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

[Prashant Kumar]

If the the only tool you have is a hammer...

Nothing he says is wrong or even objectionable, but he's working with a
particular comb.

Yes-maybe QM but also yes-maybe the Garden of Forking
Paths<http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-garden.html>.
Bayesian probability
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability>has an analogue of
this sort of collapse.

Scientists have this sort of "Hey, but that looks like this!" urge as a
result of their training, which often makes their views on art reductive,
and not particularly useful.

Prashant.

On 11 August 2012 06:35, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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