Abstract: A bearing system including one or more bearings for optimizing stiffness of each bearing which includes an individual regulator, pressure meter and flow meter to each bearing. The meters send instantaneous values of pressure an flow rate to a computer system which performs an algorithm using the values and computes target signal values for each individual bearing. These values are then transmitted to the respective pressure regulators. The pressures applied by the regulators are maximum values with which the bearing can operate without going into vibration. One algorithm that the computer uses is to compute an "impedance" value of the bearing which is defined to be P/S where P is the pressure measured by the pressure meter and S is the flow rate measured by the flowmeter. This approach assumes that the actual effective pressure in the bearing is at last proportional to the pressure measured at the meter.