"What, in the Æther, would occupy the place of water-vapor in the air? Some of us believe it is Vacuum. Minute droplets of nothing at all, mixed in with the prevailing Ætheric medium. Until the saturation point is reached, of course. Then there is condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated nothingness sweeps a given area, cyclones and anticyclones of it, abroad not only locally at the planetary surface but outside it, through cosmic space as well."
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You may have noticed the timestamps on the last entry and this one and think, "What was this lazy blogger up to? Doesn't he know he's already not going to ever complete this project even if he weren't drifting away from it for years at a time?" Or one might accidentally jump to the correct assumption: "Ed Addle broke this blogger's brain." I really wish Merle Rideout hadn't just been sarcastic about humidity but Ed Addle would also have realized that and decided not to answer.
One of my greatest problems is that I'm not interested in things I'm not interested in. Perhaps that's one of the greatest problems of all of us, poorly expressed. If that something blocks me from the stuff that interests me, I can usually suck it up, get through it, and continue at the pace, already far too slow for a mortal lifetime, that I'd been on. But sometimes, you're not just faced with something you're uninterested in: you're faced with two things you're uninterested in intertwined and tangled up with things you're too daft to understand. The "you" in that sentence being "me" and the "things" being "these five sentences of dialogue". Because Ed isn't just discussing Æther, a thing that soon won't exist in this novel's reality but does actually exist at the moment this takes place (evidence of this being all of the equipment that Ed mentions previously that exists to measure things within the Æther (as well as all the evidence collected by balloonists)) and also a thing I'm not interested in, but he's also discussing humidity and weather, things that I'm so not interested in that I abandoned this project for a year and a half so I wouldn't have to bother with them.
Or, if I'm going to be absolutely transparent, I just kind of forgot about this project or became overly anxious about some post-fifty aging issue or, as I often do, just put the project on the back-burner to simmer as if I have all the time in the universe to get back to it before it boils over and I die. Is that what you call a mixed metaphor?
"What, in the Æther, would occupy the place of water-vapor in the air?"
Try to remember way back to the previous two or three entries that this was in response to Merle asking about humidity within Æther (probably jokingly but nerds are gonna nerd, you know?). Ed approaches this problem logically in that, based on current thinking, Æther would act much like atmosphere or water. It's the substance that exists in space when no other substance exists which allows waves to propagate across it. Because our atmosphere is a thing that exists and is made up of stuff (you know the stuff: smog, farts, air, balloons), Æther probably acts much like it. Meaning weather patterns can form or tides can move through it based on its interaction with other nearby bodies. Just as air bubbles can occupy water and water-vapor can occupy air, something must be able to form or move through Æther in much the same way. In other words, humidity (or, if I want to keep adding water to this analogy for some reason, a fart).
"Some of us believe it is Vacuum."
Why? Ed doesn't discuss why because you can't test a scientific hypothesis on something that doesn't actually exist (even if it does sort of exist in this novel's idea that the way people thought things work is the way they worked until we figured out the reality of it (which, maybe, is how things work?)). But somebody thought it so it's as valid a theory as anybody else's. Which is one of the main problems with the way people think about reality in the year of your Lord 2025. The common sense kind of people seem to think that a scientific theory is something you just think up out of whole cloth and then that's it: it's as valid as anybody else's theory. What they're really talking about is opinion and speculation but they can't separate themselves from the mainstream definition of theory. To them, the theory of gravity holds equal weight (hee hee) to the theory of a flat Earth. They don't understand the difference between a hypothesis based on observation using experiments to test its validity so that it becomes a scientific theory if evidence shows the hypothesis hold time and time again. They just figure, "I thought glanced off the side my brain so it must have some validity!" Then they run to ChatGPT and ask it if it makes sense and ChatGPT is all, "Sure! Great job! You're the smartest!" Then they spiral into narcissism and madness.
Sorry! The explication of this one line got away from me. I know I grouped it with four other lines but since it's all one piece of Ed Addle's explanatory dialogue, I figured I needed them all for context. So back to this line!
Is it ironic that their speculation that a vacuum forms in Æther to explain the humidity of Æther comes so close to explaining exactly what Æther actually is? Just a vacuum! Remember, my knowledge of chemistry and physics stems from high school and maybe one year of college before I became a Lit Major. So I can't really explain how vacuum forms within Æther. But I can speculate and my speculation is equally as valid as the speculation of a PhD scientist (according to the illiterate masses, I mean).
Here's my speculation: I've seen that trick where you float a candle in colored water and then put a glass over the candle until the flame uses up all the oxygen and goes out. The water rises up into the glass because a vacuum is formed when the fire burns off all the oxygen. So maybe the hypothesis is that light moving through Æther is a catalyst which causes a chemical reaction to burn up small amounts of the Æther. This forms tiny bubbles of vacuum within the Æther. Now, you'd think this would cause the Æther to collapse in on the bubble. But if Æther fills everything, there's nothing to move into the space that the Æther leaves behind if it were to collapse in. So the bubble of vacuum remains somewhat stable. And it is the build up of these vacuum bubbles that cause "weather" in the Æther.
One other thought: some of us believe it is Vacuum sounds somewhat like some of us believe in a Vacuum. Not that they believe in a thing called a Vacuum but that their beliefs are unmodified by outside context. Pynchon is saying, in a roundabout way, that Ed Addle's "some of us" are merely speculating. There is no actual evidence for what he's about to discuss.
"Minute droplets of nothing at all, mixed in with the prevailing Ætheric medium."
Opinions and speculation within the prevailing scientific discussion are "minute droplets of nothing at all."
"Until the saturation point is reached, of course."
This is when the storms happen, as with the interaction between humidity and temperature (is that how weather patterns form? Also the movement of the Earth? I never took any weather classes at all!). Also something that causes somewhat of a storm: new ideas into the scientific discussion that can no longer be ignored, based either by evidence (hopefully!) or faith because it seems to explain things so well. Here, Pynchon seems to be discussing crazy theories that sweep the scientific community, leading many astray into vacuums of ignorance. Heino and Merle had a bit of a discussion about these things earlier which is why I'm staking my reading comprehension's reputation on following this train of metaphorical thought. Heino believed Æther itself was a storm of vacuum bubbles that would eventually amount to nothing at all.
"Then there is condensation, and storms in which not rain but precipitated nothingness sweeps a given area, cyclones and anticyclones of it, abroad not only locally at the planetary surface but outside it, through cosmic space as well."
Eventually, these loony theories need to be dealt with by the scientific community as they condense among groups of scientists willing to believe a popular, untested theory that seems to easily and readily explain a problem they've been having in their math and observations. These would "condense" in a local area first, sweeping the scientific community and buggering up their data. If it was attractive enough, it would then move through "cosmic space" as well, infecting the entire science. These are seen as "storms" because they simply disrupt the entire scientific process until they pass.
On a more literal level, I suppose these storms which produce "cyclones and anticyclones" of vacuum somehow cause the vacuum to re-integrate into the Æther, or, more probably, simply dissolve into more nothingness. Is that a thing? Can nothingness become greater nothingness so that it doesn't exist as a bubble but stops existing entirely? I guess it doesn't matter because, once again, Ed Addle's theory here is pure speculation about a thing that soon won't even be something discussed by scientists. In essence, the whole idea of Æther is one of these vacuum storms which has only recently begun to finally pass and dissipate.
