C of L49...Maxwell 's Demon: a history

[Mark Kohut]

Trumped! So, I second heartily. What I was just going to write....only better said.

Maxwell's Demon as metaphor, as Adams used it, as Pynchon read of it there (if he originally learned of it elsewhere) is used
as a History divider.  So,

If entropy as OBA has used it before applies to it's social analogue, apathy, then 'the same deckful of days; the Vast White Entropic Corporation, full of 'old men',-- no more individuality, ingenuity, invention is one side of the thought experiment. It is entropy atrophying., so to speak. 

 One side of the 'thought experiment" is the entropic wasteland/tower in which Oedipa is caught? The other side is where the energetic, 'hot' molecules go......all of the 'revelations', creative, demonic, stuff that Oedipa is encountering.

What a better way to categorize the "United" States of America than via the official USPS. In Adams' History of the US, which begins @1800, he wrote that there were up to seven---7!---mail deliveries a day in the majnor American cities such as Philly and NY. The United States is united by its mail service....Every city and town has a central P.O. 

And, as has been remarked about the 2nd Law of T. in the 20th Century, it is more about "information" not thermodynamics as it was in the 19th C. Seems TRP might be using it--MD' + 2nd L- as a subtle metaphor for 'attention"?...Oedipa learns---with revelations going on all around her and which last (with her)---to pay a different kind of attention than she did when caught ignorantly in her tower. 

She--we--are the sorter??





 


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, June 4, 2009 12:00:17 PM
Subject: Re: C of L49...Maxwell 's Demon: a history

Any beleaguered housewife would be more likely to respond:  sorting laundry isn't work?  Oedipa's quip about the post office is pointed.  She jokingly implies that the US Post Office can mete out punishment: "you'll find yourself in a mailbag, headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you."  Imprisoned, exiled, beaten, for dissing the USPS?  On one side we have the USPS, mainstream, centralized, official, doing real work, subject to entropy.  On the other, Tristero, presiding over an alternate, anarchistic postal service, with members like Nefastis who can defy entropy and Koteks who resents the official, the mainstream the centralized.  Oedipa defends the USPS now, butlater ...

Laura 

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>

>We know Pynchon liked the entropy metaphor---"social analogue, apathy" as LK writes--- A LOT, using it as the title of his prize-winning story. It is lotsa years later in his writing, but in Slow Learner he says he din't know much about it all scientifically. 
>Just used for the stories. 
>
>So, in Cof L49, as soon as Oedipa learns this new concept--Maxwell's Demon, which sorted but " did no work"---she snaps
>Tell them at the Post Office that sorting isn't work.........
>
>Gotta matter A LOT in the context of L49, yes?.....since the Official U.S. Mail is tacitly set against the alternative communication system of The Tristero?.....
>
>More Thots?
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>
>>
>>
>>p. 86 hc...I won't link here to wikipedia or anything re JCMaxwell, you can....I just want to add the personal association of the bearded Victorian that he was with the bearded Smith Brothers of the famous coughdrops. (No P connection;  thanks for indulging me)
>> 
>>He was raised and remained a VERY Christian-believing scientist and was anti-Darwin's theory. 
>> 
>>Maxwell is widely acknowledged as the nineteenth century scientist whose work had the greatest influence on twentieth century physics. His electromagnetic theory and its associated field equations 'paved the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity, which established the equivalence of mass and energy. Maxwell's ideas also ushered in the other major innovation of 20th century physics, the quantum theory.  ----from an online bio, not wikipedia
>> 
>>Maxwell's Demon---wikipedia: 
>>Maxwell conceived a thought experiment as a way to explain the statistical nature of the second law. He described the experiment as follows[2]:
>>... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.
>> 
>>Schematic figure of Maxwell's demon
>>In other words, Maxwell imagines one container divided into two parts, A and B. Both parts are filled with the same gas at equal temperatures and placed next to each other. Observing the molecules on both sides, an imaginary demon guards a trapdoor between the two parts. When a faster-than-average molecule from A flies towards the trapdoor, the demon opens it, and the molecule will fly from A to B. The average speed of the molecules in B will have increased while in A they will have slowed down on average. Since average molecular speed corresponds to temperature, the temperature decreases in A and increases in B, contrary to the second law of thermodynamics.
>>
>>
>>      
>>
>
>
>      
>