ATDTDA ether (on topic, a paper from the 1010 people...)

[mikebailey]

http://1010.co.uk/maxwell_presentation.html#1

brief quote:
Equally the paranoiac work of Thomas Pynchon, day and light - returning
to Against the Day. Coming to light, revelation, exposure, a transparency
or making visible enabled by this crystalline Iceland spar which serves as
a doubling - the decomposition of light into two rays (the ordinary and
extraordinary, the real and the imaginary component) as it passes
through the calcite crystal. Science as a bringing into light, the light of day
as opposed to the darkness of spiritualism. Work (and putting the
spectrum to work, work and energy and entropy, light as resource and as
power) and the day and light.

"Deep among the equations describing the behaviour of light, field
equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an
itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and
again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the
side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between two
worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety...
Within the mirror, the scalar term, with the daylit and obvious and takenfor-
granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted
pilgrim's guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless
uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist."
[Against the Day. Thomas Pynchon]


....In an article on Aether for the Encyclopedia Britannica Maxwell wrote:
Ether or Aether (aiqhr probably from aiqw I burn) a material substance of
a more subtle kind than visible bodies, supposed to exist in those parts of
space which are apparently empty... Whatever difficulties we may have in
forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the aether, there can be
no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty,
but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the
largest, and probably the most uniform body of which we have any
knowledge. Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter
is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant
bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have
as yet no conception, but also ... to constitute the material organism of
beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours
are at present - is a question far transcending the limits of physical
speculation.

(Maxwell, fairly heavy hitter, character in Lot 49; the Michelson-Morley
experiment was a big deal!  Actually no-aether was the upstart, hipster
thinking of its time...
in AtD, perhaps we may divine something of the author's attitude
from the way so many ether adherents drift into the mental ward...)