M&D p 6: the Distance to a Star

[Mark Kohut]

Clearly, that is stated. isn't a pynchon-relevant question whether, when
we--the world--can calculate the distance to a star, the Times will still be
impossible to calculate.

And when science can know what will happen when a butterfly flaps its wings--L49
or map Slothrop's every move, are the Times STILL impossible to calculate.

I think pynchon wants to say Yes...

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 4:49 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Sun is a star. And our boys take measurements of its distance and
> calculate and so on, but these Times are not that easy to measure nor
> calculate. So, the scientific reading of the metaphor seems to miss
> the point that Science can't measure these Times, and especially these
> Times in America.
>
> http://www.mdlpp.org/pdf/library/CharlesMasonandJeremiahDixon.pdf
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "...for the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the
>> Distance to a Star."
>>
>> That's a loaded simile for 18th-century astronomy, especially with the many
>> references coming up to Mason's boss, Astronomer Royal James Bradley.
>> Bradley had attempted unsuccessfully in the 1720s  to determine the distance
>> to a star by stellar parallax: the change in its position between Obs six
>> months and ~185 million miles apart, as the earth moves halfway around its
>> orbit. But the angle was too small to detect with the instruments of the
>> time; Bessel would succeed in 1838. (Parallax -> distance measurements
>> within our solar system were easier, cf. p. 93.)
>>
>> I wouldn't put it past Pynchon to have in mind a later echo, beloved of
>> astronomers and triumphalist historians of science. In 1835 sociologist and
>> philosopher Auguste Comte wrote that "we would never know how to investigate
>> by any means [the stars'] chemical composition... every notion of the true
>> mean temperatures of the stars will necessarily always be concealed from
>> us." Unknown to Comte, Fraunhofer had already described the bright and dark
>> lines in the spectra of the Sun and a few bright stars. Kirchhoff, Bunsen
>> and others would identify the lines with incandescent elements, letting us
>> determine both composition and temperature (as well as crucial foundation
>> ideas and data for quantum theory).
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