TRP Themes

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Tresy Kilbourne writes:

> This reminds me of a book I stumbled across about 10 years ago that 
> vindicated much of what I sensed was going on in Pynchon's universe: 
> Order Out of Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine. IP is a Nobel Laureate in physics. 

One shouldn't really take the '80ties Chaos cult too seriously - I'm 
sure TRP would be the first to agree that it is just as dangerous to 
take Chaos out of its clearly defined scientific context as it is to 
see entropy everywhere.

> The book addresses the central paradox of Newton's Second Law: if the 

Don't you mean the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? If not, please clarify.

> universe is getting increasingly disordered, how does an ordered system 
> like life come into existence? Short answer: fluctuations in systems 

Closed systems are getting increasingly 'disordered', and if the 
universe is a closed system, it is getting more disordered. The time 
frame is such, however, that entropy on a universal level is totally 
irrelevant to us. System earth, which is the one important for life, 
is not a closed system (the sun is constantly pumping energy in). So 
increasing disorder does not directly apply to us anyway. On a more 
localized level, say a cellular level, maybe....

> under far-from-equilibrium conditions (i.e., severe stress) can give rise 
> to "spontaneous self-organization". To me, this is why Pynchon is always 
> investigating "cusps" and various other singularities in human history, 
> because it's at these junctures that possibilities for renewal exist. I 

Except the "cusp" WW2 represents is not about renewal at all, but 
about Them further tightening their reign - only when things are in 
flux in order to facillitate a rearrangement of Their structures, 
opportunity exists to slip through their fingers, or just. er, 
dissolve?

> can do Prigogine's book justice here, but leafing through it just now 
> reminded me again of how many points of contact there are with Pynchon's 
> own deployment of science

I agree that Chaos Theory, which began to be established as discipline in the 
early seventies, seems a useful (metaphoric) angle to approach GR from. The 
problems in prediction, which gave rise to Chaos mathematics, had 
been around for a long time, and while TRP could not have heard of 
Chaos when he wrote GR, his grasp of both science and pop culture 
means that he probably was aware of the general, ah, atmosphere? which 
gave rise to it later.

hg
hag at iafrica.com