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

[Mark Kohut]

And if I may allude to your online work again, you give a variation of this thematic insight, perhaps just a subtle subset of 'possibilities foreclosed and lost"--you tell us---in your comment to this blog post on Against the Day below. 


From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: 'Alex Colter' <recoignishon at gmail.com>; 'Mark Kohut' <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Cc: 'Pynchon- L' <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, August 10, 2012 5:53 PM
Subject: RE: Mind-Bending Science In Thomas Pynchon's Mind-Bending Novel Against The Day


I can’t add anything but agreement to Carroll’s remarks, but I’d link them to Pynchon’s 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 GR’s 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 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]. 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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