An Early work by Thomas Pynchon

[Monte Davis]

David Payne sez:
 
> I'd be happy to try to email a copy of the PDF to you off list if you'd
like. 
 
Thanks for the offer, but I got it second try. For some reason the "OK"
button in the open/save dialog is grayed out, but it worked anyway.
 
First impression from dipping into it: published 1874, so figure ol' Ruggles
(b. 1823) had most of his ideas formed by the 1850s. It's a fascinating
period  (OK, I'm a history of science junkie, so they're all fascinating).
Look at the discussion of "chemical affinity... the force by which the
Elements are united," on pp. 18-19. It is "controlled and modifed by the
three great agents, Heat, Light, and Electricity," etc. etc. NB the table of
contents: he organizes the book as a whole by those "three great agents."
 
He's got it a lot clearer than the earlier "affinity" of alchemy, a heady
brew of love and valence and sympathetic magic. He's well beyond Goethe's
_Elective Affinities_  of 1809, in which the chemistry was explicitly a
metaphor for the human relationships.
 
But he's not quite ready to take that mathematical-reductionist step to
saying that affinity *is* chemical bonding *is* electricity, nothing more or
less. He hasn't assimilated Maxwell yet to assure himself that light is
electromagnetic and interacts with matter as an electrical phenomenon. (The
detailed "how" of that won't be worked out until quantum theory anyway.)
 
The existence of molecules was disputed as late as 1860, so he doesn't have
a developed kinetic theory (Boltzmannn & Maxwell & Willard Gibbs & co) to
assure him that heat enters in simply as a measure of how fast the molecules
are moving (and thus how long electric forces have  to work on them).
 
So from a modern PoV, there's a diffuseness here, a cloudiness, a weasel
wording he can't help because he hasn't resolved more qualitative factors
into fewer quantitative ones -- in fact,  to the aficionado, just a soupcon
remaining of Goethean poetry and alchemical magic. This TRP's chemical
physics is almost, but not quite, a mathematical science.
 
That flavor is long gone from, e.g., my 1960s college textbook _Introduction
to Chemical Thermodynamics_. That covers much of the same ground far more
precisely, concisely and powerfully, is less fun but more enlighening to
read, and I wouldn't be without it for the world. 
 
But what OBA does like no one else is to keep the whole history in mind and
ring the changes, using the power when he needs that and the poetry when he
needs *that*. As I wrote last November in the "Riemann space" thread:
 

"The vein Pynchon works so well is the tension built into the nature of
science, the science of nature. On the one hand it keeps turning up weird
and wonderful new stuff that might as well be magic at first blush...

 

"And on the other, it works relentlessly to *assimilate* the new stuff into
an expanding, rigorously consistent scheme, insisting that there is *one*
world with *one* set of rules. And it's precisely that stone deterministic
rigor that allows it to keep the magic coming -- to predict invisible waves
or time dilation or genes or black holes or bizarre quantum phenomena before
they're observed.

 

"Notice how T.W.I.T., just like The White Visitation, presents a gallery
with the whole range -- from the crackpots and fringers who cherry-pick just
enough Weird Science to pump up the magic they want to believe anyway, to
the mournful Roger Mexico types who've worked through all the equations and
lost the magic along the way."

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20071108/01f2e735/attachment-0001.html>