Did Edgar Allan Poe Foresee Modern Physics and Cosmology?
By John Horgan
I’ve always been an Edgar Allan Poe fan, so much so that I even watched the horrifying—not in a good way–2012 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 didn’t 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 insight”–and 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/
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