The first consequence of this law in question is theclassical assertion that devices which create inequalities of temperaturerequire the input of energy ("Demons, Engines and the Second Law." Scientific American Nov. Maxwell's DemonIn 1871 James Clerk Maxwell proposed that a being small enough to observeindividual molecules might be able to violate the second law ofthermodynamics (for a biography, see Maxwell in the UK). In COL 49, Pynchon explicitly revisits entropy and adds a manifestation of its greatest theoretical challenger. Today, with increased travel of information and capitalist consumerism across the planet's CNS (Marshall McLuhan's term), many prophesize an analogous "global monoculture" as a final state of sameness. Callisto looks at this stagnation and foresees a similar destiny for ideas. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease." ( Slow Learner, 88-89)Here Pynchon invokes the concept of "heat-death," where energy is no longer exchanged between particles which have reached the most probable state in a closed system (predicted by Willard Gibbs). He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. Callisto, a prophet of impending doom, dictates aloud the tale of his own discovery of the entropic end of culture: "Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to a certain phenomena in his own world. Origins of Entropy in PynchonThe concept of Entropy first emerges in Pynchon's published writing in his short story "Entropy" (1958 or '59). For a specific examination of information entropy in COL 49, see "The Paradox ofTruth, the Truth of Entropy" Information Theory is the mathematical theory of communicationthat is used to find out the speed and quantity of information transmission.It uses statistical concepts of probability to compute the extrainformation (redundancy) necessary to counteract the distortion and lossesthat may occur during transmission from one information source to another.Entropy within this theory is the "measure of the rate of transfer ofinformation in message" (OED). A closed system inevitably proceeds toward uniformity of energy. Furthermore, this "most probable pattern" is actually a state of equal energy among particles, as collisions cause bodies to exchange heat. Thermodynamic entropyis the measure of this disorganization in a system. With time, the energywithin a system will inevitably tend to become distributed in the mostprobable pattern, which consists of all the individual particles of thesystem engaging in random, disordered motion" (OED). Thermodynamics is the scienceof the relations between heat and other forms of energy.It deals with the changes that occur in a system if the energy distributionis unbalanced, therefore it "can be regarded as governing the directionof all physical changes taking place in the universe. There are two fields which define this concept: Pynchon's reader travels an analogous odyssey to the protagonist, sorting information, flirting with chaos and circumnavigating truth.ĮntropyEntropy is a quantity that, in its two contexts, characterizes not only all form and life in the universe, but all signal, language, information and written material ever produced anywhere. The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) traces Entropy through the theoretical Maxwell's Demon device (the greatest historical challenge to the second law of thermodynamics), and also extends the property and Demon to metaphorically control and inform the journey of Oedipa Mass. Engineering principals animate his fiction in literal explorations, and then escalate into larger thematic matter. Thomas Pynchon achieves an unusual synthesis of art and science, and develops the unique character of his ambitious, "post-modern" works with a renaissance conception of continuous knowledge.
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