more on entropy

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

meikle at mail.utexas.edu writes:

>                                  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.  

Yet the letter is an important affirmation of rebellion, and of both 
the writer's and the recipient's identity and, maybe more 
importantly, agency. Both metaphoric uses of the two entropies you 
mention above fail to see this. And it is precisely here, IMHO, that 
TRP's critique of society's (mis)use of science begins.

>                 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.

Yes - the question is _how_ and _why_ he uses sloppy science, and if 
he does so sloppily.*

hg
* (which he doesn't, except in some of his short stories, most 
notably "Entropy")
hag at iafrica.com