ATDDTA (6) 156

[Monte Davis]

Wonderful work, Bekah! Give us crunchy facts and connections; "broad
questions" will surely arise of themselves. 
 
Colors: if you don't have it already, do read "Coloring Gravity's Rainbow"
by N. Katherine Hayles and Mary B. Eiser, in Pynchon Notes #16 --
downloadable as
 
http://www.ham.muohio.edu/~krafftjm/pn/pn016.pdf
 
Until reading it I had missed most of the rich "color coding" in GR. AtD
uses a somewhat different code, but the way Hayles & Eiser go about it (and
you can extract that even without having read GR) looks very useful for AtD
as well.
 
***
 
There's also a throwaway [hah!] reference late in GR to "...a quaint
brownwood-paneled, Victorian kind of Brain War, as between quaternions and
vector analysis in the 1880s..." -- so P has been thinking about that for
decades, too.
 
First: from a working scientist's point of view, quaternions and vector
analysis are two largely equivalent *formalisms*: you can model a wide
variety of physical problems using either mathematical structure, solve
using two very different-looking sets of procedures, and get the same
answers. Which formalism someone uses, and which one "wins" in the long run,
is often historical accident: the prestige of an early practitioner who used
A rather than B, or one may fit more easily into the existing math
curriculum than the other, or the first few "Physics seen through B"
textbooks may be a lot better than their "Physics seen through A"
counterparts.
 
Example by analogy: even though Newton created (one version of) calculus and
used it to convince himself of the arguments in his _Principia_, in the book
itself all the problems are formulated and solved with geometry rather than
calculus
 
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newton/prin-04.html
 
... because that's what his 1680's readers were familiar with. It was an
established and "respectable" formalism. A modern scientist finds the
_Principia_ almost unreadably round-about and clumsy. But that's because
calculus, which had been in many ways a "quick and dirty" shortcut for
Newton and Leibniz, evolved into respectability itself over the next two
generations.
 
That should suggest the other side of the coin: even though two formalisms
may be *mathematically* equivalent, they're like two languages: they have
different flavors and associations and histories, they nudge the mind in
slightly different directions, they represent the world at slightly
different angles. Historically, although other things Hamilton did remain
central to modern mathematical physics, quaternions "lost" and vector
analysis "won" for most purposes. For Pynchon that "Brain War" is part of
his larger take on roads not taken, forgotten (but not necessarily lost)
causes, and alternate perspectives.           
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070401/7abeb0b6/attachment.html>