GR translation: crossover point

[alice wellintown]

The law of thermodynamics must embrace human history in its last as
well as in its earliest phase. If the physicist can suggest any
plausible way of escaping this demonstration, either logically or by
mathematics, he will confer a great benefit on history; but, pending
his decision, if the highest Will-power is conceded to have existed
first, and if the physicist is to be granted his postulate that height
and intensity are equivalent terms, while fall and diffusion are
equivalent to degradation, then the intenser energy of Will which
showed itself in the primitive extravagance of variation for which
Darwin tried so painfully to account by uniformitarian formulas, must
have been--and must be now in the constant process of being--degraded
and lost, and can never be recovered. The process, in physics, is not
reversible. (The Degradation 195-96)

Adams, Henry. The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma. 1919. Ed.
Brooks Adams. New York: Peter Smith, 1949.

Philadelphia, by Franklin's time, answered less and less to the
religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was
becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in,
goods and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a
grid of regular city blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading
into ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal.
(Dickens, visiting in 1842, remarked, "After walking about in it for
an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked
street.") Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material
ones, like productivity! Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God
or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform,
one-way, in general not reversible -- that is, against clock time,
which got everybody early to bed and early to rise.
Poor Richard was not shy in expressing his distaste for Sloth. When he
was not merely repeating well-known British proverbs on the subject,
he was....



On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 10:18 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> The cross over point, is generally the point at which something is not
> reversible. That is the phrase that seems most important here: Not
> Reversible. What does it mean? I think it means Western Man's way of
> thinking about the world. And, GR seems to challenge this idea. So,
> maybe it is reversible and therefore there is no crossover point?
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html
>
> Try de Chardin.