ATDDTA (3) Aether Dreams, 57-58

[Monte Davis]

David Casseres wrote:
 
> 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.
 
I'm going to take your very sage emphasis on " a new kind of Absolute" and
run with it. I'm going to float the notion that special relativity is
"offstage but central" in AtD . I mean that in the same sense that the
actual devastation of WWII and the Holocaust (just past)... and the nuclear
arms/ICBM race (just about to start)... are "offstage but central" in GR.
 
AtD is a book chock-full of light, of aether, of clocks and mirrors and
railroads, of Riemann and Minkowski and space-time... and it has three
passing mentions of relativity, and one of Einstein. Isn't that just a bit
odd? Isn't that, in fact, passing strange?
 
As you say, the pop-science (and Weird Science) take has been that
Einstein's 1905 paper "made everything relative." If measurements of time
and space intervals could be stretched or squeezed according to an
observer's state of motion, and no state of motion or reference frame had a
privileged status, then... woo-woo! Anything was possible!
 
But in some very important senses, *less* was possible after 1905. The whole
point was (1) to keep the laws of physics from changing with motion, and (2)
to incorporate -- actually, rebuild around -- the fact that light always
moves at the same speed in any reference frame. 
 
Einstein said repeatedly that he'd have preferred the name "invariant
theory" if it hadn't already been in use for a branch of algebra.As space
and time interavls got shifty, Minkowski showed how to define an invariant
space-time interval. And in the new scheme, nothing could go faster than
light, ever, nohow, noway -- not that it's extremely hard or that we don't
know how to go about it, but that it's UNDEFINED, like dividing by zero or
going north from the North Pole. That's built into what we now MEAN by space
and time.
 
By the same token, time travel was right out. You can in principle have the
Wellsian "time machine" experience by zooming so fast that the earth ages
800,000 years while only hours pass on your spaceship -- but you can never,
ever go *back* even a fraction of a second. You can't bring Erlys back, or
Webb, or undiscover the Vormance artifact, or silence the guns of August
1914.   
 
So just when we're geting all excited about "time as the fourth dimension,"
and how loosey-goosey Einstein has shown the world to be... in fact, he has
slammed a very big iron-bound door, very hard. There is now an absolute
limit on speed, and a profoundly fixed arrow of time.
 
I think Pynchon knows that very well. I think relativity is offstage in AtD,
and Weird Science alternatives are singing and dancing 24/7 onstage, because
that nice young patent clerk locked us into time and history more deeply
than ever before -- and that is too terrible to contemplate. There may be a
world of flying girls with aether wings, where Roswell and Merle can turn
events to different paths by tweaking "the constant term in the primitive"
-- but it isn't this one.
 
  
 
 
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