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 Why hadn't he seen it before?

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Because he was sober. We're often warned against driving or operating heavy machinery or engaging in sexual activity while drunk because it limits the scope of our abilities to see things as they are. We're not often warned against the danger of merely thinking about stuff while drunk. But it's the same concept. It's easy to understand that your reaction times are lessened while drunk so you shouldn't drive (also your eyesight becomes fuzzier and your brain dumber). It's also easy to understand that maybe buffing a floor with a high powered buffer could get dicey. It's maybe less understandable for some how engaging in sexual activity should be limited by how drunk you or the other person is because, for loads and loads of them, getting drunk (or getting somebody else drunk) is the only way they can get laid. But if your rationality is hampered, so is your ability to recognize or give consent. But thinking?! Why, that's the easiest thing in the world to do! And it's sometimes more fun when you're drunk! Why would anybody warn against thinking at a time like that?!

I think most people have an unconscious understanding that thinking is bad when you're drunk which is why sports exists. It's a great way to get drunk while not having to think about anything but how stupid the uniforms of the team playing against your favorite team look when that team is beating the fucking pants off of your team and you can't find any other way to feel superior to them or their fans. Concerts are good for getting drunk at as well because you don't need to think while rocking out to your favorite rap or country or boy group.

I think another reason thinking while drinking is dangerous is because alcohol is a depressant and if you think too much while drunk, you're eventually going to probably kill yourself. Please don't think and drink!

"Why hadn't he seen it"
Obviously there isn't much to say about this line on its own. But that's what this blog is about so let me say just this tiny little bit: seeing is revelation. It's incorporating evidence into your understanding of the world via the medium of light. Light as illumination and knowledge and change being the theme of this book, or, at least, this section. Perhaps what Pynchon is stating here and the previous (and probably aft) sentences is that alcohol works much the same way as light. It helps one to see things, if not clearly, at least from a different perspective. Like two observers seeing two different events at differing times based on their distance from the object or their movement away or toward that object. Hint, hint!

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 One day Merle had seen the astonishing truth of the case, though admittedly he had been most of the night working his way from one Whiskey Hill saloon to the next, drinking.

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"Merle had seen the astonishing truth of the case"
This makes it sound like Pynchon's going to explain exactly the connection Merle saw between Blinky Morgan and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Nobody would blame you for rubbing your hands together, pulling your pants down to your upper thighs, pumping the lotion bottle three or four times, and getting ready for the money shot reveal. And while I, sitting here with my pants half off, don't know for sure if there's going to be a reveal because I'm reading this long ass book one sentence at a time (probably due to some early childhood brain injury), I'm hesitant to start pumping lotion into my hand because I quickly noticed the conjunction "though" which is how a grammarian shouts, "Before you begin fondling your nether regions in anticipation of universal truth revealed and/or boobies, take a second to regard the framework of the first clause by studying this second clause!"

"though admittedly he had been most of the night working his way from one Whiskey Hill saloon to the next, drinking"
See? Merle was drunk when he had this revelation so take it with several grains of salt on the rim of your tequila shot. Do teetotalers understand how truly overwhelming revelation can be when one is in an altered state? I feel like the reaction to revelation while you're sober reduces itself to a nod of the head as it's swiftly incorporated into your understanding of life and the universe around you. In an altered state, revelation becomes truly religious. The immenseness of the revelation multiplies by the grandeur of the altered state. A drunk might be, as Merle here, astonished, a pothead flabbergasted, while somebody on mushrooms or LSD might trepan themselves to let out the massive truth flow freely from their blown mind. I may not have trepanned myself but I regularly had mind blowing revelations about severely mundane things while on mushrooms or LSD which thought about later sober just made me shake my head and laugh. I'm glad I never started a cult about how the number three connects everything and triangles are the perfect shape, or how some VCRs' pause button would pause the show but then to unpause the show, you'd have to press it again instead of play. Even though, you know, the button's purpose was to PAUSE, not to UNPAUSE!

"Whiskey Hill"
Whenever I research Cleveland to read about Whiskey Hill, I just get modern mentions of Whiskey Island. I'm assuming this is the same place but things have changed due to climate change!

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 "There you go. An asymmetry with respect to light anyway."

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"An asymmetry with respect to light anyway"
Ed Addle simply repeats what Merle explained the press reported about Blinky's eyes. Yeah, jerko. He sees two different things with each eye. Asymmetrical, you might say.

I think it's the asymmetry of the two separated beams of light from the same source was what Michelson and Morley were looking for to prove the existence of Æther. The light split in two perpendicular directions but measured across the same distance should result in two asymmetric wavelengths if Æther exists. The double-refraction of the light (but not resulting in parallel beams due to the use of mirrors) coming back together would cause the beam to intensify or dim depending on if the wavelengths "interfered" with each other (hence the name interferometer!).

Ed's "with respect to light" bit might also just be him conceding that, sure, he can imagine Blinky seeing the world this way but it's only in regards to the way Blinky's eyes receive light at different times or wavelengths. In other words, it has nothing to do with Æther. So there you go, Merle. Big deal.

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 "A double-refractor, for that matter."

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An interferometer splits light from a single source and then has them converge on a detector. A double-refractor polarizes the light to create two beams in parallel. So Merle's example is subtly different in that Blinky's seeing the same light but refracted to different wavelengths. I'll admit (again): I don't think I'm smart enough to understand the difference.

But what I am smart enough to understand is that Merle Rideout is getting into photography (or soon will, anyway) so he sees Blinky as a photographic or telescopic lens while Ed Addle sees him as just another tool to discover his beloved Æther.

Are their two viewpoints another example of the Theory of Relativity and how two observers can view the same events in different ways? Man, I'm really simplifying one of the most amazing scientific leaps of logic and experimentation of the 20th Century! I should probably just stick to playing video games.

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 "A walking interferometer, as you'd say," suggested Ed Addle.

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"interferometer"
Merriam-Webster's definition: "an apparatus that utilizes the interference of waves (as of light) for precise determinations (as of distance or wavelength)". The interferometer was the device used in the Michelson-Morley experiment to determine if the movement of the Earth caused a change in the speed of light as it moved through the theoretical Æther. Ed's suggesting that Blinky now has the same sort of ability. He can see distortions in space-time because each eye sees the same light from the same source but from two separate perspectives.

A Michelson interferometer invented by Albert Abraham Michelson in 1887.

Here's a quote from the Michelson interferometer Wikipedia page that sort of sums up why Pynchon's concentrating on this event at the beginning of the book, much like he began with the Columbus Exposition in Chicago because it signaled the end of the Frontier and the advancement of electricity:

"The null result of that experiment essentially disproved the existence of such an Æther, leading eventually to the special theory of relativity and the revolution in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century."

Thomas Pynchon has carefully chosen this time and place as the beginning of not just a new century but an entirely new world brought on by a new understanding and perspective, a changed observation, of that world.

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 Blinky gave out a number of stories.

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We only have two examples of the stories Blinky gave out which Pynchon probably did on purpose. What he's given us is two different examples of the violent trauma that altered Blinky's eye. Two different possibilities. Two different ways of seeing things. Blinky's eyes themselves. If your eyes see the world in two different ways, how can you be sure of the truth of anything you're seeing? Blinky's stories now match his vision. Do you believe the left eye or the right eye? And does it even matter if both are, in their own ways, true?

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 Each of Blinky's eyes, according to press accounts, saw the world differently, the left one having undergone an obscure trauma, either from a premature detonation during a box job or from a naval howitzer while fighting in the Rebellion.

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Not sure how Merle could tell this from Blinky's picture although I'm sure one eye must have been covered in a white film. Maybe the picture Merle is talking about which would be the picture Thomas Pynchon saw was the picture in my last blog post. And if you go by that picture, one eye is in the light and the other is recessed in darkness. Along with the rumors that Blinky's eye sees the world differently, Merle could have then come to the conclusion, skin covered in goose flesh, that Blinky somehow was seeing the world in a way that would prove the Michelson-Morley experiment a complete failure.
    The idea that Blinky's eyes saw the world in different ways finally reveals that my speculation was probably correct in that the "principle" is that of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Here we get the most compact and literal example of that theory: a man whose two eyes themselves act as separate observers, each seeing the same world but from different positions and perspectives.

"obscure trauma"
The literal reading of this line indicates that the actual story of the eye's trauma is unknown to all but Blinky. But this can also be read as a trauma caused by darkness. Meaning, you know, no light since light's super important to this book. Illumination can be read as knowledge as well. In other words, the trauma has hidden knowledge from the eye, leaving it in darkness, a metaphor for the current times not being able to yet see the reality of the physical universe.

"premature detonation during a box job"
I'm not sure what this means but I assume it means robbing a box car on a train or a bank vault. I suspect Pynchon chose the two examples of how the eye went for specific reasons but, again, I can only speculate. Could Blinky's vision of the unknown principle (seeing prematurely in a way he shouldn't) caused by a premature detonation be a hint at how the atomic bomb was made possible by Einstein's theory? According to how I'm perceiving history in this novel, I mean that literally. The atomic bomb would not exist until a new way of viewing the universe came into view and not Einstein's theory was especially needed for an atomic bomb.

"naval howitzer while fighting in the Rebellion"
We don't get a mention as to what side of the Rebellion Blinky fought on. But that doesn't matter. Pynchon simply takes the opportunity to remind the reader of the historical context of this story: just mere decades ago, a bunch of racists rose up to try to maintain ownership of Black Americans. Sure, some moronic imbeciles who are stupid love to claim the Rebellion was started for States Rights. But you know which right they wanted their own say in, yeah? Slavery, dumb-dumb.
    Anyway, maybe this can be seen as Black versus White or, in other words, Dark versus Light (both in the color of the skin of the people at the center of the dispute and also the "dark" idea of keeping slaves versus the "light" of emancipation).

Double anyway, Blinky loses his eye through some sort of violent means and changes the way he sees the world forever. Rebellion. Detonation. Trauma. Look, Pynchon will get less subtle and metaphorical about these things once Lew gets to Colorado!