public school, Lot 49, and Lew Alcindor

[GSnodd at aol.com]

Hello again folks.

Just a few glaringly general notes on the threads ollowed recently:  I am
scientist-educated and I yet generally have no idea what anyone is talking
about with reference to Hawking, or what Werner Von Braun ACTUALLY said,
yadda yadda yadda, partly because I read a generous portion of fiction and
not much in the way of "science" authors or bios of scientists.

It's much more the continuum than the "Science on this side-Arts on that
side" that so many make it up to be.  I have seen science up close, and it's
not nearly so exact as outsiders believe.  In fact, I saw a great deal of
"improvising" and quite a bit of "creativity" in the science lab, more than
I've seen evidence of in quite a few fiction writers.  Although if I called
it "getting creative" when I saw it, the scientists may have been horrified
to hear that term applied to their work.

As I've seen it, the use/replication of creativity/art in the laboratory has
been used quite a bit and is built of strong stuff.  On the other hand, when
I see "science" in a fiction, it largely is made up of nonsense.  Of course,
I'm no rocket scientist....

On fictions:  I assume that every quote is made up, until I see that the
quote "must have" been taken from a historical figure.  Still that is
tentative, the "must have".

I believe, as jm does, that it is "scary" when someone takes a quote in a
novel and makes it out to be "face value".  We should not be so generous with
Mr. Pynchon; I'm not that generous with "non-fiction", after all.

Daniel Stein proposed that the notion of "science is dead" might have come
from most of us being public school educated. Not from my neck of the woods.
 Most of us, in the "lower echelons of academia", our teachers believed, had
no "ticket out" except science.   Degrees in the arts were "worthless", I was
told, and we all believed it.  Nevertheless, the quality of the science
instruction was laudable, as our teachers thought we were doomed if we didnt'
learn our science.  I got largely the same treatment/perspective in college.
 If you believe that you'll need it just to survive, it comes alive before
your very eyes, Daniel.

Is Pynchon "highbrow fiction", to which Paul Mackin alludes?

Yours,

William Kenneth Miller