AtD, V, GR: Modernity, science, Adams, turnips, relativity etc.

[Monte Davis]

When Science Went Modern
<http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Fall_Daston.php>*,*
Lorraine Daston
If you have time / interest / patience for just one smart, summarizing
essay on what was new in science c. 1905 and what it has to do with
modernity (ergo, Pynchon -- what Adams sensed was coming, what Kit and
Tesla and Yashmeen were up to, what Mondaugen heard in the sferics) you
could do a lot worse than this. Many Pynchon commentators have.

(I put the turnips there just to see if you were awake.)

One quibble: "The third [scientific] modernity, of the early twentieth
century, toppled the certainties of Newton and Kant, inspired the
avant-garde in the arts, and paved the way for what were probably the two
most politically consequential inventions of the last hundred years: the
mass media and the atomic bomb."

"Mass media" here has to mean radio and TV, then internet. "Paved the way"
suggests that relativity and/or quantum mechanics were prerequisites for
Marconi and KCUF. Not so: a world with Maxwell's (1860s) understanding of
electromagnetism, and the electrical technology of the 1880s, would
certainly have come up with radio soon, TV thereafter, even if Planck,
Einstein, Bohr & co. had never lived. And surely the commercial/cultural
drivers from point-to-point radio to commercial broadcasting had all been
road-tested in the mass print media of the late 19th century.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20161123/4671bbd5/attachment.html>