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

[Alex Colter]

Thanks Prashant!

And Alice out of curiosity what are your sources concerning P. rejecting a
good deal of critical readings of his works? I swear I've heard that before
but I cannot remember where.

I read the comments for the article and they led me to an
essay<http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/metaphor05/>by Sean
Carroll of C.I.T. who calls the Collapse of the Wave-Function in
Quantum Mechanics a recurring metaphor in M&D... perhaps the more
Scientifically Minded among us can help shed a bit of light on the idea?

"If it is true that scientific ideas provide source material for literary
> metaphors, it doesn't follow that the appearance of the scientific concept
> in the fictional work need be very explicit. Just as a paradigmatic example
> of a particularly blunt use of physics in literature is provided by the
> young Pynchon in his story “Entropy,” a compelling example of an
> extraordinarily subtle use of such inspiration is provided by the mature
> Pynchon in his novel *Mason & Dixon*. This work concerns the adventures
> of 18th-century surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, first as they
> observe the transit of Venus in southern Africa and later as they map the
> celebrated line of constant latitude marking the boundary of Pennsylvania
> and Maryland (and consequently dividing the American North from the South).
> At one point early in the book, the surveyors puzzle over a letter they
> have received from the Royal Society:

“You suppose this is Bradley's voice? I think not, for I know
him,---Bradley cannot write like this, even simple social notes give him
trouble. `...Whenever their circumstances, now uncertain and eventual,
shall happen to be reduced to Certainty.' Not likely.”

“Eeh, thah's deep...? `Reduc'd.' ”

“As if,..there were no single Destiny,” puzzles Mason, “but rather a choice
among a great many possible ones, their number steadily diminishing each
time a Choice be made, till at last `reduc'd,' to the events that do happen
to us, as we pass among 'em, thro' Time unredeemable,--- much as a Lens,
indeed, may receive all the Light from some vast celestial Field of View,
and reduce it to a single Point. Suggests an optical person,--- your Mr.
Bird, perhaps.” (Pynchon 1997: 45)

Here Pynchon has given just enough of a hint to suggest a metaphor that
> will recur throughout the book -- that of the *collapse of the
> wavefunction* in quantum mechanics. Mason's description of multiple
> destinies, steadily diminishing in reality until reduced to a single
> observed situation, fits perfectly with the conventional Copenhagen
> interpretation of wavefunction collapse (sometimes referred to as
> “reduction” of the state vector). One of the most profoundly
> counter-intuitive features of quantum mechanics is that systems can be in
> superpositions of ordinary states -- a cat that is half alive and half
> dead, in Schrödinger's famous thought experiment [4<http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/metaphor05/#fn4>].
> It is the act of observation that converts these multiple co-existing
> realities into a single observed truth. Pynchon portrays the westward
> progress of Mason and Dixon as a series of such observations -- before they
> cross a certain hill, it is not only conceivable that various fantastic
> possibilities might describe the other side, but all of these possibilities
> really do obtain, until the surveyors' actions collapse them into a single
> reality. Of course, such a manifestly 20th-century notion would appear to
> be completely anachronistic in a novel set in the 18th century; but Pynchon
> regularly makes cheerful use of such anachronisms, and there is no reason
> to believe that he would hesitate to refer to profound ideas of modern
> physics in a novel about progress at the dawn of the Age of Reason. Science
> has provided the author with a particularly rich metaphorical idea, and the
> absence of any explicit discussions of quantum mechanics in the book is no
> reason not to take advantage of it."
>

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 3:15 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

>   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.)
>
>
>
>
> 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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