Time & Against the Day

[Mike Weaver]

I suppose my personal philosophical/political journey, from hippie 
dreamer to marxist materialist, started with John Fowles' book the 
Aristos in which I first came across Heraclitus and "all is flux". Later 
I saw the title of a political lecture  - 'motion considered as the 
essential state of matter'. Which led me to consider a different trinity 
from length, width and height. Time, energy and motion, each term 
describing the relation of the other two.  Space is just our way of 
describing configurations of energy.
So, arrogant sod that I am, I've long been unhappy with Einstein's 
slapping time onto the three material ones as a fourth dimension, and 
now with physicists like Lee Smolin on the case, I'm watching that area 
with interest.

As for this review, interesting and illuminating as it is, I'm not sure 
there wasn't a bit of shoehorning going on at the start to set up the 
contrast between the postmodern invertebrate standard and Pynchon's 
vertebrate heresy. Was it necessary to the argument?


On 15/12/2015 21:33, Monte Davis wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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