New Books

Toby G Levy tobylevy at juno.com
Wed Aug 24 21:55:51 CDT 2005


Why do you suppose that Martin Amis put up Pynchon and C.P. Snow as
literary opposites? I was flipping through Amis's "The War Against
Cliche" in a bookstore when I saw this.

Toby

> C. P. Snow once remarked that not knowing the second law of 
> thermodynamics is like never having read Shakespeare. Yet, while 
> many people grasp the first law of energy, "Energy can neither be 
> created nor destroyed," few recognize the second, "Entropy can only 
> increase." What is entropy anyway, and why must it increase? Whether 
> we want to know how a device as simple as a refrigerator works or 
> understand the fate of the universe, we must start with the concepts 
> of energy and entropy.



More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list