Time & Against the Day

[Monte Davis]

The woo-mongers seized upon one implication of relativity (time dilation
with increasing velocity) to confirm their hope:  if you could "go through"
time at different rates, it must be just like space -- so you could go both
ways, right? But the same math which establishes time dilation establishes
that the "rate of exchange" must be positive (or zero, if you're a photon
at the speed of light). It can't be negative (reversing time or going back
in time) "Can't" not in the sense of a barrier that could in principle be
broken, but in the sense of "undefined/meaningless operation," like
dividing by zero or going north from the North Pole.

AtD is chock full of various narrative, thematic, and emotional "if onlys"
about history, from the family/personal to the global. Traverse vengeance
and failures of love, or math and time machines, or revolution and
anarchism: everybody wants to have acted differently back in the day, to
step into an alternate life that diverges at some crucial mirror moment, to
escape or redirect the history that is delivering them into WWI and worse.
>From the Candlebrow crowd to 'Interstellar' and the 'Terminator' movies,
we've always wanted to believe that Einstein validated that -- and it's a
deep tragic joke buried in AtD that in fact, he said "no" in thunder.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 2:49 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I remembered.
> That I didn't see how you could be right.
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Remember my going on in the first AtD read about offstage-but-central
> > Einstein and relativity -- the trains and mirrors and light and
> > tatzelwurmholes? That for all the woo at the turn of the 20th century
> (and
> > in AtD) about time as the fourth dimension and Wellsian time machines,
> > relativity actually slammed the door against that, and Pynchon knew it
> very
> > well?
> >
> > Just sayin :-)
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> http://pippablog.com/against-the-day-pynchons-journey-into-the-real/
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> >
>
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