GRGR(3) get the point?

[RICHARD_WILSON at udlp.com]

momentarily de-lurking...
------------------------------------

a while back someone (RJ?) was wondering about Pointsman's name...
--------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Edward W.A. Pointsman, F.R.C.S. 
--------------------------------------------------------
0) i couldn't come up with any anagrams (though WARM FECES would fit if you
changed the P to an E - could this discrepancy be a physics reference: Positron
-> Electron by charge-parity-time reversal? ... nah....)...

1) it has 8 points (7 periods +  the  "Point" in Pointsman)
 ...not sure if there is a point to all these points  - kabalistic? points on a
compass dial?

(hmm... maybe i should go back and take a look at that "mongoloid point"
sentence in section one) 

2) W.A. possibly suggests "Wolfgang Amadeus"... so maybe this connects the P-man
to the Rossini-Beethoven stuff later on...

also, Pointsman (as well as his up-coming epithet in slothrop's hallucination)
sounds like an echo of Weissman...
does anyone know the exact count of "_-man" named characters in the oeuvre? 

3) F.R.C.S. - don't know if this is an actual title abbrev - anyone know of one?
( best i could do was : Foreign Research Center Staff). phonetically it suggests
"Frankenstein".

4) multiple middle initials are kind of uncommon. TRP would have known of Paul
A. E. M. Dirac from his physics education. 

Dirac invented something called the "delta-function" which is a special
distribution which allows us to solve problems involving waves (qm and em) with
point-particle wave-equation-solutions (called propagators or green's functions)
with the assumption that measurement is taking place (usually called "scattering
problems"). 

it's kind of like a poisson distribution where the hits-radius has collapsed to
zero (if the distribution of V2 hits were a dirac-delta-function then all of the
hits would occur at a single point in London). 

(Dirac also discovered anti-matter - another possibly relevant concept in GR -
when he formulated the relativistic version of single-particle quantum
mechanics)

---------

the statistical elect/preeterite discussion brings to mind Einstein's famous
quote expressing his philosophical objections to quantum mechanics.

an interesting side-bar to modern physics is concerned with how the solutions to
Schrodinger's equation are to be interpreted. Niels Bohr put forth what is
called the "copenhagen hypothesis" which says that particles are actually
probability waves (ie extended over space-time) inside the universe until a
measurement is taken at which time they collapse to a point which prior to the
measurement only contained a statistical chance of containing the point. an
alternative interpretation put forth by John Wheeler and Bryce De Witt asserts
that qm uncertainty arises due to an infinite set of overlapping universes in
each of which a particle will be a point with slight differences in the position
and speed of the particle being measured and in which the act of measurement
collapses the frame-of-reference from a mixture of all of the universes into
just one (or at any rate a smaller subset) of the universes which we then call
The universe at that particular place and time. this is called the "many
universes hypothesis".

(then there's kaluza-klein theory and supersymmetry but we won't go there...)

so in the copenhagen universe, free-will exists and nobody will  get elected
until the final measurement of grace has   been taken.

in the many-universes universe of universes, karma is fixed  - so the elect and
the preterite are pre-destined. however since all possible destinies are
reallized, everyone who goes to hell also goes to heaven, though the yo(u)-yo(u)
will only get to experience one of them. 

--rwilson

"i guess that depends on what your definition of *is* is" -- wj clinton