READINGS FROM THE NEW BOOK OF NATURE: PHYSICS AND PYNCHON'S "GRAVITY'S RAINBOW"

At Cornell University, where Thomas Pynchon first won a scholarship to study engineering physics and later took a degree in English, one of his professors wonderingly remembers his apparently voracious appetite for the complexities of elementary particle theory.1 Although many critics, some of whom have written articles with titles that would seem right at home in the pages of Scientific American, have speculated upon the manner in which concepts from physics function as aspects of Pynchon's bizarre fictional landscape, we have yet to ap? preciate how pervasive such concepts are in the determination of both design and meaning in all of his novels. The implications of discoveries made in the new physics are not merely the source of new ideas which Pynchon incorporates into a traditional novelistic framework; they are rather the basis for a radically new conception of the nature of human identity and societal organization which Pynchon has chosen to express in a highly appropriate but nevertheless extremely problematic narrative mode. We are so accustomed to conceiving of the physical dimensions and dynamics of our world in essentially Newtonian terms that it is difficult to appreciate why a novelist like Pynchon should take interest in a field of scientific endeavor that is still popularly viewed as tediously complex, dull and predictable. Most of us have not yet fully assimilated the fact, as Neils Bohr puts it, that the great extension of our experience in recent years has brought to light the insufficiency of our simple mechanical con? ceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which customary interpretation of observation was based.2 Newton, like the Greek atomists, conceived of particles or mass points as indestructible entities which moved in the separate and distinct dimensions of space and

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