Pynchon and Quantum Mechanics?

[Timothy C. May]

Briefly, I haven't been posting much on this list lately. I'm not a
lit-crit type, just a former physicist at Intel, now retired, who
happens to also like Pynchon. I stay connected to the chaos sort of
work, so I want to comment on chaos and QM in GR.

Bonnie Surfus wrote:

> 	About _The Dance of the Wu Li Masters_, a great book.  I have 

I'd call it a provocative book, but not accurate. Zukav's spin on QM
is idiosyncratic to that community which thinks Bell's Theorem puts
the magic back in the universe. Most physicists don't see it quite
this way.

> done a bit of work on Pynchon and chaos theory (Look for my article on 
> _Strange Attractors in VINELAND_ in CRITICAL MASS.)  I am reading GR for 
> the second time and hope to scan the surface via chaos, which is a 
> monumental statement.  I hope to do this, anyhow.  Certainly, quantum 
> physics, as prob. the 2nd major scientific disc. of this C., will figure 
> into this work.  Without it, chaoticians would have had little 
> opportunity to locate the necessary bifurcation points relative to their 
> evolution.

No, chaos theory never needs to invoke QM. In fact, if Planck's
Constant, h, were zero, and we were thus in a "classical" world
(classical physics, aka Newtonian), we'd still have chaos.

Information theory is at the core of modern notions of uncertainty.
String complexity, to use the jargon of Kolmogorov, Chaitin, and
others.

We can't predict the trajectories of billiard balls beyond a few
collisions. Not because of quantum mechanics, but because "tiny
errors" march in from the 30th decimal place to the 20th to the 10th
to the 5th to the 3rd, etc. After only a handful of interactions, the
most precisely measured initial positions lead to "chaos."

It is true that researchers are looking at how quantum theory
interacts with chaos theory, but the connections so far have been
minor.

I offer this commentary only to help the lit folks in my domain, as
they have helped me in their domain.

--Tim May

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