"Well now, there's a student of Professor Gibbs whose work really bears looking into, young De Forest, a regular wizard with the electricity . . . along with a Japanese visitor, Mr. Kimura—but say, where can a starving pedagogue and his pilot get a couple of those famous Chicago beefsteaks around here? Boys, like you to meet Ray Ipsow, without whom I'd still be back in Outer Indianoplace, waiting for some interurban that never comes."
* * * * * * * * * *
"Professor Gibbs"
Josiah Willard Gibbs, American mathematical physicist and professor at Yale beginning in 1871. Discoverer of the concept of chemical potential in the mid to late 1870s. That's well within the 20 years plus or minus of 1893 that I consider the weird changing landscape of the world in which Pynchon decided to center this story (at least center the beginning of the story! It'll keep going. So it's like the years prior to 1893 that form the changing shape of our universe's perceived landscape are the "beyond the zero" years. They're unseen but still shape and affect the current and future years). He created an equation called the Phase rule that makes it easy to discover the variables in chemical reactions (I have simplified this definition because I am a simple person who doesn't understand complex things). Gibbs discovered the idea of free energy which is now called "Gibbs free energy" as if it's some kind of electrolyte supplement for exhausted nerds. "Free energy" does not mean "energy that you get for free without any strings attached and a miracle to keep everybody's kitchen appliances running forever." Like many words used in science that every day regular people misunderstand because they think "common sense" has anything to do with scientific thought and mathematical theory, free, in this case, means "available in the form of useful work." But then I don't know what that means in this context! Maybe it means something like "energy that isn't needed to maintain the chemical reaction and thus can be used for something else, like powering an engine or heating a body"?
Here's what I get when I Google "simple explanation of Gibbs Free Energy": "The Gibbs free energy of a system at any moment in time is defined as the enthalpy of the system minus the product of the temperature times the entropy of the system. The Gibbs free energy of the system is a state function because it is defined in terms of thermodynamic properties that are state functions." Oh yeah! So simple! Thanks, Google! Thanks, Science! Now I'm going to go get a Dunce Cap permanently sewn to my head.
Professor Gibbs also published a book called The Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics in 1902 which is a book I'll never read but it apparently laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics. Probably more-so than just having "mechanics" in the title. But this Dunce Cap sewn to my head explains why I'll never come up with any other reason how it managed that.
"young De Forest, a regular wizard with the electricity"
Lee de Forest who enrolled at Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School in 1893. An inventor of various radio technologies, he was deemed one of the founders of the electronic age. He once appeared on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, being introduced as "the father of radio and the grandfather of television." That's probably the best way I can summarize Lee de Forest's importance to the changing world via human experimentation with technology. I'm not reading Against the Day so I can do book reports on every single thing mentioned by Pynchon! I just need to dive in a bit, figure out why the person or thing mentioned is of importance to the evolution of human civilization, and get out before my eyes glaze over and I wish I were playing Apex.
"Japanese visitor, Mr. Kimura"
This one has me stumped. Sort of. I found a Shunkichi Kimura who graduated from Yale in 1896. His dissertation was "Studies on General Spherical Functions." He was also a wireless engineer in the Naval Electrical Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan. He also co-founded "The International Association for Promoting the Study of Quaternions and Allied Systems of Mathematics," or, simply, "The Quaternion Association." The definition of a quaternion is thus: a complex number of the form w + xi + yj + zk, where w, x, y, z are real numbers and i, j, k are imaginary units that satisfy certain conditions. This nonsense was first described by Irish mathematician, William Rowan Hamilton in 1843, obviously insane. Or maybe just way smarter than I can even imagine somebody being. Because why would he even need to come up with this equation in the first place?! And I certainly hope that I don't need to understand quaternions to understand the theme of this novel! This is going to be delta t and Gravity's Rainbow all over again, isn't it?! The need for quaternions has something to do with vectors and calculus, which we've seen discussed previously. Well, if not discussed, at least implied by mentioning brilliant minds in the field of vectors.
In Kimura's and his cofounder Molenbroek's letter to the scientific community, "To Friends and Fellow Workers in Quaternions," Kimura and Molenbroek say this: "On the other hand, many who are prejudiced against the calculus of quaternions maintain the opinion that it is hard to understand, and that it contains a great deal which is useless in addition to things immediately applicable."
In other words, some scientists are as dumb as I am and they don't like to be reminded of it! I wonder if Pynchon is setting up some kind of crazy feud pitting quaternion vectorists against Cartesian plane-ists! That would be as exciting as when Pynchon delves into the language wars when discussing Tchitcherine's backstory. Oh, what a grand time I had pretending to understand all of the humor in that! You can bet I laughed out loud quite merrily in public so people wouldn't actually believe what the sewn on Dunce Cap was screaming at them.
"famous Chicago beefsteaks"
Well, Penelope Black and her zealot friends just fed some to Pugnax! Maybe they've got some left over?
"Ray Ipsow"
A ray can be a beam of sunlight. Ipsow is reminiscent of ipso facto which means "This equals this because, duh, obviously. Do I need to say more?" The researching of the other names has drained me of all imaginative speculation. Maybe I'll figure out why his name is Ray Ipsow later. It sounds like a cross between Roy G. Biv and Lorem Ipsum Dolor.
"without whom I'd still be back in Outer Indianoplace, waiting for some interurban that never comes"
I suppose what Heino is saying is that he was waiting for a bus somewhere in Bumfuck, Indiana, when this aeronaut, Ray Ipsow, gave him a lift. If he's saying something else, I'm sorry for interpreting this wrong. Maybe you should have gone straight to the Against the Day wiki where hundreds of above average minds are working together to interpret the text rather than one single less-than-average mind.
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