(urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

[Marc Aramini]

I've made a ton of science - biological claims about Wolfe ... But his interest as a symbolist always seems to me to keep the science at that level - it's representation rather than the hard application, like the giant nucleic acid building in House of Ancestors having some atavistic sympathetic vibration with the real person's genetic material it "matches".  Accretion disks and schwarzschild radii seem ever so slightly "harder" than Wolfe's usual symbolic , tropish employment of science. 

When he obsesses about something, it is usually closer to industrial engineering and the kinds of materials used - if I had to guess I would say theoretical physics are treated a little differently than the "let's build this based on these building properties" descriptions that crop up (like talus manufacturing - this is where science becomes less metaphorical for Wolfe)

We really should keep mid 70s or even earlier understandings in mind, unless we are just talking about probabilities here that are not lit crit in nature.  

Are we talking about the text or the possibility of the text here?  Because Borges or st augustine will probably influence his treatment of a scientific mystery as much as his physics background ... 


Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 9, 2013, at 6:19 AM, Jeffery Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:

> On 9/9/2013 7:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> It doesn't matter (in engineering terms) whether stuff that reaches the
>> event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the definition
>> of an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the Schwarzschild
>> radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.
> 
> What force acts on the matter to prevent it from following the usual swarm of elliptical orbits instead of the disk?
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