Time and Lght...(WAS Re: As forewarned, CERN has presser tomorrow on Higgs)

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Ahh, yes. This discussion does bring me back a bit; back to my earliest
days of misunderstanding Pynchon. And what pair of "binomials" could be
more pynchonesque than "time and light," excepting maybe gender and
math, but I'll leave those latter two for another post, possibly a
revisiting of Yash's dream- her brain awash with the counterforce-like
hormones of early pregnancy- which was given, to my liking, too short
schrift. For now, though, it's Time and Light.

It must have been a function of the fact that my first experience of
Pynchon was in 1973, with Gravity's Rainbow. Of Lot 49, I had had no
inkling. V. was beyond my ken, although, a college chum had urged it on
me several summers earlier, as he carried it with him as we skulked
around the suburbs of Chicago, waiting to ship-out on one of the
freighters plying America's inland seas. He said it was good, but
nothing more. He was too engrossed. So when I picked up GR, I had no
idea about Pynchon's obsession with Venus.

Despite my lack of preparation, I took to GR like Cyprian to faggotry.
 From the first few pages, it was apparent that he loved math and
science, and that alone would have been enough to carry me through the
jungle of cultural and literary allusions that were already starting to
cling to my pynchon-naive brain. But the lyricism, that's what really
hooked me. I was with Pirate on the roof of the Maisonnette, harvesting
bananas from that entropic hothouse, staring easward, and catching that
first glint of something new on the cusp of morning, the photons
reflected from the vapor trail of an A4. Incoming, indeed. Crisp,
chilly, bright- it was perfect.

I don't have the text with me (natch) but I'm still there with Pirate,
or he with me, wondering if he shouldn't notify someone in the four
minutes we have until that last, silent, dt. And here, of course, one
of my earliest misunderstandings: the text, narrated from within
Pirate's pov, at that point, speculates about the brevity of those four
minutes with respect to the speed of sunlight. Something to the effect
of..."less than the six minutes it takes to reach the Planet of Love,
really, no time at all..." or something like that. Not thinking of
Venus, I associated "Planet of Love" with Earth (Where else in the
solar system does love occur?) and thought to myself- Well, it started
out good, but it should be 8 & 1/2 minutes, not six, so, I guess he's
not as slick as he seems. I'll cut him a break and keep reading, but
keep my eyes open for more mistakes. Right.  But it was the "no time at
all" that really intrigued me and eventually opened my mind to his
possible subtlety, and might make him worth the effort of
dealing with his slightly flawed knowledge of math and science.

"No time of at all..." a throwaway at the end of a paragraph, but wait,
of course, do the math from the perspective of the massless photon-
the Lorentz Transformation: time goes to zero... "no time at all."  For
the photon, the trip from the Sun to Venus, or Earth, or to the
furthest reaches of the universe, for that (un)matter, is
instantaneous. Wow! I reconsidered. Maybe this dude is not so dumb,
after all. But what's he alluding to here (and now)? Everything! From
Newton and Leibniz, to Berkeley, to Keat's Ode to a Nightingale-
("Already with thee...")  to Einstein's Special and General  
Relativity,
& etc,etc.-  There is what meets the eye- photons- but there is a whole
helluva lot more. This novel really is something new, I realized, and
it's just the beginning. Of course, for the photons, it's over before
it's over.

Years later I read V. and the rest, and I finally got hip to the
"Planet of Love" being an allusion to Venus, and so, "six minutes"
really is correct for the interval as measured from the Earth. But
that was all in hindsight. At the time, the light hadn't reached me.


-----Original Message-----
From: Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>
To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>; pynchon -l
<pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, Jul 6, 2012 8:29 am
Subject: Re: As forewarned, CERN has presser tomorrow on Higgs


A photon in any spacetime will not experience proper time. If it
doesn't experience proper time then it is a virtual particle.


On 6 July 2012 22:19, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:


Umm… by no means all photons are virtual particles.  
 
 From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of Prashant Kumar
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 7:37 AM
To: Monte Davis; pynchon -l


Subject: Re: As forewarned, CERN has presser tomorrow on Higgs


 

What I meant is that you have the same debate regarding identity and
individuality, but in the modern debate the object is not souls but
quantum mechanical particles. In fact, the mathematical definition of
photons is what leads to this debate: because they are massless,
photons do not experience proper time they are known as 'virtual
particles' and exist outside of the reality of massive particles, in
some sense. Now since every photon is identical, you have serious
problems defining identity. Think 'spirit world', and you have the
connection to Duns Scotus' haecceities.

 

Prashant

 

On 6 July 2012 18:40, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
In defense of physicists (of whom I am not one):  what distinguishes
massless particles (e.g. photons) from scholastic word-spinning is that
(1)
their properties are unambiguously, mathematically defined; (2) those
p[roperties have led to a century of predictions verified to many
decimal
places; and (3) they are the only properties consistent with such
irrelevant
arcana as stars shining, atoms cohering, and DVD lasers playing.

My apologies to Abelard and Duns Scotus if that's the kind of thing they
were doing and I missed it.


-----Original Message-----
 From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf

Of Paul Mackin
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2012 12:24 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: As forewarned, CERN has presser tomorrow on Higgs


On 7/5/2012 11:35 AM, David Morris wrote:
> OK, I stand corrected.  Existence w/o mass.  I expect such existence
> would never become more organized than at the sub-atomic level.  But
> I'm no physicist.

Me neither, but somehow I'm reminded of the Medieval controversy over
the
distinction between essence and existence, if any.

P
>
> On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
wrote:
>> It bestows mass; they haven't [yet] gotten around to a field/particle
>> that "bestows existence."
>>
>>
>>
>>  From  David Morris
>> Higgs is the new either, a medium that bestows existence.
>>
>>