more on entropy

[meikle at mail.utexas.edu]

hg writes:

>Why do people still insist on equating thermodynamic entropy and
>information entropy? The two have absolutely nothing to do with one
>another! It is this type of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo which has
>ruined many a earnest engagement with TRP.

Looking at this from a historian's perspective, I'm interested in the fact
that people like TRP have made this connection and have made use of it,
whether or not it's a valid connection.  Lot 49 wouldn't exist as we know
it without this connection.  One example:  Mike Fallopian explaining that
the members of the Peter Penguid society have to send one letter a week
through the W.A.S.T.E. system.  Then we see a letter that contains
absolutely nothing new, nothing that adds to or differs from what the
recipient already knows.  In other words, according to Claude Shannon's
(Bell Labs) information theory, there's no measurable information.  Or, in
a metaphoric application of Henry Adams's version of the second law of
thermodynamics, the letter is only more evidence of the random sinking of
everything into some amorphous lowest common denominator of
undifferentiated sameness.  And what about John Nefastis's model of
Maxwell's demon?  (That's where Pynchon puts the lie to the
entropy/information inversion:  "Sorting's not work?  Tell it to the post
office," or words to that effect.)  Henry Adams, philosopher of entropy,
lurks in and within V.  Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of information, is
evoked at any number of points in Lot 49.  TRP invokes (and satirizes) the
cosmic esp of McLuhan's "global village" when he has Mucho Maas declare
something to the effect that there's a mystical unity of all those who say
"rich chocolaty goodness" at the same time or hear the same song lyric at
the same time. Just because TRP uses sloppy science (for whatever purpose)
is no reason not to pay attention to it.