The counterforce

In his novel V., Thomas Pynchon paints a picture of the twentieth century dominated by physics, and of human behavior swept along by the inescapable tide of physical laws [1]. What chance does an individual have in seeking order in his or her own world when the universe as a whole is streaming inevitably towards a state of maximum entropy? It is a distressing picture, made more chilling by Pynchon’s observation that rather than resist the universal tendency toward disorder, humans have become highly adept at promoting it. Pynchon again takes up the theme of the inexorable tendency toward maximum entropy in his later novel Gravity’s Rainbow [2], this time drawing on the metaphor of the German V2 rockets raining down upon London towards the end of World War II. Despite the best efforts of British military intelligence to predict where the rockets will land, it seems that they are following a perfect Poissonal distribution. Once the rocket’s engine cuts out over the North Sea, it is only gravity’s rainbow that determines where it will fall. Destruction is not only inevitable, it is random and dispassionate. And yet, as Pynchon continues in the last section of Gravity’s Rainbow, there is a “counterforce”, an organizing principle that runs counter to the tendency towards maximum entropy, at least in some instances. His metaphor for the organizing force is the period immediately after the fall of Nazi Germany, when competing interests — national, commercial, and individual — scurried about to carve order out of the rubble. Pynchon ascribes almost mythical character to the counterforce, which he also refers to as the “green uprising” or the “Titans of the Earth.” He suggests that there is a general principle, as fundamental as the second law of thermodynamics, but running in the opposite direction, that allows daisies to grow out of the ashes. As a student of molecular genetics at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s, I read Pynchon and ruminated on the doomsday message of V. Walking past Henry Moore’s sculpture Atomic Energy, which marks the spot of the