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

[ish mailian]

Very good.

Thanks.

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 9:48 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> When Science Went Modern, 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.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l