Warning: MAY contain spoilers.
Hello, I am looking for the science aspect of Foucault’s Pendulum. Could someone who has read the book point me in the right direction?
For example “pages 256 - 300 and pages 453 to 456 etc.”
Anything will help and I don’t mind spoilers if you wish to include that sort of thing.
What do you mean, “science aspect?”
Paper due tomorrow, huh? Good luck with the all-nighter.
Yeah, there’s not a whole lot of science in this book.
lol. Got it in one.
Do you mean the “telluric currents” thing? You do realize that our protagonists are just making up stuff for the fun of it.
I don’t remember any science in there. It’s not about the actual pendulum.
Also, asking for specific page numbers isn’t going to help you, unless you and the person giving you pages happen to have the same edition of the book. The book’s over twenty years old, and has gone through God-knows-how-many publications, so good luck with that.
N.B. I was looking at the description of the novel on Wikipedia, trying to refresh my memory of how they used the PC to generate conspiracy theories (thinking that might be what the OP was asking after) and I found this quote:
How can you not love Umberto Eco?
The bit where Foucault decapitated the Vampire Illuminatus with his sharpened pendulum was a neat demonstration of the conservation of angular momentum.
No, it’s due in a few weeks.
Thank you, i’ll do some research on that.
Good to know thanks.
Oh damn it. I didn’t think of that. Thanks for the heads up.
Thank you very much! If anyone else has anything to add, it would be much appreciated.
Well, it has been a while since I read it, but when the zombies turn out to be created from the blood of Foucault himself {or, as the Vampire Illuminatus himself puts it}
Leapt unwieldy but full-fashioned,
as Athena sprang from Zeus,
The bifold spiral conjured
From thine dregs of mortal juice
it is a reference to DNA: the “bifold spiral” is the double helix formation revealed by Crick and Watson; the “mortal juice” is of course the hero’s own semen, taken by the succubus Lamia when she seduced him beneath the Temple of Solomon. This whole chapter deals with the ethical dilemmas of human cloning, when Kaine creates the Forsaken Army in Foucault’s own image.
Then, if you’ll pardon the vehemence, why not read the friggin’ book yourself? Given due diligence it’ll take a week, tops.
It’s taken me the better part of 10 years.
I’m on the second chapter.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
It gets better when the brain essence extracting starts.
Wasn’t the issue there that the nanomachines that granted Foucault effective immortality (and which of course ran in his bloodstream) were specifically tailored to him; when injected into a third party while they maintained only the semblance of life, without higher cognitive function.
ETA:
Wasn’t that sequence revealed to be a hallucination during the final confrontation in the High Temple of Tlön?
That quote is a bomb! Brilliant!
You’ve got to have a bit of the masochistic Puritan to read this book, but for those of you that haven’t, the following sorta captures the essence of the book (and this list?):
“THE DEPARTMENT OF USELESS TECHNIQUES”
‘‘Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies.’’
‘‘Great,’’ Belbo said admiringly. ‘‘I have one, too: Aztec Equitation.’’
‘‘Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Adynata?’’ . . . Belbo . . . looked at me, saw my bewilderment. ‘‘Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,’’ he said to Diotallevi. ‘‘It’s not a department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of Tetrapyloctomy. . . . The art of splitting a hair four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We’re not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it’s the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn’t seem completely useless.’’ ‘‘All right, gentlemen,’’ I said, ‘‘I give up. What are you two talking about?’’
‘‘Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a . . . School of Comparative Irrelevance. . . . to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects. . . . The Tetrapyloctomy department has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata, or Impossibilia. . . . The essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing’s absurdity. We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrio-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film. . . . But what courses did we put under Oxymoronics? Oh, yes, here we are: Tradition in Revolution, Democratic Oligarchy, Parmenidean Dynamics, Heraclitean Statics, Spartan Sybaritics, Tautological Dialectics. . . .’’ I couldn’t resist throwing in ‘‘How about a Grammar of Solecisms?’’ ‘‘Excellent!’’ they both said, making a note.
Or my favourite bit : cretins, fools, morons and lunatics
You guys are killing me!
That might qualify as social science. Does that help, Bigshift?