« February 2007 | Main | April 2007 »
March 07, 2007
Goedel's Theorem in the Wild
From Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
''Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume study of King Kong, ''you know folks, he did love her." Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people... even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movies at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam...And yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian restatement of Goedel's Theorem - when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us...something will. So the permutations 'n' combinations of Pudding's Things That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Goedel's Theorem, don't give Hitler an outside chance. So, when the laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born... (it's page 275 in the Penguin edition)
My favourite part is the idea of Pudding writing a book called Things That Can Happen in European Politics.
Posted by logican at 09:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack