ATDDTA (3) Aether Dreams, 57-58

[David Casseres]

Here's my cue to repost, with a bit of editing, something I pout up on the
Chumps of Choice blog a while back (they read faster than we do):


The Aether is the universal-scale version of Pynchon's old hobbyhorse, the
Grid. The system of coordinates on which everything is measured, to which
everything is relative, *where everything happens*. The Absolute.

In Newton's science, the grid was "space," three-dimensional, homogeneous,
universal and, note well, immaterial. This classical grid was the foundation
of Nature, and so when the Enlightenment built its own politico-economic
Grid, this new Grid partook of the power and absoluteness of the natural
grid. Not only did everything in Nature have its eternal coordinates, so did
all of human actions and institutions (especially commerce and
colonization).

But the notion of light waves, figured out by Maxwell, seemed to require a
material medium for the waves to wave in. The old idea of an invisible
"luminiferous, effluvious aether" fit the bill. It wasn't the same thing as
space, but it filled space and really, there was always something of a
discomfort, a feeling of well, which is it? Aether or space? What's really
real? Where's the Absolute? (Is there absolution?)

Michelson and Morley put an end to the confusion, leaving the huge question
of how light does work, if there's no aether. But space was now back in
place as the domain in which everything exists. Newton's grid again.

But in AtD (O look, something relevant after all), I think we see the Grid
petering out west of Chicago, in the "unshaped freedom" of the "vast herds
of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western
plains." (p. 10) And I believe Pynchon is dreaming ahead to the day when
Einstein describes the photon, and leaves his colleagues to wrestle out an
explanation of why the particles, blasting through space, somehow *look like
waves traveling through aether*, but aren't. "Raffiniert ist der Herrgott,"
sez Einstein, waggling his eyebrows, "aber boshaft ist er nicht." God's
tricky, but not malicious. Oh thanks, Albert.

But the photon is only the setup. Now Einstein throws his punch: *space is
not absolute*. You cannot measure anything against it after all. There is no
grid. *No Grid.*

At least not in the old sense of an Absolute. For Tricky God, it turns out,
has provided an entirely different Absolute, one that you can't use in the
same way at all: C, the speed of light in a vacuum. Or to put it another
way, the Absolute is a law of Nature, not a geometry. Not a system but a
single physical constant.

So now what are we going to imitate in our schemes of profit and conquest,
of territory and dominion? Of course we'll still do as much as we can in the
name of the Grid, but it's not like it used to be. Because for the next
century or so people are going to keep popping up and saying "But everything
is *relative*, innit?" Driving the aggrieved bourgeoisie crazy, right along
with the eye-rolling physicists.

And that steady dance-beat of Old Europe is going to fray into Ragged Time,
and then decompose completely into bebop.

And fictional narrative is going to go all pomo and strange and take on all
sorts of disguises.

Pynchon is doing something rather extraordinary here: destroying a metaphor
that's been right at the heart of his previous work, recreating himself in
many ways as he does so.


On 2/17/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> ...
>
> In Hartford, Merle reads of the upcoming Michelson-Morley experiment. For
> a very good concise description, see
>
> *http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/michelson.html*<http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/michelson.html>
>
> It includes a nifty Flash animation that lets you adjust the speed of both
> light and aether "wind" for a better grasp of what the experimenters *would
> have seen* -- if they hadn't seen nothing, which was even more interesting.
>
> History-of-science wonk digression #1: "luminiferous [light-bearing]
> aether," with that fine old a-e ligature, has a fusty antiquity about it:
> "One of those weird substances people used to believe in, like phlogiston or
> caloric, right?" as I wrote in the meditation on Maxwell:
>
>  *http://montedavis.livejournal.com/2006/12/12/*<http://montedavis.livejournal.com/2006/12/12/>
>
> But in fact, for several centuries it was just as rigorous a construct as
> today's dark energy or Higgs field. It's only in hindsight that we think
> "how unnecessary" --  and, patting ourselves on the back, "how silly."
>

...
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