![]() ![]() 3 Ĭlearly it would be perilous to argue that taking such a course as “Transmission of Information” was the only possible mode of learning about entropy available to Pynchon. ![]() A four-thousand-level course would have been reserved for advanced students, and Pynchon switched majors from engineering physics to literature after his first year. It is most unlikely that Pynchon actually took course 4564, “Transmission of Information.” As a first-year student, he had a tightly prescribed curriculum in physics, mathematics, English, and drafting, and his one elective was in astronomy. Entropy, as defined by Shannon, is connected closely to many issues about the communication of information-especially “fidelity considerations and the effective rate of transmission”-raised both by trying to understand information theory and by trying to read Pynchon. Central to designing a transmission system to communicate information efficiently is the concept of entropy as developed in information theory, especially by Claude Shannon. In this essay I shall argue that “the general aspects of a transmission system” apply to our reading of Pynchon as well as to our listening to an electronic system like a radio. These principles are applied to pulse-code modulation as an example of modern transmission of information. The over-all performance of transmission is discussed as to fidelity considerations and the effective rate of transmission. The transmission of primary signal functions into secondary signal functions at the transmitter, the capacity of the channel to transmit the secondary signal function in the presence of channel noise, and the possibilities of recovering the primary signal function at the receiver are studied. The statistical properties of the source, its entropy, and the rate at which information is produced by the source are discussed. The definition of information and a quantitative measure of information are given. This course deals with the general aspects of a transmission system, which consist of the source of information, the transmitter, the channel, the receiver, and the final destination of the message. The course description contains a word much examined in Pynchon studies, “entropy,” but not used here in the more familiar context of thermodynamics: “Transmission of Information,” course 4564 in the electrical engineering department, anticipated concerns about communications raised by the kind of fiction that Pynchon began to write before he graduated from Cornell, as an English major, in 1959. Under “Courses in Radio and Communications” the 1953–54 catalog of the Cornell College of Engineering described an advanced topic, “Transmission of Information,” that might have interested a bright engineering physics student matriculating that autumn named Thomas Pynchon.
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