Those M&D words 9: epsilonics

[Monte Davis]

In Newton's notation  for the differential calculus, epsilon is an
infinitesimally small number. Say you have a curve in the x-y plane and are
seeking its rate of change at a certain value of x. Very roughly, you
calculate the average rate of change (the curve's slope as if it were a
straight line) over smaller and smaller intervals (delta-x) from x to (x +
epsilon); as epsilon goes to zero, you approach the desired (instantaneous)
value.

Maskelyne finds coincidence -- intriguing, but not miraculous -- in M&D's
birth sign houses and their Obs. In that context, "practising epsilonics"
seems to mean "looking to ever-finer details for traces of God's handiwork."

Cf. the scenery on the way to Cuxhaven, GR p. 567:

"...the stairstep gables that front so many of these ancient north-German
buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet gray as if risen out of the sea,
over these straight and very low horizons. They hold shape, they endure,
like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago mathematicians were
learning to break the cannonball’s rise and fall into stairsteps of range
and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller,
approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs
and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer,
smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed
down intact―it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the
Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless
themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders
of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes, whole and
shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a while, and go
away..."




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