Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

His craft is fiction. So, you know, we can dig the reference or the joke
to/on/about Tesla or whatever science P uses, entropy and such, but in the
end, P writes fiction. If one needs to be an expert in Tesla to read P,
well...that isn't ttrue, but were it the case we wouldn't know him.


On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 6:31 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> re Pynchon and ( some of) his use of science ( and scientists)....we know
> he knows a LOT, but I am always reminded of him saying, re entropy for
> example, that he hardly knew anything about it, but he knew enough to use
> it in his fiction...
>
> He USES things including science. How? We keep exploring....
>
> There are some of Tesla's ideas in Against the Day is something I think I
> know...
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jun 11, 2013, at 10:45 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> > Concerning Tesla I am apparently ill-infomed. But to be honest I didn't
> ever  think that I was particularly well informed. Edison did seem to have
> engaged in an unethical smear campaign against Tesla's AC system involving
> the electrocution of Elephants and other animals, but otherwise he was
> doubtless a paragon of honest business practices. Tesla apparently won the
> contracts  being sought by both companies  by resorting to the devious
> practice of designing a superior and more flexible way to deliver current.
> > The disagreements within science referred to in the original article are
> real disagreements among respected scientists. There is definitely plenty
> about theoretical physics  that I don't understand, and you may understand
> more. But there are scientists who are probably more knowledgeable than
> you,( you know, papers published in scientific journals, books, academic
> chairs) who have differing theories about fundamental questions. ) I am
> just gullible and ill-informed enough to think they may be as qualified to
> judge as you or Malign D. So, apparently, was the guy who wrote the article.
> > On Jun 10, 2013, at 9:01 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
> >
> >> "The machinations of those who profited from his genius..." and "science
> >> that challenges power," coupled with your earlier "Tesla wanted to solve
> >> mankind's energy challenge much more than to get rich..." strongly
> suggests
> >> that you see him as an altruistic figure. Interesting,  when juxtaposed
> with
> >>
> >>
> >> 1) Tesla's own claim that Edison promised him $50K (1885 dollars) for
> >> electrical design innovations, and that Tesla left Edison (and started
> his
> >> own electrical firm) because E. didn't pay up. Edison denied it, and no
> one
> >> familiar with Edison's business practices has ever found it plausible.
> >>
> >> 2) Tesla licensed his 1888 motor and transformer designs to
> Westinghouse for
> >> $60K plus a royalty of $2.50 per HP produced -- at the time, a deal on
> the
> >> order of Zuckerberg's share in the Facebook IPO.
> >>
> >> 3) In 1899, Tesla raised $100K from John Jacob Astor IV, purportedly
> for new
> >> lighting designs, and spent it on his wireless power-transmission
> >> experiments instead. A year later, he got $150K from J.P. Morgan for the
> >> Wardenclyffe tower (an investment aborted when Marconi demonstrated
> distance
> >> radio first).
> >>
> >> I could go on with the many lawsuits and patent claims by (as well as
> >> against) Tesla, or with his repeated attempts in the 1930s to get
> government
> >> funding (US, UK, USSR, Yugoslavia) for a particle-beam weapon he claimed
> >> "will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200
> >> miles from a defending nation's border... [and] cause armies to drop
> dead in
> >> their tracks." (Doubtless you can explain to me why that was a much more
> >> ethical proposition than the Reaganaut version of the same scam.)
> >>
> >> Suffice it to say that while he *said* a great deal about benefits for
> all
> >> mankind from his work (and I have no reason to call that insincere),
> what he
> >> *did* leaves no doubt whatsoever that like Edison, Westinghouse,
> Marconi,
> >> and many other electrical innovators of the time, he was very much
> >> interested in turning his ideas into large financial ventures and great
> >> personal wealth. Nothing wrong with that -- until you portray him as the
> >> people's scientist, standing foursquare against the Man.
> >>
> >> As for "Whether Tesla could successfully do what he claimed will
> probably
> >> never be known"... well, it will probably never be known whether ancient
> >> astronauts built the Pyramids, or whether Roger Bacon's philosopher's
> stone
> >> could in fact change lead into gold, but the smart money's against it.
> There
> >> is *zero* evidence that Tesla ever produced experimental results that
> aren't
> >> explained by "consensus" electromagnetic theory. And outside the
> precincts
> >> of UFOlogy, akashic energy, zero-point antigravity, etc., there has been
> >> *zero* sustained scientific interest in the, ahh, idiosyncratic
> theories of
> >> his later years. Not because he was a bold humanitarian rebel disdained
> by
> >> the greedy Establishment, but because he went off the fucking rails
> >> mentally.
> >>
> >> Feel free to go on about quantum field theory, the Casimir effect,
> Ebola,
> >> and other "mysteries." I see no evidence that you have enough grasp of
> what
> >> *is* known and understood about them to say much of interest about what
> >> isn't. I'm sorry if you take "ill-informed" as a personal attack, but on
> >> these matters -- which you, not I, brought into the discussion of
> Pynchon
> >> and science  -- you are. As your notion of "civil conversation" seems to
> >> require that I pretend otherwise, I'd best bow out of this one.
> >
>
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