vv2

[Don Corathers]

A question I'd like to throw out for anybody who has a better visual imagination and sense of spatial relationships than I do.

On page 35:

"If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo."

Easy enough to visualize looking at a planet swinging around in its orbit. If you were precisely positioned in the plane of the orbit, the planet would look like it was shuttling back and forth, left to right to left. The only difference in the passages would be that in one direction it would pass behind the sun and in the other it would pass between the sun and the observer. (I'm guessing we're supposed to ignore scale for the purposes of this image.) But "split the sun with a mirror"? Where does the mirror go, and how is it oriented to the observer? 

This seems at least modestly important because it connects the ideas of the yo-yo and mirror-time, of which we're seeing a lot in these early chapters. I suppose we could just take Mr. Pynchon's word for it that he could design a solar system with mirror that would produce this effect. But the image probably shouldn't be as hard to visualize as I'm finding it. Any thoughts?

Don