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

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Maybe saying "parallel" is a bit too much. But Kit's trip
through Tuva leads him, eventually, to Shambhala. More
than just a coincidence. And Kit's throat singing is what 
really gets him to Shanbhala and that's way more than
coincidence. And the script on the stamp on the cover
of the book is a Tuvan script over a Himaylayan image.
And that's no coincidence at all, that is all quite deliberate.
I think the stamp on the cover is supposed to be
one of the stamps from Shambhala. And, by extension,
by definition, purely fraud. But that, of course, is
another tangent altogether.

Let's just say, if anyone reading AtD knows more
about Feynman as a physicist and his interest
in Tuva will just speak up, I'm sure deeper
connections will be found. I'm not talking here
about point by point tracking of every single
concievable related element. This is what I'm
talking about:

"Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor 
adjustment or two it's what the world might be".

> "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.

Ya mean, like GR? Or AtD? Who sez unjustified?

> 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

Rilly? You mean Pynchon doesn't spend acres of writing
drawing parallels between ancient  mysticism and physics,
furthermore displaying a long fascination with the 
region in question? Remember as well, that Feynman's 
interest in Tuva came out of a stamp collection. I think
we need to look further.

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

"     Since Tuva, where he had heard such unaccountably double-jointed 
singing, in times of perplexity, as other men might routinely curse or 
absentmindedly reach for their penises or inexplicably begin to weep, 
Kit had found himself making down in his throat a single low gutteral
tone, as deep as he could reach, as long a breath would allow. 
Sometimes he believed that if he got this exactly right it would transport 
him to "where he should really be," though he had no clear picture of 
where that was. After he had done this for long enough he began to 
feel himself enter a distinctly different state of affairs. "(AtD 1079-80)

I'd say that's more than significant enough. A convergence, if you will
allow me at least that much.

Thanks,
Robin
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Anville Azote" <anville.azote at gmail.com>
> 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=Searc
> h
> 
> 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.