Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

[Mark Kohut]

yes, I have come to think my citation of 'the mathematization of nature' within AtD is not very helpful....I too hastily ran it together mentally
with the consensually famous-enough 'rationalization" of the world ala Weber: "In sociology, rationalization refers to the replacement of traditions, values,and emotions as motivators for behavior in society with rational, calculated ones."..math can be part of that but as one part not as "mathematization
of nature", I guess (as I am not sure I could describe 'mathematizaion of nature' without more definitional work) . 
 
Q: is what Mason & Dixon are doing able to be decribed under your 'book of nature is written in the language of mathematics" quote and meaning? 
Is this, perhaps, (just) one reason there is no mocking of their good work? Perhaps another pivot point in TRPs lifelong embedded metaphoric
use of math (and science)?---that is the 'mocking' begins with other math/science uses?
 
My emphasis rests more, I repeat myself, ,so I repeat myself, on how much of the math in AtD is satirized, could not in the book even come close to
'mathematizing nature' and so is nowhere near nature at all.
 
One final remark that could take us down new rabbit holes---or which you might think is coming from me already deep inside mine--I am trying to
get TRPs vision so I can get all the nuances, waves and wrinkles in AtD and to that end I still think it very possible---even if the math/scientists think
it wrong---that TRP may have written about math from Wittgenstein's 'radical' position.
 
 
 
 

From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: 'Mark Kohut' <markekohut at yahoo.com>; 'Kai Frederik Lorentzen' <lorentzen at hotmail.de>; 'Matthew Cissell' <macissell at yahoo.es>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
Cc: Prashant Kumar <p.kumar at physics.usyd.edu.au> 
Sent: Sunday, August 5, 2012 3:48 PM
Subject: RE: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

Interesting -- I liked the Burtt book when I read it in  the 1970s, but hadn't made the Cornell connection, for which thanks.

Be careful about reading too much into "the mathematization of nature," which doesn't really go as far as it might sound beyond Galileo's "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics," or the William James I quoted earlier. The math begins as (and for most scientists remains) a maximally precise, compact *language*, free of the distracting connotations and ambiguities of natural language, in which to summarize relationships among natural attributes. It's powerful, because if you've captured a relationship correctly you can use the math to find or predict quantities you can't measure directly or haven't measured yet (the duration of the solar eclipse at Amarillo, TX in 10,455 CE). Also, of course, there's an enormous, richly interconnected toolkit of "pure" math entities and operations, many developed entirely independent of natural science, that you can get to by agreed-upon transformations from an original, simple mathematical
 formulation -- and damn if they don't turn out to describe/predict the real world, too! (cf. Prashant's earlier reference to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".)

A few scientists and some philosophers take the Platonic leap beyond math as language and toolkit to math as the fundamental reality, or at least some sort of privileged essence. I suspect it's that (along with the fact that modern physics has increasingly probed domains where there *isn't* any natural-language "paraphrase" of the math involved)  which rubs many math-averse humanists the wrong way. I don't subscribe to it myself, and sometimes wonder if it's not just a very sophisticated version of "if all you have is a hammer..."        

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2012 8:18 AM
To: Kai Frederik Lorentzen; Matthew Cissell; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon

Cassirer's major work: 
"It is the first work, in fact, to develop a detailed reading of the scientific revolution as a whole in terms of the “Platonic” idea that the thoroughgoing application of mathematics to nature (the so-called mathematization of nature) is the central and overarching achievement of this revolution. And Cassirer's insight was explicitly acknowledged by such seminal intellectual historians as E. A. Burtt,"

Burtt was at Cornell most of his career and while TRP was there. His Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science was even in paperback in the sixties. I posted it on the wiki as a possible real influence on TRP for AtD at least. The mathematization of nature may be a way to state some thematic notions within AtD, imho and the puncturing of all kinds of Platonic-like ideas is a lot of what is going on in AtD. 

From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, August 3, 2012 6:53 AM
Subject: Re: Saure Trauben der Mathematik / Trial Ballon


On 01.08.2012 00:19, Matthew Cissell wrote:

> As a person whose background is so heavily informed by two very different fields it is not unthinkable to speak of TP as straddling the Two Cultures gap

Like Cassirer in philosophy?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cassirer/
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