In Prigogine and Stenger’s book, the New Alliance, they
claim that chemistry was tremendously boosted by Buffon. There was a period in
the 1770s when certain French scientists, like D’Alembert, began to consider
the Newtonian system to be faulty, due to various discrepencies they thought
they had found, experimentally. Buffon, however, was having none of it, and in
refuting the anti-Newtonians on the theoretical level, he suggested that the
universality of gravity had not yet been taken up by chemists, who had clung
tenaciously to an old fashioned system of “attractions”. The mathematical
faults that D’Alembert felt he had found merely pointed to the need for further
research under the grand Newtonian umbrella.
“… and if, up to this day, we
have regarded the laws of affinity as different from those of gravity, the
fault lies in not having well conceived them, grasped them, embrassed this
object in all its extension. The figure which, among celestial bodies, hardly
does anything by the law of the action of bodies one upon the other, because
the distance is so vast, does everything, on the contrary, when the distance is
very small or non-existent.”
It is through the research that was pursued under this
unifying charter that, in the beginning of the century, brought about the
discovery of radioactivity. Buffon’s comparison was almost literally
transferred to the atom in Bohr’s theory of 1913, although I doubt Bohr ever
read Buffon. It was in this context that the wave became one of science’s
reigning symbols. From 1900 until the 1930s, waves were much in the news, and
not only due to physics, but due, as well, to technology. The wave was
associated with the radio, and the radio promoted a view of the world as a
sphere of invisible waves. In 1919,
Victor Tausk’s famous essay, On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in
schizophrenia, he points to a recurrent image in schizophrenia, in which
patients claim that a kind of devise exists that influences the patient’s and
other’s thoughts and feelings. In a footnote on the devise, Tausk notes that “It
produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays
or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to
explain.” The patient isn’t the only one – as radios came on the market, it was
the rare customer whose “knowledge of physics” could explain how they worked.
But that they worked by means of waves (rather than, mostly, rays – I think one
could probably trace a change from rays to waves, the effect of cultural
themes, in the 19th century) was
something all knew.
I am not quoting Tausk to intentionally pathologize Virginia Woolf, although I’m afraid that,
given our knowledge of her breakdowns, I am a bit. However, Woolf’s own texts
are not reticent about what she experienced during periods of mental
disorientation, and I don’t think one can discount these experiences in the way
she wrote, the themes she elaborated.
Heinrich Hertz, the man who discovered radio waves, spoke,
in general terms, of replacing such terms as energy and force in mechanics with
his threefold categories of time, space and mass, and deriving his mechanics of
“hidden mass” and “hidden movement” from these – much to the dismay of
philosophers like Mach. That hiddenness, that invisibility, combines with the
notion of waves to create a certain popular mythology. Oliver Lodge, who took
Hertz’s theory, popularized it in England, and arguably made the first radio
receiver, was as famous, in the 1920s, as a parapsychology researcher. He took
the model of the radio very far – in the twenties, he propounded the theory
that the eye “is like a revieving instrument for detecting radio waves of an
extremely short and definite length. It was the first wireless receiving set
employed by man.”
With authorities like Lodge – authority-eccentrics – using
the notion of invisible waves to reinforce a rather pre-scientific world view,
I hope I am not pathologizing Woolf by suggesting that both her illness and her
peculiar awareness of contemporary fact made waves an irresistable image of the
stability-in-instability that she was after. I have not been able to find out
when she first bought her own wireless set. But there is a quotation in her
diary from 1918 that shows how radio waves, voices, and information come
together in a complex. She records a meeting with a high government official,
who tells her about the latest developments on the front in France.
“I tried to think it extraordinary but I found it difficult –
extraordinary, I mean, to be in touch with one who was in the very center of
the very center, sitting in a little room at Downing St. where, as he said, the
wireless messages are racing through from all over the world, a million miles a
minute. Where you have constantly to settle off hand questions of enormous
difficulty and important – where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon
what two or three elderly gentlemen decide…”
This crisscrossing of messages, and the sorting of them, is
reproduced and suitably transformed in many passages in Jacob’s room where an
entire collectivity is taken into account, with the authorial voice wandering
among it, and commenting on the enormous difficulty and incompleteness of
knowing where to begin, how to penetrate, what it means. This is a collectivity
in which Jacob floats. It is to the decisions of two or three elderly
gentlemen, who take this collectivity, this Europe, to war, that Jacob is
eventually sacrificed.
This, then, are some of the significations of the wave. The wave is the form taken by what is in
motion, whereas the room is a retreat from what is in motion – this, at least,
is one of the values their opposition has in Jacob’s room. You can be mounted
on a wave, but not for very long. Woolf has a description of Jacob’s attempt to
hunt like the gentry which seems, almost,to derive from Muybridge’s famous
series of photos. It gives us, or me at least, the kind of wave reference which
I think goes all the way through the novel:
A few moments before a horse
jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself
together, goes up like a monster
wave, and pitches down on the further
side. Hedges and sky swoop in a
semicircle. Then as if your own body ran
into the horse's body and it was
your own forelegs grown with his that
sprang, rushing through the air
you go, the ground resilient, bodies a
mass of muscles, yet you have
command too, upright stillness, eyes
accurately judging. Then the
curves cease, changing to downright hammer
strokes, which jar; and you draw
up with a jolt; sitting back a little,
sparkling, tingling, glazed with
ice over pounding arteries, gasping:
"Ah! ho! Hah!" the
steam going up from the horses as they jostle
together at the cross-roads,
where the signpost is, and the woman in the
apron stands and stares at the
doorway. The man raises himself from the
cabbages to stare too.
So Jacob galloped over the
fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the
hunt, and rode by himself eating
sandwiches, looking over the hedges,
noticing the colours as if new
scraped, cursing his luck.”
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