AtDtDA(28): Slowly as God's Justice

Mon Mar 24 15:20:09 CDT 2008

quickly: on "equations of history"......seems the phrase appeared in a mathematics journal
  in 1920.......

  Discussions: Forecast 
Warren Weaver
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 27, No. 5 (May, 1920), pp. 205-209
doi:10.2307/2973655
This article consists of 5 page(s). 

Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
  "Slowly as God's justice, reports began arriving out of the East,
from what seemed incomprehensibly eastward, as if the countless tiny
engagements of an unacknowledged war had at last been expressed as a
single explosion ..." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 796)

"incomprehensibly eastward"

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature ... is
Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all
its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case
the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot
entertain any other.

--Edmund Burke, "Of the Sublime," Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html
http://www.victorianweb.org/philosophy/sublime/burke.html

For Serbs [Balkan] begins down there in Kosovo or Bosnia, and they
defend the Christian civilization against this Europe's Other. For
Croats, it begins with the Orthodox, despotic, Byzantine Serbia,
against which Croatia defends the values of democratic Western
civilization.

For Slovenes, it begins with Croatia, and we Slovenes are the last
outpost of the peaceful Mitteleuropa. For Italians and Austrians, it
begins with Slovenia, where the reign of the Slavic hordes starts. For
Germans, Austria itself, on account of its historic connections, is
already tainted by the Balkanic corruption and inefficiency.

For some arrogant Frenchmen, Germany is associated with the Balkanian
Eastern savagery - up to the extreme case of some conservative
anti-European-Union Englishmen for whom, in an implicit way, it is
ultimately the whole of continental Europe itself that functions as a
kind of Balkan Turkish global empire with Brussels as the new
Constantinople, the capricious despotic centre threatening English
freedom and sovereignty....

--Slavoj Zizek, "The Spectre of Balkan" (1998)

http://www.artmargins.com/content/review/petresin.html

Photographs

E.g., ...

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071114.html
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Tunguska.png

"which was worse"

?

annunciation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01541c.htm

Vanavara

http://www.evenkya.ru/eng/?id=obsh&sid=admterdel&ssid=41

Cf. pp. 778, 782

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0803&msg=124991
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_768-791#Page_782

"Ground zero" of the Event was 40 miles north of Vanavara.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_792-820#Page_797

"six hundred miles per hour"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_wave

Distances less than 11,000 km - Seismic waves have predictable travel
schedules. P wave speed = 1.8 x S wave speed. L wave speed = 0.9 x S
wave speed.

Distances greater than 11,000 km - P waves are observed to be delayed
and S waves disappear completely....

Time-distance graphs allow the source of an earthquake to be calculated.
Determined from the time elapsing between the arrival of P and S waves
at a minimum of 3 different seismograph stations. Time of the
earthquake can be determined by knowing the speed of P waves.
Intersection of distance arcs locates epicenter.

http://www.geo.ua.edu/intro03/quakes.html

I'm assuming for the time being Pynchon's figure (calculation?) is at
least roughly correct, but ...

"smoked paper rolls driven clockwork-slow"

Early seismometers had an arrangement of levers on jeweled bearings,
to scratch smoked glass or paper....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismograph#Early_designs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismograph

"'sensitive flames'"

Cf. ...

Cf., e.g., GR, Pt. I, pp. 29-32

http://books.google.com/books?id=iPDGp7VT8H8C
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_9780140188592,00.html

sensitive flame: A Bunsen burner flame that is adjusted so that it
reacts in an exaggerated way to any air movement--right up to sound
waves.

http://www.benteague.com/books/titles/gravitys.html

So called because such a flame appears to serve as a check against hoaxes.

http://www.ugapress.org/0820310263.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=mj7sFr6b6aMC

"'simultaneousness'"

See, e.g., ...

Galison, Peter. Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps:
Empires of Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall04/032604.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=OtRTg8gLU0MC

True time would never be revealed by mere clocks--of this Newton was
sure. Even a master clockmaker's finest work would offer only pale
reflections of the higher, absolute time that belonged not to our
human world, but to the "sensorium of God". Tides, planets,
moons--everything in the Universe that moved or changed--did so,
Newton believed, against the universal background of a single,
constantly flowing river of time. In Einstein's electrotechnical
world, there was no place for such a "universally audible tick-tock
that we can call time, no way to define time meaningfully except in
reference to a definite system of linked clocks. Time flows at
different rates for one clock-system in motion with respect to
another: two events simultaneous for a clock observer at rest are not
simultaneous for one in motion. "Times" replace "time". With that
shock, the sure foundation of Newtonian physics cracked; Einstein knew
it. Late in life, he interrupted his autobiographical notes to
apostrophize Sir Isaac with intense intimacy, as if the intervening
centuries had vanished; reflecting on the absolutes of space and time
that his theory of relativity had shattered, Einstein wrote: "Newton,
forgive me ['Newton, verzeih' mir']; you found the only way which, in
your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought--and
creative power."

At the heart of this radical upheaval in the conception of time lay an
extraordinary yet easily stated idea that has remained dead-center in
physics, philosophy, and technology ever since: To talk about time,
about simultaneity at a distance, you have to synchronize your clocks.
And if you want to synchronize two clocks, you have to start with one,
flash a signal to the other, and adjust for the time that the flash
takes to arrive. What could be simpler? Yet with this procedural
definition of time, the last piece of the relativity puzzle fell into
place, changing physics forever.

This book is about that clock-coordinating procedure. Simple as it
seems, our subject, the coordination of clocks, is at once lofty
abstraction and industrial concreteness. The materialization of
simultaneity suffused a turn-of-the-century world very different from
ours. It was a world where the highest reaches of theoretical physics
stood hard by a fierce modern ambition to lay time-bearing cables over
the whole of the planet to choreograph trains and complete maps. It
was a world where engineers, philosophers, and physicists rubbed
shoulders; where the mayor of New York City discoursed on the
conventionality of time, where the Emperor of Brazil waited by the
ocean's edge for the telegraphic arrival of European time; and where
two of the century's leading scientists, Albert Einstein and Henri
PoincarÃ©, put simultaneity at the crossroads of physics, philosophy,
and technology

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/galison-einsteins-clocks.html

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einsteins-time.htm

Special Relativity

Special relativity (SR) (aka the special theory of relativity (STR))
is the physical theory of measurement in inertial frames of reference
proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the
Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." It generalizes Galileo's principle
of relativity â that all uniform motion is relative, and that there is
no absolute and well-defined state of rest (no privileged reference
frames) â from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including both
the laws of mechanics and of electrodynamics, whatever they may be. In
addition, special relativity incorporates the principle that the speed
of light is the same for all inertial observers regardless of the
state of motion of the source....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

Einstein, Albert. "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter KÃ¶rper."
Annalen der Physik 17 (30 June 1905): 891-921.

http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/papers/1905_17_891-921.pdf

"the error of the seismograph recordings"

"Error" doesn't mean mistake or wrongness. It measures the variability
within each instrument; every measurement comes with a plus-or-minus
figure. If the Event happened instantaneously, each of the charts
would record it as a more or less spread-out peak. The energy released
in a process is calculated from the area under the curve of intensity
versus time; to get the power (rate of energy release), divide the
energy by the duration of the process. Even though he states the math
wrongly, Vanderjuice suspects the seismographs of the world have
responded to a titanic release of energy that took place in
essentially no time at all, so that power = energy divided by zero.
When physicists see a real process apparently demanding division by
zero, they call it a singularity and go looking for an explanation.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_792-820#Page_797

"more than embraced the 'instant'"

http://books.google.com/books?id=Ma77jxOOmBcC
http://www.foucault.info/documents/archaeologyOfKnowledge/foucault.archaeologyOfKnowledge.00_intro.html
http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=0415287537&parent_id=&pc=

"the equations of history"

Perhaps an allusion to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, in which the
Psychohistorian Harry Selden calculates equations of history. His
equations are (seemingly) thrown off by the advent of a mutant with
unusual powers that his predictive equations do not take into
account--not unlike the advent of the Tunguska Event.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_792-820#Page_797

"'Power being equal to the area under the curve'"

In physics, power (symbol: P) is the rate at which work is performed
or energy is transmitted, or the amount of energy required or expended
for a given unit of time....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_%28physics%29

"'it begins to look like a singularity'"

singularity

Main Entry: sinÂ·guÂ·larÂ·iÂ·ty
Pronunciation: \ËsiÅ-gyÉ-Ëla-rÉ-tÄ\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural sinÂ·guÂ·larÂ·iÂ·ties
Date: 14th century
1: something that is singular: as a: a separate unit b: unusual or
distinctive manner or behavior : peculiarity
2: the quality or state of being singular
3: a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex
variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains
points for which the derivative does exist
4: a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time
are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to
be the final state of matter falling into a black hole

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/singularity

In mathematics, a singularity is in general a point at which a given
mathematical object is not defined, or a point of an exceptional set
where it fails to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as
differentiability....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_singularity

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