Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 63: Lines 122-125 (1104-1107)

 "So with this Michelson-Morley result. We've all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Æther, whether it's moving or standing still, just doesn't exist. What do we do now?"

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"We've all had a lot of faith invested"
With so much discussion of scientists (and science loving nerds) having faith about scientific theories, I should probably give it more thought than I've done (or have I? I don't remember). Pynchon purposefully infuses several discussions about scientists having faith when that's exactly what scientists shouldn't be having about anything scientific. Faith should not be a part of the equation. Sure, I understand that theories in science and mathematical functions can work to explain something that's observed without actually proving how that observed thing actually functions. So there's a certain amount of "faith" that the theory or equation isn't just a tottering piece of shoddy scaffolding holding up the explanation for the end result. But Pynchon's playing a different game by constantly including the word. Roswell references religious thought for a reason in the previous paragraph. He's making a one-for-one comparison between religious faith and scientific faith, and the fallout for those not ready to abandon an idea when the idea proves faulty.
    The point I'm failing to get to is this: Pynchon isn't talking about one scientific idea (Æther) failing and how people will move on from the loss. He's explicitly discussing the death of God and religion in our civilization's growth. Every discovery about the way the universe works murders an old belief. Many of those "old beliefs" boil down to one simple answer for the unexplainable: God. But every time some unexplainable thing whose answer was God gets explained, it tilts the balance on the scales that maintain the existence of God. At some point, so many discoveries will be made that destroy yet another unexplainable thing, belief in God becomes nearly impossible. How many times does something whose answer was "God" need to be shown that there's an actual answer before the whole idea that God was ever an answer is just discarded? "Well, we'll never answer X so it must be God!" continues to fall to somebody eventually answering "X".

"just doesn't exist. What do we do now?"
And this is the modern (postmodern?) question. God is dead. What do we do now? Aside from celebrate, I mean!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Lines 118-121 (1100-1103)

 "It's like these cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day," Roswell opined, "they get rid of all their earthly possessions and head off in a group for some mountaintop and wait, and then the end of the world doesn't happen. The world keeps going on. What a disappointment! Everybody has to troop back down the mountain with their spiritual tails dragging, except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be reborn, in fact.

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First things first: I did not forget the end quote punctuation. Roswell continues to speak in the paragraph which follows this one which explains how Pynchon and I didn't make a mistake to those who understand the idiosyncrasies of written English dialogue. To those who don't understand it, well now maybe you do.

"It's like these cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day"
Young people of every generation probably think the first time they hear about a particular day being the end of the world, it's the first time anybody has ever declared that. But as you learn more and more history, across the whole expanse of human civilization, you realize somebody out there constantly thinks they know the end point of that civilization. But what's even more funny is that, as in the case of the Romans, nobody recognizes the end of your world even months and years after it already happened. You just go about your business not realizing that your world is dead until you find you're somehow living in another world that you hadn't planned on. But since that's only going to affect one generation, it's barely noticed or remembered, especially since it basically happened to the previous generation and your generation just has to be all, "Oh, wait. How come this world isn't anything like what mom and dad said it was?"
    That bit about not realizing your civilization is already dead but you continue to live in it? That's not just like Rome; it's also like relationships! If you've never been in a relationship before and you're wondering what it feels like to have one end even before either person truly knows it's over, you should read "Melenctha" by Gertrude Stein! Although maybe you shouldn't read it because if I know the kinds of people who read my blogs, you would absolutely hate it and then hate me for suggesting it. So never mind. Maybe go read Sam and the Firefly instead. That was my favorite book in elementary school.
    And just for clarification before I move on to the next bit, the "it's like" part should be acknowledged as it means Roswell's comparing the Ætherists loss of their belief system regarding how light works to these cults. I just want to make sure the pronoun's antecedent is clear before I go entirely off the rails talking about end of the world cults. This isn't directly about them. It's about the Ætherists and, more generally, anybody who must face the consequences of a new discovery in science and all which that discovery winds up destroying.

"they get rid of all their earthly possessions"
This is the closest a person living in a capitalist system can get to death. Material possessions are like your video game health bar. When you've lost them all, the next loss is your life. Or, as we'll see by the end of Roswell's thought, a clean slate through a kind of materialist reincarnation. We are our memories and our experiences. But in a capitalist system, many people are merely their seemingly endless collection of horrible Funko Pops.

"head off in a group for some mountaintop and wait"
If you do this alone, you're a crazy hermit. If you do it with a group, it's a religious movement.

"and then the end of the world doesn't happen"
I like the tense of this sentence, or whatever you call it. What am I? A grammarian?! Oh, sure, I knew how to use antecedent correctly. I think. But that doesn't mean anything at all! Anyway, I like that Roswell's not just rebuking end of the world cults of the past with this statement but all those in the future as well.

"The world keeps going on. What a disappointment!"
I mean, yeah. You don't need a cult to have this revelation five or six times per day. But I suppose it's worse for those who not only burned every bridge in their life because they didn't think they'd need to cross any more rivers ever again but were probably really self-righteous while doing it.
    These two lines bring to mind The Entertainment from Infinite Jest. Himself's terrible, possibly-actual-world ending movie that destructively takes away the "what a disappointment" part of the equation from the people who watch it. One of my lifelong rants has been how I never asked to be born into this world of pain. I didn't give my parents consent to suffer this turmoil! And so when I finally got to the description of Himself's "Infinite Jest" film, I found I would probably have readily succumbed to it. A movie filmed with a special holographic lens that puts the viewer in the mind of a baby while its mother repeatedly apologizes to it? Yes please.

"except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be reborn"
Speaking of Infinite Jest, I think Pynchon just wrote it in three lines here (minus all the drama about how parents shape their children's lives and with fewer allusions to Hamlet). This is Don Gateley's story! Shedding all material possessions (past traumas and addictions most definitely included) to be reborn a free man, able to experience life and feel actual human emotions again! Plus Don gets the added benefit of getting as close as possible to dying so he can be reborn. Plus we get to see how Himself continues to direct movies from the afterlife due to Gately's near death condition. I think.
    Anyway, that's a different book that I need to re-read! What these "grinning idiots" understand is that they don't have to be tied to those stupid fucking Funko Pops! You can throw them in the trash and be free! You can give yourself a second chance at actually experiencing life! Stop cosplaying a dragon! Let the dwarves take your ugly treasures! Let their theft awaken you from your gold-hypnotized slumber! Be angry or joyous but whatever you do, fly! FLY, DAMMIT, FLY!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Line 117 (1099)

 As if it possessed the substance of an invention or a battle, the negative result took its place in the history of Cleveland, as another of the revealed mysteries of light.

* * * * * * * * * *

"history of Cleveland"
I just read* the Wikipedia page "History of Cleveland" and didn't find a single mention of the Michelson-Morley experiment which only proves that Thomas Pynchon knows more about everything important than anybody else in space and time.

* Pressed CTRL-F and searched for the number of times "Michelson" appeared in the text. It was 0.

"revealed mysteries of light"
Illumination reveals what has previously not been seen. So this is kind of a joke, I think. It might not be as funny a joke as "the history of Cleveland", but I thought it was pretty good.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Line 116 (1098)

 The mood in the saloons frequented by Ætherists grew sombre.

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Those who most believed now grieve as we all grieve the constant changes of our lives, as we all try to process the loss of a long-held belief in the face of changing evidence, of new experience, of a growing and ever-evolving world. I may not have ever felt a belief so deeply that I wasn't sure how to go on after learning something different (you know, like when Inspector Javert learns that maybe he was wrong all those decades in projecting evil and chaos on a man who simply committed a crime out of hunger and desperation but he can't cope with that realization so he, logically, throws himself off of a bridge) but I have had a deli close down where I loved to go and eat their meatball subs while drinking Mr. Pibb out of their soda fountain and skimming the Willamette Week for rock shows at local venues. That's pretty similar, right? Heck, we all mourn the loss of locations we've grown fond of visiting because change is constant. And that may as well be like losing religion was to people in the 19th Century. Right?

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Line 115 (1097)

 If the Æther was there, in motion or at rest, it was having no effect on the light it carried.

* * * * * * * * * *

At first you might think this statement was a bit redundant, after all that was said before. But it's crucial to the idea that the Michelson-Morley experiment did not prove that Æther doesn't exist; it just proved that it had no effect and, thus, it struck the blow that would eventually lead to its demise, at least in the eyes of all but the most religiously devoted to Æther.
    This declaration that Æther isn't needed to understand the speed of light or how it travels was foreshadowed by Merle Rideout and Heino Vanderjuice's earlier discussion about how Æther had become a matter of faith among many scientists, some being so devoted to the idea of it that they will try to keep it alive throughout the early half of the 20th Century, long after most scientists had put it in the bin. But most scientists decided, after this experiment, that even if it existed (again, it was not proven not to exist here), it simply wasn't a variable that mattered to the study of light. Thus it was subsequently disregarded. And, as such, in the universe of Against the Day, it suddenly ceased to be. It previously existed in the consciousness of the world, thus it was scene by aeronauts and others, affecting their travels in the sky, but would no longer be an issue. Disbelief causes a physical change in the phenomena of the universe.

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Line 114 (1096)

 For word was circulating that Michelson and Morley had found no difference in the speed of light coming, going, or sideways relative to the Earth speeding along in its orbit.

* * * * * * * * * *

This is one of those nice "Science Without Math" statements that we can all use from time to most-of-the-time. It simply sums up the experiment without getting in the weeds of the details (although the details are what make this whole Blinky Morgan and Edward Morley are the same person theory interesting). What was the experiment about? It was about measuring the speed of light in several different directions to see if the movement of the Earth changed the speed. A change would indicate that the light was moving through something which was also traveling at those speeds. It should be faster going in the direction of the Earth while slowing down going perpendicular to that direction (or against it, obvs!). Who needs to know how it's done? How the light from one source is split into different beams and bounced in different directions to eventually arrive at the same destination? And how arriving at the same destination in phase (since light was suspected to be simply a wave as sound (which is why is was suspected that it needed a medium to travel through)) would indicate that direction didn't hamper its speed. Only if each beam arrived out of phase would there be an indication that the movement and inertia of the Earth would be affecting it. And that out-of-phase bit was what made Merle's theory into a lengthy philosophical sidebar that Pynchon has spent an awful lot of time on. Which he doesn't do with all of his strange little tales so it must have been especially important to the overall themes of the novel. I suspect it backs up the idea that Lew has been split from another Earth to find himself on one where he has become a pariah among those he once knew and loved. But then I could be biased because that was my initial impression of my first reading of the Lew Basnight sections.

Maybe as Mark Z. Danielewski says in his new novel, Tom's Crossing, in the section where the mortician does the autopsy on Russell's body, I need to uninstall my initial bias of Lew's possible dimension hopping. Or, if I want to remain loyal to Thomas Pynchon here, I need to get beyond the zero to rid myself of not just the bias but the idea of the bias too. I think. Remember how not smart I am? I still have trouble with the idea of "Beyond the Zero"!

Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 62: Line 113 (1095)

 "Because Blinky emerged from invisibility, and the moment he reentered the world that contained Michelson and Morley, the experiment was fated to have a negative outcome, the Æther was doomed. . . ."

* * * * * * * * * *

I think somewhere along the way, I got Merle's theory a bit twisted. I was speculating that Æther would be dead if the experiment were a success and the beams were in phase. But, of course, Merle's theory was that Blinky being captured was tied to the discovery that Æther wasn't a concern in measuring the speed of light. But I have to allow for slight missteps being that I don't understand nearly enough of the minute details of this experiment. As a whole, I get what they're doing. But when I break it down into parts (like reading the Wikipedia entry on the Michelson interferometer), I simply come to a thorough understanding of the limits of my intelligence.
    That being said, we're back to Merle's simple theory: in some way, Blinky being captured is connected to the non-detection, and subsequent demise, of Æther. I don't understand it and probably never will which doesn't bode well for my understanding of the rest of the science and math of this novel. I'm already dreading the possible revelation that a reader must understand Quaternions to interpret the novel.

I think the main point here is this: Merle Rideout expressly states my theory of Lew Basnight (and possibly my theory that the world physically changes based on the discoveries made by science). If Blinky has returned to a world with Michelson and Morley, that must mean he was previously in a world without them or there experiment. A world where Æther continued to be the driving force behind the movement of light through space. Possibly an Earth with a hollow center. Or a universe where Martians lived on the moon. A place where boy angels fly about the world in a balloon with a perpetual energy machine.  A place where a man can live without any knowledge of the sin he committed in another dimension.