"There's a U.S. Bureau in charge of reporting all this?" wondered Roswell Bounce, who was gainfully self-employed as a photographer, "a network of stations? Ships and balloons?"
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Oh shit. A skeptic whose name evokes UFOs and bouncy houses! Also, since he's a photographer, he doesn't have anything invested in taking a stand on whether Æther exists or not. Sure, he's into light and maybe concerned about how it travels but he's a self-employed dude just trying to, like Merle, take as many naked lady pictures as possible. What does he care how the light moves through the air from the boobies to his glass plate?
By not having a vested interest in one side of the scientific debate or the other, Roswell concerns himself with the realistic particulars of Ed Addle's supposition. If all of this information is being collected by the government, there must be tangible proof of the Bureau collecting the information, proof of the technology they use, and instruments and locations where they collect the data. I don't even believe Roswell is challenging Addle on his information; Roswell's just genuinely surprised that the government's running a Bureau of Æther.
By invoking balloons, which Roswell probably just means weather balloons that measure Ætheric conditions, Pynchon seems to suggest that some of the balloonists do this kind of work. That, currently, these measurements can be made, and are being made, by teams of young balloonists around the world. Because until the Michelson–Morley experiment happens, Æther remains extant. The experiment won't destroy it entirely so expect more it in the storied years ahead but it will have plastered a marginal half-life to it. Its days are numbered.
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