On 18/07/2008 13:16, "Nabokv-L" <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
[EDNote: On Nabokov's physics, see also Robert Grossmith, "Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister". Russian Literature TriQuarterly (Ann Arbor, MI), 24, 1991, pp. 151-162.
My article "The Poetics of Science in, and around, Nabokov's The Gift", The Russian Review, Russian Review. 62 (2003): 243-61, touches briefly on Einstein's role in that novel. See also several lengthy discussions in Marina Grishakova's The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Cultural Frames. Tartu: Tartu UP, 2006. I also have some forthcoming work on this topic. ~SB]
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re:
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:55:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: joseph Aisenberg <vanveen13@sbcglobal.net> <mailto:vanveen13@sbcglobal.net>
To: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@utk.edu> <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu>
All right I went and looked up this Langevin you spoke: a French physicist most famous for his use of ultra-sound and for popularizing Einstein's ideas about the Theory of Relativity. So...
Speak Memory, Interview No 9, pg. 116 Nabokov says: "While not having much physics, I reject Einstein's slick formulas; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist."
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Wonderful leads, SB, which I'll pursue at the speed of light. JA's citation is fascinating, too. It's a real challenge to separate the popular expositions of Relativity (and their impact on what you might call "lay [laid-back?] culture") from the hard (truly hard) applied mathematics involved in Einstein's "slick" formulae. One first needs to be aware of the huge conceptual leap from Newtonian "absolute" space-time to Special Relativity, and then, just a few years later before breaths could be caught, Einstein's even more staggering leap to General Relativity. It's not clear which of Einstein's many "slick" formulae VN is "rejecting," and how seriously.
One of the formulae, from Special Relativity, the approximation E = mc-squared, was spectacularly verified at Hiroshima. The Einstein-Lorenz time-dilation formula behind the so-called Twin Paradox (straddling both Special and General Relativity) has also been verified with great accuracy on many occasions. Indeed at places like CERN, it's an everyday (a trillion-trillion times a day!) undeniable fact of high-energy physical-particle life! Mass, length and time DO change relative to velocity! See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
Jansy mentioned in a recent post that she ponders setting off in an "imaginary" space-ship in order to test the Einstein "rejuvenation" formula. In fact, Jansy, it definitely works for REAL space-ships. REAL astronauts and atomic-clocks have made the journey and they do return YOUNGER.
Pondering VN's teasing "escape" -- namely that one can be an atheist without a knowledge of theology -- the boring logician/epistemologist might counter as follows: the assertion "I am an atheist" is meaningful (i.e., either true or false) if and only if the speaker shares with us some mutually-agreed definition of "atheist." That would involve at least _some_ notion of "belief/non-belief" in _some_ notion of "god(s), God(s), divine/transcendental being(s)," which notions are, beyond doubt, the primary topics of "theology" however you care to define it, or dodge it.
One analogy might be VN's impatience with Edmund Wilson's criticism of VN's Russian grammar, lexis and prosody! The NERVE of that guy!! Would Bunny have escaped Volodya's justified wrath by using the atheist/theology trick? Imagine Wilson saying "While not knowing as much Russian as VN, I reject his slick translations of Onegin; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist."
Stan Kelly-Bootle