How Did Edgar Allan Poe Manage To Describe The Big Bang In 1848?

They mock when Edgar Allan Poe published his prose poem “ Eureka ” in his last year of life , describing how the macrocosm had begun with a unmarried “ aboriginal particle ” that explode outwards in “ one instant flash . ” But 80 eld afterwards , cosmologist begin realizing that Poe had been on to something .

There ’s anew article about Poe in the New York Review of Bookswhich talk of the town about how far ahead of his sentence the author of “ The Raven ” really was :

Poe ’s mind was by no means banality . In the last year of his life [ 1848 ] he write a prose verse form , Eureka , which would have found this fact beyond doubt — if it had not been so full of visceral insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generation , at least until the belated twentieth C , could make any sense of it . Its very grandness made it an object of derision , an example of affectation and psychotic belief , and so it is view to this daytime among readers and critic who are not at all abreast of contemporary physical science . Eureka describes the extraction of the universe in a exclusive particle , from which “ radiated ” the corpuscle of which all matter is made . minute of arc unsimilarity of size of it and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravitational force caused them to collect as thing , mold the physical universe .

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This by itself would be a startling anticipation of advanced cosmogeny , if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it , for example that space and “ continuance ” are one affair , that there might be headliner that emit no light , that there is a abhorrent force that in some degree counteracts the military force of gravity , that there could be any bit of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours , that our creation might collapse to its original res publica and another universe erupt from the atom it would have become , that our present universe may be one in a serial .

All this is perfectly profound as observation , hypothesis , or speculation by the light source of science in the twenty - first century . And of path Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it . It was the product , he said , of a kind of aesthetic abstract thought — therefore , he importune , a poem . He was absolutely earnest about the truth of the score he had made of cosmic origins , and he was ridiculed for his sincerity . Eureka is important because it indicates the ordered series and the seriousness of Poe ’s thought , and its noteworthy wholeness . It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly strict method of inquiry .

For more about how Poe managed to trace the Big Bang almost a century early , check outthis illuminating New York Times article from 2002as well . [ NYRBviaVDare ]

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