AtDTDA: 19 hidden 'innocently' inside the 'w' term [542]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

There's that 'hidden term'—the 'w' term, Woevre is speculating.
It seems to be the key to understanding the Quaternionic Weapon.
Well, that term, it appears, represents time. I still don't 'get' the math
in Against the Day, but fortunately, someone does. I'm pretty sure 
that this has been posted before, but this is the moment in our 
traversal of the novel where we really can use it: 

          Science in Against the Day: Vectors and Quaternions
          Michael White

           Here at last is the long-delayed next installment of my 
          ongoing primer on the science in Thomas Pynchon's novel 
          Against the Day. The draft of part 1 can be found here. 
          Illness and major deadlnes put me back by months. I hope 
          to have more installments out soon.

          Anyway, here is part 2: Quaternions and Vectors in 
          Against the Day. . . .:

          . . . .Why does Pynchon make such a big deal of quaternions and 
vectors in Against the Day? Possibly because they are so tied up with the 
changing notions of light, space, and time around the end of the 19th Century. 
An important theme in the history of science is that how we perceive our world 
is limited by how we can measure it, and what we can say about it (especially 
in terms of mathematics). The quaternionists’ views of space and time were 
limited by the mathematical formalisms they were working with. Some of them 
speculated that the scalar (or w ) term of a quaternion could be used somehow 
to represent time, while the three vector components covered 3-dimensional 
space, but this view treats time differently from how it would eventually be 
dealt with in the four-dimensional space-time of special relativity. For one 
thing, time as a scalar term would only have two directions, ‘+’ or ‘-’; that 
is, either forward or backwards, whereas in relativity individual observers 
can be rotated any angle relative to the time axis of four-dimensional 
space-time (recall the Frogger example from part I of this essay).

Characters in Against the Day speculate about the somewhat mysterious role of 
the w term of quaternions, suggesting that the ‘Quaternion weapon’ makes use the 
w term to somehow displace objects in time. As Louis Menand notes in his review 
of Against the Day, this book “is a kind of inventory of the possibilities 
inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination.” (I disagree 
with Menand’s claim that this is all the book is, and that it is just a rehash 
of what was done in Mason & Dixon. More on that in another installment of this 
essay.)

Spaces and geometries, those which we perceive, which we can’t perceive, or 
which only some of us perceive, are a recurring theme in Against the Day. As 
Professor Svegli tells the Chums about the ‘Sfinciuno Itinerary’, “The problem 
lies with the projection” of surfaces, especially imaginary ones beyond our 
three-dimensional earth. Thus ‘paramorphoscopes’ were invented to reveal “worlds 
which are set to the side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world 
given us.” (p. 249) To draw perhaps a too-crude analogy, the 
mathematical tools of physics are like paramorphoscopes - designed correctly, 
they can enable us to talk about worlds and imaginary axes that we would not 
have considered otherwise. And perhaps the by abandoning some of the tools once 
current in the 19th Century, we have closed off our perception of other aspects 
of nature that remain currently transparent to us. It turns out that Gibbs’ 
vector analysis itself was insufficient to handle important aspects of 
relativistic space-time as well as quantum mechanics, and physicists have since 
rediscovered important ideas in algebra developed by Hermann Grassman and 
William Clifford, whose 19th century work anticipated important 20th century 
developments better than quaternions or vector analysis. . . .          

http://tinyurl.com/39nzyb

But how 'innocent' is time anyway? It is after all, that which wounds all heels.
Time is a term often worth considering when contemplating karma. This place 
we now are in—the 'Grand Dyke'—is holding back all these forces of bad 
karma that King Leopold's despoilment of the Congo demands. The Congo 
might help us see one of Pynchon's 'hidden terms': Civil Rights. Lurking in the 
background [though breaking into the foreground in Mason & Dixon] is the 
issue of civil rights. It also breaks into the foreground here: Flanders awaits 
a gassing, this story continues in Gravity's Rainbow. Underneath it all is 
slavery, and if it's justice that Pynchon seeks, Our Beloved Author perceives 
justice in terms of enslavement, and of course freedom. And as we all know, 
freedom is the domain of the Counterforce.

Po-Mo sounds wafting through the room:
Brian Eno, David Byrne: 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts'
Quran
Sire LP

Laurie Anderson: United States Parts I-IV
"Language is a virus from outer space"—William S. Burroughs
Warner Brothers LP