Atd : page 542---starts on page 524.Big Ass Spoiler

[Anville Azote]

On 12/7/06, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Two other ideas, related to concepts never spoken of in
> the novel but very much worth persuing. First, there are
> simply too many arrows pointing in direction of Richard
> Feynman for parallels to Kit to be ignored. Second, there
> were two, nearly buried, possiable carom shots off of Proust,
> and miles of raptureous prose:
>

Rilly?  Someone else can judge the Proust; it's the Feynman angle
which interests me, and all I can say about that is --- rilly?  The
most definite connection I can draw is Kit's journey through Tannu
Tuva.  Significant, yes, but does it make the characters parallel?  I
presume your other evidence is accessible via the search links you
posted a while back, to wit:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Feynman+shambhala&spell=1

"Feynman" and "Shambhala" occur on the same pages because of
"Shambhala Publications", which appears to be a New Age publishing
house.  The first page of hits is heavily salted with Fritjof Capra's
"The Tao of Physics", which is not a physics book but instead an early
example of the genre which draws unjustified parallels between modern
science (mostly quantum physics) and ancient mysticism.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Feynman+tuva&btnG=Search

This is definitely significant, like I said before. . . . but all it
rilly shows is how an idiosyncratic American physicist, a kid from Fah
Rockaway, New York who made it big, brought an obscure Central Asian
territory to wide attention.  Who's to say that Pynchon didn't learn
about Tuva from the Feynman stories and then write about it for his
own reasons, which had nothing further to do with Feynman?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Feynman+vectors&btnG=Search

Feynman was a physicist.  He used vectors.  As a professor, he taught
and wrote about them.  What of it?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Feynman+riemann&btnG=Search

Yes, the names of two prominent intellectuals do sometimes occur on
the same page.  None of the Google hits give any evidence of Feynman
himself working on the Riemann hypothesis or any other concept due
specifically to Riemann.  (The only place in the anecdote books in
which Feynman mentions Riemann anything is one point when he suffers a
bout of insomnia and works out a few formulas related to the Riemann
zeta function.)  Looking through them, I see "Riemann integrals" being
applied to "Feynman path integrals" --- what a shock, mathematical
techniques named for two different people being related!  What does
this have to do with the character of Kit Traverse?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Feynman+quaternions&btnG=Search

Again, this doesn't give any evidence that Feynman himself did
anything with quaternions.  The **Feynman Lectures on Physics** are
done entirely with vectors; in the brilliant chapter of Volume 1 where
he builds from counting to the complex numbers, he **stops** with the
complex numbers and never advances to higher dimensionality.  He
certainly **knew about** the quaternions; I recall a passage where he
describes how they were displaced by vectors, and I'll try to locate
that description (the **Lectures on Computation,** maybe).  But
knowing about an interesting bit of math --- math which has never been
suppressed, just disused for most practical applications --- is not at
all the same as making significant contributions to that field.

So, rilly, the **only** significant contact point between Kit Traverse
and Richard Feynman is Tannu Tuva.

-A. A.