Fwd: V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The demon must also be a reference to Maxwell's Demon. The mirror sits in the imperfect world of the waiting room, where entropy is at play, but it's reflected in the mirror-world, which Rachel wonders could be the world where imperfection (and entropy) is rendered irrelevant, where people live in mirror-time (entropy is frozen?).

LK

-----Original Message-----
>From: János Székely <miksaapja at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jun 30, 2010 12:21 AM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Fwd: V-2nd - 2: clocks and mirrors
>
>See the issue of the torsion pendulum at
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s_experiment
>The two forces at play here are gravity and centrifugal force. (The
>two demons? Centrifugal force standing for entropy?) Note also that
>Eötvös's "weak equivalence principle" (concerning, yes, gravitation
>and trajectory) was one of the bases or inspirations for Einstein
>theory of general relativity. Here the two forces as well as the two
>worlds "cancel each other out,"
>which is a man-made, that's counter-entropic situation, which unites
>the animate and the inanimate principles. That may be why the
>otherwise cold metal parts "gleam warm and gay". Here Rachel's dilemma
>seems to be founded in the basic morality of counter-entropy in
>general on the one hand, and the basic immorality of cosmetic surgery,
>which is also a counter-entropic act, on the other. Just as Shoenmaker
>is not evil but rather blatantly ambivalent in his morality.
>
>János