Forty-Four: Shame on You for Thinking

Pynchon in Public Podcast

04.18: Gravity’s Rainbow

In which, despite efforts by Them to stop us, we continue our work on Gravity’s Rainbow with a look at Book Three, episode five – the Tchitcherine episode.

Notes:

Here’s an example of Kyrgyz script. When writing was first developed, a Latin alphabet was used. So “A screaming comes across the sky” would have looked like this:

Bir jini asmanda bolot

Around 1920, the Arabic alphabet was adopted. The words themselves didn’t change, but how they were written changed dramatically. Most notably, Latin is written from left to right, whereas Arabic is written from right to left. So the same sentence would look like this:

بىر جىنى اسمانادا بولوت

Finally, in the early 1930s, Russia began to impose a Cyrillic alphabet onto the Kyrgyz people. Pynchon has Tchitcherine working on this project. Once again, the words didn’t change but how they were written did:

Бир жини асманда болот

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If you would like to learn more about Gödel’s Theorem, here’s a nice explanation at Scientific American. And here’s a write-up at the Guardian about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

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On chess outcomes and the number of atoms in the universe:

Claude Shannon – a mathematician and cryptographer called “the father of information theory” – put the lower boundary for the possible outcomes of a game of chess to be 10¹²⁰. (This is called the Shannon number.) Victor Allis, a Dutch computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, put the upper bound at 5×10⁵⁰. He also estimated the game-tree complexity to be at least 10¹²³, assuming a branching factor of 35 and an average game of 80 moves.

The estimate of atoms in the known universe is often put between 4×10⁷⁹ and 4×10⁸¹.