ATDDTA (3) Heavy Weather, 59-60

[David Casseres]

On 2/17/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
> ...
>
> We do like our outlaws.
>
> Our crazies... not so much. In the Northern Asylum or "tolerated… though
> not especially beloved" in the saloons we find the light-talkers,
> Lightarians, light addicts, Addled Ed -- excuse me, Ed Addle, with his
> aetheric weather: "Minute droplets of nothing at all, mixed in with the
> prevailing Ætheric medium. Until the saturation point is reached, of course.
> Then there is condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated
> nothingness sweeps a given area…"
>
> (During Sherman's march across the South in the American Civil War, his
> engineers proved adept at quickly repairing rail lines and bridges destroyed
> by retreating Confederate troops. After a while, the latter began to joke
> bitterly that even blowing up tunnels was useless: "Those Yankees allus
> carry spare tunnels, too."
>
> The metaphor of surface waves in water, transverse and longitudinal and
> shear waves in material media (sound, earthquakes, explosive shocks) had
> been stretched and stretched again to account for light until by 1887 it was
> ready to tear. Some, equipped with Maxwell's tools, were ready to move on --
> but here we see those who rebounded the other way, insisting that light be
> *more* like tangible stuff, aether *more* like stuff that can sustain not
> just waves but pressures and fronts and storms.
>
> You can go crazy, Pynchon seems to be saying, trying to cram something
> truly new into an old scheme.  We should be grateful that today we
> understand *our* world without bogus, misleading  notions like, say,
> "electric currents."
>
Indeed.

Those of us who use GMail to receive the p-list get a little extra: a
tasteful column of "sponsored links" (i.e., paid for) to the left of the
thread of p-list content.  These links are chosen to "go with" our content,
and sometimes correspondences are amusing.  For example, the "Aether Dreams"
thread gave this link, among others:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ik=a313a526df&view=rl&rlk=Physics%20Theory&rll=en&zx=xbfyy3-uhzkm5
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