Science
Related: About this forumDid Edgar Allan Poe Foresee Modern Physics and Cosmology?
By John Horgan
Ive always been an Edgar Allan Poe fan, so much so that I even watched the horrifyingnot in a good way2012 film The Raven. But when I spotted an essay on Poe by novelist Marilynne Robinson in the February 5 New York Review of Books, I hesitated to read it, thinking, What more can I know about Poe?
Robinson then hooked me with her first sentence, which calls Poe a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day. She went on to reveal something I definitely didnt know about Poe. Just before he died in 1849, when he was only 40, he wrote a book-length work titled Eureka.
According to Robinson, Eureka has always been an object of ridicule, too odd even for devotees of Poe, the emperor of odd. But Robinson contends that Eureka is actually full of intuitive insightand anticipates ideas remarkably similar to those of modern physics and cosmology.
Eureka, she elaborates, describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which radiated the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe. This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and duration are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series. All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century.
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2015/01/24/did-edgar-allan-poe-foresee-modern-physics-and-cosmology/
Basic LA
(2,047 posts)I knew he had briefly attended West Point, but this is new. And I have that issue of the NYRB, just arrived. (Great post.)
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)I just downloaded Eureka for free for my Kindle. Ligeia is one of my favorite stories ever and I have reread him so many times, I can't even count. And every time is a different experience. He truly was one of the greatest American writers, whether you like the genre or not.
hunter
(38,327 posts)I enjoy many intuitive feelings about cosmology (most of them nonsense in all probability...) and I frequently lack the more rigorous mathematical tools I need to express them.
I've downloaded the book. I tend to avoid later books of a similar nature, since the world is overburdened with crackpot cosmology theorists such as myself, but this is Poe!
MisterP
(23,730 posts)then got arrested for teaching teens how to jerk it correctly
defacto7
(13,485 posts)In the beginning of the first thing lies the secondary cause of all things with the germ of their inevitable annihilation.
E.A.Poe