GWGW

[Craig Clark]

Douglas Kellner writes, apropos the GWGW (pwesumably the Gwoup Wead of
_Gwavity's Wainbow_)

> In any case, it seems to me that the text attacks the Pavolovian "long
> chain of better and better approximations" and "No effect without a cause,
> and a clear chain of linkages"-- an ontology central to modern science
> that Mexico's statistical probabilities, quantum theory and anticipations
> of chaos theory overturns, a more discontinuous universe of probablities
> and hence contingencies, mysteries, etc. It is GR's great achievement to
> provide literary form and interrogation of the passage from the modern to
> the postmodern....

Excuse my scientific ignorance here, but I'd like to throw out a few 
ideas on this subject, based on what little I have been able to wedge 
into my humanities-biased head.... Inter alia, the title of the novel 
suggests this shift. The mathematical description of gravity, and the
splitting of a light beam into a rainbow spectrum using a prism, were
both central achievements of the scientific career of Sir Isaac Newton. 
Behaviourism is one extreme of the logical, ordered, Newtonian 
paradigm of how the universe should operate. But the title of the 
novel suggests also that light is being bent into a rainbow shape by 
gravity - an Einsteinian concept, signalling the shift from the 
orderly Newtonian model of the universe to the less orderly 
Einsteinian one.

Okay, scientists, shoot me down here.

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"