The Rule of Phase Applied to History: Vidal, Adams, and Pynchon

[Henry]

No doubted noted previously, but new to me, and so perhaps to others:
http://atomicrazor.blogs.com/atomic_razor/2008/10/the-rule-of-pha.html

"I had been reading Gore Vidal's seminal New York Review of Books essay on
the New Novel, 'American Plastic: the Matter of Fiction' and arrived at the
section on Thomas Pynchon. Vidal didn't have much time for the other
American writers working the manner of the roman nouveau, such as Donald
Barthelme and John Barth, but he saw something in Pynchon, partly Pynchon's
refusal to sell out to the academic world and secure a cosy sinecure for
himself in some liberal arts college in New England and partly Pynchon's
interest in and use of science and scientific metaphors in his novels."

"Henry Adams is not an obscure writer. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and
The Education of Henry Adams are available in Penguin Classics (or certainly
were). The Education of Henry Adams contains the essay 'A Law of
Acceleration' as Chapter 34. The notion of exponential accelerating change
is important to the idea of the Technological Singularity and it is
interesting to note that here we have the idea initiated by as mainstream
thinker as one could hope for."

"But it is a second essay 'The Rule of Phase Applied to History' mentioned
by Vidal as a prime influence on Pynchon that Adams fully crystallised the
idea of the Technological Singularity in terms of the notion of the phase
change - ice, water and steam are all forms of H20, but their physical
natures are radically different, even if controlled by the same laws of
physics and thus intimately connected through the principles of
thermodynamics. Adams saw the phases of history as linked a similar way."

If GR=Chemistry, M&D=Astronomy, and ATD=Physics, then how about the others
(or has this already been covered :-)

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HENRY M
Information, Media, and Technology Management Consultant