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Re: Einstein and Langevin
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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.
J.A.: Yeah this was exactly what I meant, that Nabokov didn't have the sort of mathematical theoretical scientific mind that some have attributed to him just because he threw around some scientists names and a few concepts here and there; I know nothing myself and yet I felt like I knew more on the subject than he did.
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.
J.A.: This is quite fascinating! How did they know the astraunauts were younger? Since they would have been going at far far less than the speed of light it doesn't seem exactly measurable, unlike say, the loss of bone mass that occurs in zero gravity existence. I suppose their clocks were a little behind those they had originally been synced with? Couldn't have been by much I suspect. But this brings us to N.'s notion of time. When I first read Speak Memory, and Ada I had thought Nabokov was saying that he literally did not believe in time, was suggesting a notion of Chronological relativity, but in the gift Fyodor says he's almost at the point of not believing in it, but somehow still does (don't remember the page numbers). I must admit as every inch a non physicist I've never understood notions of space-time continuums or that time travel could exist in any real or perceivable way, since it doesn't seem like time exists. It is merely a reification of the clock device
which we culturally use to measure changes in space: in other words the time is always now, with rearrangements of matter. How could one move around in "time" since this "stuff" isn't really anything at all? Just a bit of side speculation.
An analogy might be his 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."
J.A.: This is an excellent parry!
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