Magic Castle Gowing On Sience Grounds

Thomas Pynchon indited his famous novel Gravity's Rainbow by many scientific elements and symbols, such as formulae, scientific laws, even thinking methods. Using these materials he constructed a magic literature world, in which faith and order are absent, logic is confused and amount of irrational, absurd, mystic and super realistic things flood. The contradictory in this novel testify a metaphor which Einstein used before, human's scientific cognition ability is like an expanding circle, the more it expands, the more uncertainty, more oppression and more impaction it will face. In another words, with the soaring development of science, on the one hand, science enlarges human's fields of vision both in depth and in breadth in an unprecedented speed. On the other hand, science shrinks the area of human's self-conscience cognition accordingly. This paradoxical situation turned into a reality which people faced rigorously in the period of World War Second and some time after the war. Just in this sense, we can find the spiritual roots of this novel and understand why Thomas presented modern mysticism or science mysticism in his novel. In the era of European continental rationalism, the admiration of science peaked at the zenith, when science was regarded as a weapon to construct and protect the final authority. Consequently, as time went by, the role of science varied. It was mystified and objectified gradually. In the 20^th century, rapid developing science...