MDMD (10) Summary 1

[Otto]

MDMD (10) Summary (94-104)

Excerpts in both languages:
http://www.venus-transit.de/text/MasonDixon.html
http://www.venus-transit.de/text/MasonDixonEnglish.html

Structurally this chapter, in which we meet again Reverend Cherrycoke and
his audience (whom we had left at the end of chapter 7) really is a framed
narrative, the part on Mason and Dixon told by Cherrycoke is in-between the
1786-parts.

Summary I (94-96)
The chapter opens with a quote from Cherrycoke's own "Unpublished Sermons"
where he equates Kepler's laws of the elliptic movements of the celestial
bodies to God's laws having us humans in His gravitational field of force.
The Twins want to see the explanation of the parallax (Chapter 9, p. 93) on
the orrery and have their fun lighting the tapers while Tenebræ realises
that cousin Ethelmer (who realises that she has grown to a young lady since
he saw her the last time) seems to be drawn very close to her by some other
gravitational law than Kepler's.

To explain the parallax the Rev'd (of course) has to operate the inner
planets while the twins "content themselves with the movements of the
outermost Planets, Saturn and the new "Georgian," but three years old."
(95.13-15)
This reminds me on another "new planet" in another novel by Pynchon,  "The
new planet Pluto." (GR 415)
[The entire quote can be found in a post from Robert (jbor) from August 11,
2000, filed under "WW2 in GR" at www.waste.org/pynchon-l ]

Uranus was discovered coincidentally on March 13, 1781 by Sir Friedrich
Wilhelm Herschel (1738-1822), originally an expert on military music, who
had moved to England in 1757 and had worked as a church organist before his
discovery made him famous and granted him support by King George III.
Herschel first thought that he had discovered a new comet.
But the name he took did not last as it is sometimes with those astronomical
names chosen to gain support of some sovereign, for example the names of
Jupiter's four big moons chosen by Galileo.

This new planet, in 1786 still known under his original name Georgian or
Georgium, has been added to the orrery three years ago by "Dr. Nessel, the
renown'd German engineer" (95.15). But the explanation given by Tim Ware
http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/alpha/n.html
doesn't say something about the origin of the engineer's name. Neither the
Brockhaus nor the Encarta or any of my books on Astronomy know him and the
only two internet sources I could find were these: Maybe it has something to
do with "Awakening Young Minds. Perspectives on Education," Denise D. Nessel
(Ed). Los Altos, CA: Malor Books (1997). Review by Wanda A. R. Boyer, Ph.D.,
http://www.cadvision.com/Home_Pages/accounts/liszt/Reviews.html
or with a character from "thirtysomething," a show I don't know:
http://www.geocities.com/televisioncity/set/1116/ep407.htm

Anyway, this Dr. Nessel had added Mappemondes to Uranus in different shapes
to the different orreries, showing it as a habitable world with continents
and oceans, leaving it to the children to apply their own stories and
histories to this new world.
According to their interests the Twins think of the martial parts and
Tenebræ of the scientific development. All this makes me think of my own
first encounter with that genre. Not quite Captain Future (or in the case of
the twins maybe better Niven/Pournelle) and Ursula Le Guin yet, but maybe to
call an early, and imo a very sympathetic one, form of Science fiction
already.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/1128/cf_pulp.html
I take Captain Future as an example because I remember that in this pulp-sf
from the Forties of the 20th century the other planets of the Solar System
still were described as habitable worlds, maybe against better knowledge at
that time (?) while I have no doubt that in 1786 there was no scientific
evidence that these worlds should *not* be populated. The unique character
of every of our sibling planets was still unknown. My (German) copy of Le
Guin's "The Dispossessed" (1974)
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/dispossessed.html
shows some mappemondes of Tau Ceti's habitable worlds to give the reader the
impression of how these imaginative worlds might be shaped.

Cherrycoke explains how the astronomers determine "the value of the Solar
Parallax" (95.34), which is the "size of the Earth, in seconds of Arc, as
seen by an observer upon the surface of the sun" (96.1-2) by recording the
exact time of when "this Passage begins and ends" (95.32) from as many
points on earth as possible, preferably near the poles. We have had
geometry, analysis and statistics in GR, here we get "the magick of
Celestial Trigonometry" (96.7) which makes it unnecessary to burn our feet
to get the "Vector of Desire" (96.12), as cousin De Pugh Le Spark calls it.
Cherrycoke says a little silent prayer for him for being good at
mathematics. Why? This isn't the time of Galileo, whose risks are mentioned
later in the chapter (98.23-27).

Otto