The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49

by

Thomas Pynchon

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Entropy is the name of two related concepts, one in thermodynamics and one in information theory. In thermodynamics, entropy refers to the amount of unavailable energy or the (degree of disorder) inside a given system. For instance, if heat is spread out throughout a room, entropy is higher than if all the heat is concentrated in one corner. When entropy is lower, or heat is more concentrated, then the system can do work, or make things move (like in Nefastis’s box, which tries to raise a piston by concentrating all the heat in one part of the container). The second law of thermodynamics states that thermodynamic entropy increases over time, meaning that heat spreads out, eventually creating a more or less random distribution of hot molecules (and therefore a more or less homogeneous temperature throughout the space). Pynchon also crosses his discussion of thermodynamic entropy with a consideration of information entropy from mathematics. Essentially, information entropy represents the distribution of probabilities for an unknown event (or the content of an unknown message). If the probability of an event or the content of a message is certain, then the event or message’s information entropy is lower, whereas if there are more different possibilities, the event or message’s entropy is higher.

Entropy Quotes in The Crying of Lot 49

The The Crying of Lot 49 quotes below are all either spoken by Entropy or refer to Entropy. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

She made the mistake of looking at herself in the full-length mirror, saw a beach ball with feet, and laughed so violently she fell over, taking a can of hair spray on the sink with her. The can hit the floor, something broke, and with a great outsurge of pressure the stuff commenced atomizing, propelling the can swiftly about the bathroom. […] The can collided with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery, reticulated bloom of glass to hang a second before it all fell jingling into the sink; zoomed over to the enclosed shower, where it crashed into and totally destroyed a panel of frosted glass; thence around the three tile walls, up to the ceiling, past the light, over the two prostrate bodies, amid its own whoosh and the buzzing, distorted uproar from the TV set. She could imagine no end to it; yet presently the can did give up in midflight and fall to the floor, about a foot from Oedipa's nose.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, Metzger
Page Number: 24-5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“Communication is the key,” cried Nefastis. “The Demon passes his data on to the sensitive, and the sensitive must reply in kind. There are untold billions of molecules in that box. The demon collects data on each and every one. At some deep psychic level he must get through. The sensitive must receive that staggering set of energies, and feed back something like the same quantity of information. To keep it all cycling. On the secular level all we can see is one piston, hopefully moving. One little movement, against all that massive complex of information, destroyed over and over with each power stroke.”

“Help,” said Oedipa, “you’re not reaching me.”

“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”

“But what,” she felt like some kind of a heretic, “if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?”

Nefastis smiled; impenetrable, calm, a believer. “He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor.”

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas (speaker), John Nefastis (speaker), James Clerk Maxwell
Related Symbols: The Nefastis Machine
Page Number: 84-5
Explanation and Analysis:

Looking down at San Francisco a few minutes later from the high point of the bridge’s arc, she saw smog. Haze, she corrected herself, is what it is, haze. How can they have smog in San Francisco? Smog, according to the folklore, did not begin till farther south. It had to be the angle of the sun.

Amid the exhaust, sweat, glare and ill-humor of a summer evening on an American freeway, Oedipa Maas pondered her Trystero problem. All the silence of San Narciso—the calm surface of the motel pool, the contemplative contours of residential streets like rakings in the sand of a Japanese garden—had not allowed her to think as leisurely as this freeway madness.

For John Nefastis (to take a recent example) two kinds of entropy, thermodynamic and informational, happened, say by coincidence, to look alike, when you wrote them down as equations. Yet he had made his mere coincidence respectable, with the help of Maxwell’s Demon.

Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts; more than two, anyway. With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together.

Related Characters: Oedipa Maas, John Nefastis
Related Symbols: Cars, Smog, and Freeways, The Nefastis Machine
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
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Entropy Term Timeline in The Crying of Lot 49

The timeline below shows where the term Entropy appears in The Crying of Lot 49. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...some demon managed to sort hot from cold air inside a box. This would reduce entropy and create a difference in temperature that could, say, power a perpetual motion machine. By... (full context)
Chapter 5
Conspiracy, Interpretation, and Meaning Theme Icon
American Modernity and Counterculture Theme Icon
Media, Communication, and Human Relationships Theme Icon
Change, Redemption, and Marginalization Theme Icon
...girls; then, he shows Oedipa his machine and explains the balance between heat and communication entropy in a complicated way that Oedipa does not completely understand. Nefastis believes that the demon... (full context)