The meaning of the second equation in Gravity Rainbow
orbit.openlibhums.org/article/doi/10.16995/or...
orbit.openlibhums.orgPosted Jun 28, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC
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orbit.openlibhums.orgThanks for sharing, that was very interesting, especially the rocket document reproductions. Is this your work? I can’t help but think the writer should have gone and asked a mathematician or engineer first as it would have saved them a lot of time - the other paper saying it’s meaningless is talking total nonsense as the equation is immediately recognisable as a fairly normal pde, and the variables are named very normal things.
Always extremely interesting to get a closer look at what Pynchon might have been working with, with those books. Thanks again!
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Thanks man.
I just felt I had to share after the first time I read it. It was a personal matter for me as I felt it had been mocking me for too long. Pynchon studied physics at Cornell and worked for Boeing so I felt he wouldn't dare to write a meaningless equation.
As for the writer, no I didn't write, though I wish I had his insights on Gravity Rainbow. It happens to be a fresh paper so it shows how much there is to be found on Pynchon's works. If you are interested, there is also this great paper on how Pynchon describes gravity from the perspective of General Theory Relativity, where gravity is not a force per se but rather the path objects follow through space.
As for the equation, I agree with you. Oddly enough a similar question had been asked on Mathematics Stack Exchange and noone of the answers pointed to the correct equation. I am willing to bet it was quickly regarded as fluke since the dynamical equations are extremely non linear and coupled.
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That was just fantastic, that paper. Where are you finding all of these? Thanks for sharing.
It occurred to me that the scene where Roger pisses on everybody is a particularly weedy and ill-thought through effort to defy gravity:
and actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by...
It’s revealed that Pointsman is in a secret meeting with the world elites including Nazis and communists (Iron Crosses and Orders of Lenin Mexico pisses on) but Mexico doesn’t even seem to notice or tell anyone. Historically this is probably one of the most significant sections of the book in that it directly references Operation Paperclip-type events but it’s brilliantly slipped in in this comic scene. One almost feels like the reader is encouraged to cheer on Mexico’s reactionary, childish and ineffectual attack on Them, Pointsman’s comeuppance, to defy gravity with his arc of piss while totally missing the very real fact that the British and American governments recruited a huge number of top level Nazis to help run the world after the war. Whereas it eg takes Bland a lifetime of evil, some ancient Masonic magic, and deep insight and meditation to truly defy gravity and escape the system, pointedly something the preterite would never have access to. It’s incredible commentary on the failings and short-sightedness of would-be revolutionary movements I think.
Going to have to reread the book hunting for arcs and everything affected by Gravity now... thanks again.
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Well, I had quite some free time to search the internet for clues on Gravity Rainbow. As you might imagine, I felt shell shocked the first time I read it. I came across this Journal, Pynchon Notes, which "was a journal devoted to studying the works of Thomas Pynchon". You can find more helpful papers there, though they stop publishing in 2009.
On a personal level I was always fascinated by the very idea of gravity and I felt Pynchon was the only post modernist writer to fully grasp the mysticism behind Einstein's Theory of Relativity. This quote had me scratching my head:
The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure[...]
For centuries the orbits of celestial objects had challenged man. The greeks developed the matherial concept of Aether, monotheistic religions embraced the idea of seven heavens.
But Newton, based on Kepler's observations, would drastically change that point of view, introducing a materialstic universe, governed by rigid laws of motions and by his theory of gravitation. For some, Newton left the universe with no substance, devoid of any deeper meaning. As a matter of fact, referring to Newton's legacy, William Brake wrote:
'I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.
This feeling was shared by many other romanticism writers, such as Goethe, the sensation that the world was now filled with differential equations and that alone was enough to explain it. Perhaps that is the so called "enlightenment".
The Theory of Relativy restores some sort of mysticism, not completely of course - it actually destroys the idea of aether -, but it demolishes the idea of universal space and time. And the general theory introduces the concepts of general covariance and curved spaced time: the eerie idea that gravity is not a force, but something that fills space, the very stage of the world we live in, and it follows a geometry so far beyond the one we are accostumed to think.
And when you stop to think about the meaning of "we have only begun to learn" and the fact Pynchon wrote the book on 60s, when crazy new ideas of big bang, blackholes, gravitational waves were being proposed or researched, you begin to find the correlations between Gravity Rainbow and Einstein.
At least that has been my point of view and I think this paper supports it. I could be entirely wrong of course.
I liked your points as well, you could develop them and perhaps even write your own paper. Guess it is time to read the book again.
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What a fantastic resource, thanks so much. I feel like I’ve been looking for something like that for years.
I enjoyed your post a lot, too, and think you’re totally right about that. Science has changed, in my view for the worse, since those days, with so much less tolerance for alternative viewpoints and ideas. From what I hear from scientist friends research seems so brutally utilitarian nowadays, especially with government funding cuts – so based on ‘what will get me funding?’ This has to have a deep, probably immeasurable effect on the state of our scientific understanding of the world, and therefore on our common perception. The role and nature of information and data as seen by Silicon Valley types must shift our view of things just as powerfully as Newton and Einstein’s theories did – except towards a theory rooted in capitalism. I’ve recently purchased a copy of Bleeding Edge and am very interested to see how Pynchon treats this new model of reality.
Google’s frighteningly deterministic conception of the human mind as data as easy to manipulate robs the world of its mysticism just as Newton’s Laws seemed to. It renders your Blake quote frighteningly literal. But in our modern world of almost exclusively capitalism-driven research I worry that, while I am certain that there exists a ‘relativistic’ model above that of what Google envisions, there may not be a new Einstein-equivalent to introduce these additional geometries and dimensions. I hope I’m wrong, or at the very least that Pynchon has another book left in him to help me figure this out.
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Hey, aleph_five, just a quick heads-up:
refering is actually spelled referring. You can remember it by two rs.
Have a nice day!
^^^^The ^^^^parent ^^^^commenter ^^^^can ^^^^reply ^^^^with ^^^^'delete' ^^^^to ^^^^delete ^^^^this ^^^^comment.
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The second equation has puzzled me for quite some time so I decided to search whether it actually means something. I stumbled across this first paper, pretty much claiming the second equation had no mathematical meaning overall and it was just there to challenge the reader with a mathematical background to not blindly accept mathematical truths, or those who claim to understand it:
It seemed sketchy to me so I kept searching for another reference. Pynchon himself gave some clues where he could have found it
That's a really interesting paper.
Also there's this snippet from A Gravity's Rainbow Companion Sources and contexts for Pynchon's Novel by Steven C. Weisenburger: "...motion under the aspect of yaw control. The formula Pynchon quotes is from Kooy and Uytenbogaart (Ballistics of the Future 247)."