pynchon and blackett

[Basileios Drolias]

hallo all, 

at about page 12 in GR, just before the "I'm the guy who lives other 
peoples fantasies"song, Pirate Prentice mentions P.M.S. Blackett and the  
quote "You can't win a war with gusts of emotion". (Do you remember that?).

I am giving a talk on Patrick Blackett (since I work in a building called 
Blackett lab) and I was wondering whether anybody knew the context out of 
which this phrase came out of.

However this is not the only reason for writing this here. I somehow 
believe that BLackett is intentionally placed there by Pynchon as a sort 
of sign of what is following in the rest of the book. Blackett wanted to 
win the war not with gusts of emotion but with science (and I wouldn't be 
surprised if this is the context out of which his phrase came out of). He 
was the first to introduce probabilities (and Poisson distributions) in 
different occasions to  "predict" different outcomes. Blackett as the 
flag carrier of science? a model out of which pynchon built Roger Mexico?

basil