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

Fri Aug 10 16:53:23 CDT 2012

I cant add anything but agreement to Carrolls remarks, but Id link them
to Pynchons recurring wistfulness for possibilities foreclosed and lost 
once the brute facts of the present (and especially their packaging as Their
history) have collapsed the superimposed options of the future. One of the
strongest meanings for me in GRs jump from 1945 to Richard M. Zhlubb and
now, everybody is that *we blew it*: the Zone was a 52 pickup time and
place when many old orders were decisively broken, when we could and should
have looked around at the devastation and started to do better. What we
wrought in fact were bigger, better, more numerous rockets threatening
hundreds of millions instead of a block here and there in Antwerp and
London. Vineland/IV: were the energies of the 60s bound to turn into a Me
Decade, a Reagan decade, and a few smoked holdouts in the woods and Venice
Beach? M&D: did all the European mistakes have to be recapitulated? AtD:
20th century progress (and progressivism ) -- myth or menace?

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Alex Colter
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 4:35 PM
To: Mark Kohut
Cc: Pynchon- L
Subject: Re: Mind-Bending Science In Thomas Pynchon's Mind-Bending Novel
Against The Day

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_pync
hons_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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