Mind-Bending Science In Thomas Pynchon's Mind-Bending Novel Against The Day

[Mark Kohut]

I highlight this: 
"The arguments went back and forth for four years with little apparent progress. Gibbs repeatedly and calmly emphasized that the prime consideration in a system of analysis should be given to the fundamental relationships we wish to describe in the physical world."   
  
There is an essay to be written---Monte, Prashant?---on Pynchon rescuing Gibbs, so to speak, (perhaps, I'm still uncertain) in Against the Day from what his great admirer Henry Adams did to hurt him. Which was take his grounded ideas too, too far by airy extension. In Adams' "Degradation of the Democratic Dogma" there are two now-unreadable essays, stupid as any clever idiot could be, using Gibbs to explain social and political aspects of history and the future-A non-scientist singling up all explanations outside his intellectual remit.    
 Gibbs is cited in another book we know influenced TRP: The Human Use of Human Beings. 

Gibbs is a ground, electricity metaphor half-intended in AtD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs 
 
 I know now I internalized Monte's terrif insight in the comments back when I first read this---repeated it in our back-and-forth just days ago as my own perspective--- P uses the truths of new scientific discoveries tacitly, as the deep truths to set off the satire and to add to his presentation of the real world, the physical world, all that beautiful earth and land, all the mystery of this pendant world.....  
  
THIS science-math understanding I am not challenging in this ATD reread; I challenge all--most of-- the math(s) (and any 'science' it supposedly buttresses that is said and talked and supposedly believed in in AtD.) 
  
  
 

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Mind-Bending Science In Thomas Pynchon's Mind-Bending Novel Against
The Day: Part I

http://www.science20.com/adaptive_complexity/mindbending_science_thomas_pynchons_mindbending_novel_against_day_part_i-8804

Mind-Bending Science In Thomas Pynchon's Mind-Bending Novel Against
The Day: Part II - The Quaternion Wars

http://www.science20.com/adaptive_complexity/mind_bending_science_in_thomas_pynchons_mind_bending_novel_against_the_day_part_ii_the_quaternion_wars
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