it is converted. Mass is conserved, momentum is conserved. Dr. Lückert transferred this principle to what engineers experience daily: problems.
You don't solve a problem. You transform it.
Every technical solution creates new difficulties. Whoever saves weight loses stability. Whoever gains speed pays with energy consumption. Whoever reduces complexity limits possibilities. The sum remains constant — but the distribution can be changed.
For an engineering student in Gummersbach, this was liberation. He no longer chased the perfect solution that eliminates all problems. He began to ask: Which problems do I want to have? Which evils do I prefer over others?
Five years after his studies, in 1983, this student invented a process called "rotary polygon turning." The conventional problem: In shaping, planing, and oscillating non-round turning, the tool must oscillate — back and forth, back and forth. At high speeds, inertia becomes the enemy. Accelerate, brake, reverse. The forces explode, the machine vibrates, the speed is limited.
His solution did not eliminate inertia — that's impossible, physics is physics. He transformed it. Instead of oscillation: rotation. Instead of back and forth: uniform rotary motion. The cutting motion arises from the superposition of three rotary movements — workpiece and tool both rotate, and from their difference the cut emerges.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Oscillation (back and forth) | Rotation (uniform) |
| Inertia as enemy | Inertia as ally |
| Low speed | High RPM possible |
| Tool moves relatively | Both rotate, difference creates cut |
The inertia is still there. But now it works with the process, not against it. The evil was not eliminated, but brought into a form that the inventor wanted.
Dr. Lückert would have nodded.
The Second Principle: The Currency of Progress
Nothing is free. Trade-offs everywhere. Whoever wants speed pays with precision. Whoever wants security pays with freedom. Whoever wants innovation pays with stability.
The question is never: How do I avoid the price?
The question is: What price am I willing to pay?
Rotary polygon turning had a price. In 1983, when the patent was filed, the drive motors of machine tools were at their limit at 3,000 revolutions per minute. The process needed higher speeds to leverage its advantages. The drive technology wasn't ready.
- Waiting for the technology. Decades.
- The outsider existence. No understanding from industry.
- Material insecurity.
- The feeling of being ahead of one's time and therefore alone.
Today, speeds of 12,000, 18,000 RPM are standard. Technology has caught up. But the inventor had to pay the price before he could see the returns.
We must pay a price. Dr. Lückert didn't say the price would be fair.
The Third Principle: The End of Possibilities
This is the most radical of the three principles.
Taken literally, it speaks of mortality. But Dr. Lückert was a physicist, not a preacher. He meant something else: Every decision kills all other possibilities.
In the mind of an inventor, infinitely many solutions exist simultaneously. Variants, alternatives, what-ifs. As long as nothing is built, everything is possible. But at some point the prototype must emerge. At some point you must commit. The infinite possibilities in the mind must die so that a single reality can come into being.
Whoever wants to keep everything open creates nothing.
The adapted engineer who takes a secure position at a large company and leaves his inventions in a drawer — this possible person had to die so that the inventor could live. The "quasi-employee" was never born. Instead: a life between cultures, twelve years in Colombia, decades of waiting for an industry that didn't understand.
We must die a death. Not someday at the end. Every day, with every decision.
Three Principles, One Concept
Dr. Lückert's three principles are connected. They all deal with the acceptance of limits — against the hubris of being able to have everything.
The sum of evils is constant: You can change the distribution, not the quantity.
We must pay a price: Every gain has costs, visible or hidden.
We must die a death: Every realization destroys its alternatives.
A physicist from Gummersbach taught this to his students in the 1970s. He appears in no database, no search engine knows him. In a historical documentation of the campus, his name appears once — as one of four lecturers who conducted the merger negotiations with Siegen in 1971.
But his principles have survived — in the minds of those who listened, and in the inventions that emerged from that listening.
That is perhaps the only immortality that counts.