ATDTDA (5.4) - Bad Ice After Midnight

[Paul Mackin]

On Mar 27, 2007, at 10:34 AM, Monte Davis wrote:

> Carvill John wrote:
>>   There's a lot of talk about space, time, dimensions, etc. I wish  
>> I understood more of it. I wish some scientifically minded p- 
>> lister would contribute some kind of ATD Math Overview. Monte?
> Nowhere near enough time or focus for an overview, but a few notes  
> specifically on the Transnoctial  Discussion Group:
>
> "with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces and went into Riemann  
> space..."
>
> Pure flimflam. We associate the longitude problem,  great-circle  
> routes, etc. with oceangoing ships because of contingencies of the  
> history of European exploration, but that's all perfectly  
> manageable with good old geometry and trigonometry in good old  
> Euclidean/Cartesian 3-space. There's nothing inherently more  
> "Riemannian" about sailing from Ostend to Singapore than about  
> walking.
>
> "...Planet Earth.”
> “Which not so long ago was believed to be a plane surface."
>
> Historical mythology, of course. Wikipedia notwithstanding,  
> Washinton Irving didn't invent the meme that Columbus had proved  
> the world round, but his 1828 biography did cement it in Anglophone  
> pop culture-- and provides a superb example of "how good it feels  
> to condescend to our benighted ancestors, even if we have to  
> misrepresent them to do so."  It shouldn't need to be said, but   
> the sphericity of the earth  had been conventional wisdom (among  
> the small educated fraction who thought about such things at all)  
> at least since Hellenistic times. Columbus' challenge to late-15th- 
> century conventional wisdom was to argue that the earth was ~15,000  
> miles in circumference rather than (as most authorities correctly  
> believed) ~25,000 miles, so that a then-feasible westward voyage  
> from the Azores could reach China.

that foreshortened circumference seems like Columbus's equivalent of  
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

>
> P knows all this, of course, and I have to think this is a blatant  
> flag that we're in Weird Science territory.

Pynchon does seem to know (most of the time at least) and insures  
that WE will know that he knows.

Nice post, Monte.

P.

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