THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (THOMAS PYNCHON) AND TIME DERIVATIVE

This text connects in a weird way delirium tremens (DT) and time differential or time derivative (dt). The acronyms remain the same in other languages because of the prevalence of Latin and English in Sciences. Thomas Pynchon is knwon to be a very scientific writer, I think he studied Engineering. In this book he also speaks about Maxwell´s Demon, a mytohological creature as important in Physics as Scrödinger´s cat. The best thing of the text is, from my point of view, the way in which it describes the time derivative concept, a very important one in the development of Maths and Physics

Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among "uhs" and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; "dt," God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT's must give access to dt's of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright

THE GEOMETRY OF LOVE (JOHN CHEEVER) AND THE APLICATION OF GEOMETRY TO LOVE BUSSINES

He watched below him as a station wagon passed, then a convertible. a moving van. and a small truck advertising EUCLID'S D RY CLEANING AND D YEING. The great name reminded him of the right-angled triangle, the principles of gecmetric analysis. and the doctrine of proportion for both commensurables and incommensurables. \Vhathe needed was a new form of ratiocination, and Euclid might do. If he could make a geometric analysis of his problems. mightn't he solve them. or at least create an atmosphere of solution? He get a slide rule and took the simple theorem that if two sides of a triangle are equal. the angles opposite these sides are equal; and the converse theorem that if two angles of a triangle are equal. the sides opposite them will be equal. He drew a line to represent iVlalhilda and what he knew alxlut her to be relevant. The base of the triangle would be his two children. Randr and Priscilla. He, of course, would make up the third side

How is it possible that this blog has been going on for seven years without knowing about this short story? It is a very good example to show the different ways to use science in literature. The text itself includes almost every wise choice and every typical mistake that we have been talking about in this blog

In the prologue, Rodrigo Fresán writes that William Maxwell didn´t like this short story at all and that Chever wrote in his Diaries how he sold it to anhoter magazine for 3000 dollars