There has been an incredible amount of
>really stupid literary criticism written by critics who think "chaos"
>means chaos and "entropy" means entropy.
>
>Carrol
You mean literary scholars don't use the term entropy to mean an increasing value for Bolzman's H? I'm shocked, what DO you people learn in graduate school . . .
But Pynchon's use of scientific terminology is quite exact. The Crying of Lot 49 has a treatment of entropy and Maxwell's Demon that I have used to teach the concept in intro phil of science classes. His discussion of statistics in Gravity's Rainbow is also correct, if a bit too subjectivist for my taste. He has an engineering degree, worked, and so far as we know still does ;>, as an engineer for Boeing. Vassily Grossman, also trained as an engineer, has excellent discussions of quantum physics and statistics in Life and Fate, the greatest work of Soviet literature. (Charles would repress it, as it analogizes Stalinism to Nazism.)
jks
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