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Edgar Allan Poe, Cosmologist
David Mazzotta writes "Bet you didn't know Edgar Allen Poe pre-discovered the Big Bang and Black Holes. This article at the NYT discusses the concept of pre-discovery, or theorhetical anticipation of eventual scientific discoveries. Most of these come from forward thinking physicists, but occasionally they come from a morbid, alcoholic, poet."
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."
--sig fault--
Run like hell everything is imploding in on itself!
I betcha Poe didn't forecast pr0n by telecommunication...
... and unless there is as good a foundation in his works as Feynman's Quantum Electron Dynamics then I bet he didn't. Stop pulling, anal FUD on slashdot...
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
Not sure what's up with all the NYT articles today, but here's the obligitory link: What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.
...only not nearly as funny.
"All things that are, are fire." -- Heracleitus
Do you think this meant he understood atomic energy?
Or was this just the rap he used to score chicks?
The opposite of progress is congress
Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely accepted until the 1930's...
Nice... Nice move, NYT. Leave it to someone in the Arts section to write an article discussing physics and science predictions.
Pooh-Poohed?!
Likewise, black holes are just an educated guess at what might be at the centre of galaxies or left behind in the wake of supernovae. For all we know, the absence of light in these areas may well be merely extremely dense clouds of cosmic dust rather than pinpoints of near-infinite gravitational power.
In this light, it's preposterous to say Poe or anyone else has "discovered" these constructs, though it's not all that surprising an imaginative artist such as Poe may have dreamt them up. After all, pretty much all cosmology and astronomy at this point has no more substance to back it up than The Cask of Amontillado.
Since the article requires registration and I am tired of typing in "asdasdasd" today, forgive me if this comes across as offtopic or irrelevant.
However, it seems to me that the imagining of something amazing hardly equates to the "discovery" of such a thing.
For example: the guy who dreamed up the concept of a flying car is irrelevant compared to the engineer who actually realizes such a thing.
I guess my point is simply that any fool can dream up wild things while under the influence.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
that read this post and mis-read "cosmotologist"
quoth the raven " use the mousse.."
This seems to mean that the entire species acts as a single huge brain, if you like. There needn't be a supernatural explanation for this. It could just be that culture as a whole processes information, the results of this processing turning up in random people's ideas in strange ways. Weird wild stuff...
My site: Free Nature Pictures
"Bet you didn't know Edgar Allen Poe pre-discovered the Big Bang and Black Holes"
No I had no idea! But now I know.. And yes its Saturday night and yes 11pm down here in New Orleans and here I am rading about Edgar Allen Poe.. I should be crowned as king of all nerds to be reading about this while there is lots of "big banging" going on down few blocks from here on French Quater and Bourbon St
It is well known in the field that Mr Poe discovered a black hole,or as he termed it a "pit", but in his autobiography he talks about being strapped under a big "pendulum".
Not a big "bang".
Fffft. Whatever one of those is.
If I remember correctly, Lagrange (or maybe Laplace - some french guy before 1800) first had the idea of objects so massive that even light could not escape from them. Definitely not Poe.
While being imaginative is a necessary prequisite to do science, the hard (and crucial) part of doing science is to obtain quantitative results that can withstand the tests of experiments and that predict new and useful phenomena and that hopefully, will be useful to humanity. In all these respects, Poe does not qualify as a scientist. He may have the ideas first, yes, but ideas are not sufficient.
HP Lovecraft predicted the existence of horribly betentacled monstrosities from outside the space we know long before they were first discovered lukring unspeakably behind bricked off rooms in the basement of DARPA.
Lovecraft was also an early adopter of continental drift, and it is early adoption, not invention, that we are talking about. The Big Bang did not achieve general acceptance until the 1960s, it is true, however, others besides Poe had proposed similar theories (something about a Cosmic Seed, I recall) before Poe.
In statistical terms - writers are drunken cranks. They are more likely to adopt fringe beliefs before the rest of the population. Some of those fringe beliefs will turn out to be true. The writer will seem prophetic. It's of little significance.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
In a hundred years nobody will remember you, but I'm pretty sure Poe will still have an important place in the American literature
The Raven.
The Raven
John Mitchel, in 1783, had the idea that a star could be so heavy that the light itself could not escape its gravitational field. I think this precludes mr. Poe by some decades.
http://saveie6.com/
...pre-Socratic philosophers did the same thing. Leucippus for example, was the first one to put forward the concept of atomism, and that was ~400 BCE.
He is now believed to have died of rabies, contracted from one of his pets months earlier. In fact, the records from the hospital where he died actually said that he had abstained from alcohol for the previous 6 months.
Find out more about this theory.
I think of Poe as more of an opium fiend.
Never more, never more.
Here's a link to the "poem" in question: Eureka. It's appears to me to be simply nine pages of unreadable drivel.
However I did find a rather interesting quote from Poe: "Great intellects guess well."
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Yes, but where are you going to run to?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
I read that EA Poe piece a long time ago and was amazed. However, there is one thing he got very wrong. He thought that if all things move away from each other, we could trace back the trajectory and locate the center of the universe. Elementary geometry (and a couple minutes of thinking) tells you that's not true. Think about marks on a balloon: inflate the balloon, all the marks move away from eachother with a relative speed proportional to their distance. None of them is at the center (or all of them are).
Bet you didn't know Edgar Allen Poe pre-discovered the Big Bang and Black Holes.
I predict that they will break open quarks and find even smaller things inside. Presto. In 200 years, I will be a famous founding father of physics!
I wish I knew enough about Poe to write some witty joke about the sounds a modem makes and his story "The Telltale Heart" Alas.. no.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Science is about the quality of the argument and evidence for a particular hypothesis. Being right for the wrong reasons counts for very little.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Also Kanaad had detailed explaination about atoms and related theories.
Hmmm... Ok.. Chivas on the rocks.
Yeah, and an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually "pre-discover" the entire works of Shakespeare, too.
People think different things, sometimes for the most bizzare and illogical reasons. To claim that a person pre-discovered something because what they had in their head turned out to be true is absurd.
Given the number of different thing that people think, as well as the number of discoveries made by science, and there's bound to be a collision sooner or later.
What the NYT article did not discuss, and I wish it had, was what % of Poe's predictions/discoveries proved correct (so far?). Maybe he threa a lot of spaghetti at the wall and some stuck; or perhaps he was quite prescient overall.
It's interesting to look at the authors whose ideas turned out to be valid. Some might still turn out true (H.G. Wells?). Of course in retrospect, we tend to forget the 100's of authors who were merely nuts.
Once as I was tired and stuff
Cuz I was reading lots a old books and stuff
I started to sleep but then I heard a tapping,
Kinda like a tapping at my door.
"Mr. Dude it 'Tis!", I grumbled, "Mr. Dude is hitting my door!
Wraaaaiiiiight! Never More!
I was hit in the head by a minivan earlier that year, and I still can't memorize anything. I became considerably better in Physics, Math(I'm the only sophomore in Precal at my school), and most importantly coding (that was the last of my 5 years of crap w/ basic).
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Not sure. Any more useful info would be nice.
You clearly don't have a cursory knowledge of physics or you wouldn't post such claptrap. Yeah, all of astronomy is conjecture....uh huh.
In fact he predicted Poe would predict black holes!!! No, seriously its almost as if you could predict anything from a convoluted sentance.... no really!
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
No really.... you ought to learn everything from first principles.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
The person you qouteth is that of Red,"( most of all I miss my friend, Andy Dufrieme)".. rehabilitated... let me tell you about rehabitualtion...
they come from a morbid, alcoholic, poet
/. posts come from otherwise intelligent people that think they know about American literature.
/. reader submit a story and state commonplace assumptions that have no basis in fact and, in truth, came from this slander of a dead man.
And sometimes
Living in Richmond, VA, a city where Poe lived for a large part of his life, I have more than a passing familarity with Poe. I've also done a LOT of research on Poe for a screenplay (a new film production company focusing on digital film production is not only interested in this script, but is seriously negotiating for this script).
One of my former teachers is on the board for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond and I have had long conversations and interviews with the current and former heads of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum.
In short, Poe was NOT an alcoholic (believe me, after years of working in treatment programs, I KNOW alcoholics), and there is little or no evidence he used opium, in any form.
There is strong evidence he may have been diabetic, in which case he could have what amounts to an allergic reaction to alcohol (I'm not an M.D., so I don't know all the details here.) He was also a critic and could write scathing reviews of other writers. True, he was found in a bar, went into a coma, and died a few days later. What many people don't know is that he was found in a bar on election day! I don't rember the exact law, or if the bar was a polling place, but for legal reasons, no alcohol was being served in the bar due to it being election day.
Diabetes would explain problems Poe had if he drunk and it would also explain his death -- a diabetic coma.
As for being morbid -- some of his writing was morbid. I suggest reading something like "The Poetic Principle" if you want background on this. Poe had quite a sharp sense of humor (and quite a sharp ego, as well) and was totally enticed by beauty. While I would call a number of his works morbid, I have not found enough in research to say he was morbid.
One last point: I mentioned he was a scathing critic. When he died, one of the writers he had severly criticized (I'm sorry -- I should remember his name off the top of my head, but I can't remember it) feigned friendship with Poe and asked to write the obit and handle other similar details. He used the chance to lambast and destroy Poe's reputation with slander and libel. The effectiveness of his slander can still be seen today, 153 years after Poe's death, when we see an intelligent
The line you draw at the edge of your skin which separates you from the rest of the universe is purely imaginary. You are more a part of it than you think, in fact, in some sense, "you" are a figment of your own imagination.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Everyone already knows everything, it's just a matter of remembering, and then deciphering whether what we remembered is fact or fiction. The deciphering part is where the science and maths come into play.
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Did he make any other guesses about how the universe works? I would guess that he said a lot of stuff, and happened to get lucky on two or three counts. This doesn't really mean anything. Not to mention, today's scientists still can't conclusively prove anything about the origin of the universe.
It's probably safe to say Pythagoras helped all future philosophers (he pre-dated Socrates and Plato) with the idea of pre-discovery. He was also the main force in creating the precursor to what we now think of as scientific thought.
Pythagoras was the first to really grasp that the mind could understand perfections and processes that existed in purity only outside the realm of our senses. There was a certain divinity of number (not his phrase, although some scholars have called it that) to his teachings.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
It's a term used in logic, and it's appropriate for the situation. Or would you have prefered a *scientific* techincal term? That makes sense - lots of scientific dribble for the masses to read and try to understand.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
It seems to me that a simpler answer is given by a simple converging power series. Some infinite series converge! Light from stars that are farther and farther away are dimmer according to the inverse square law. Just add them up for any portion of the sky and you get a finite number, no? Why make it more complicated than that?
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore--
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
Quoth the raven, "Inflation during the first 10e-25 second of the universe's existence."
...I can sit in my underwear at midnight and learn once and for all what the hell "Quaff" means.
I love the Internet and I love "The Raven".
Vincent Price's reading was my favorite until the Simpson's Halloween special with guest voice, James Earl Jones.
Now, back to quaffing more tequila!
Another intereseting story along the same lines is the fact that Cleopatra was a nymphomaniac and once had a horse lowered down on her, and how well that played out in history class when we were discussing her love affair with Rome's Marc Antony.
Remeber the film "Refer Madness"? The one produced by DuPont in an effort to get marijuana made illegal before the senators and representatives realized that it was the same thing as hemp. The same plant grown by George Washington on his farm, and tended to by slaves, and the same one that the US made the film "Grow Hemp for Victory" about during World War II in an effort to get farmers to grow the plant. The US has expnded a great deal of money and effort in an attempt to remove that film from existance but it recently resurfaced. Hemp was made illegal to protect DuPont's recently discovered method of making paper from wood pulp. This is an inferior paper because it turns to dust within about 300 years. We are furtunate that most of the research at the Vatican, including the first copy of the King James Bible, was published on hemp. So was the Declaration of Independance! Why are we not taught the truth.
The bottom line here is that we are adults! If the government and others would treat us as such then we wouldn't view them with such scepticism. Poe, although he was not an astronomer, was an avid reader of astronomy books and spent many an evening staring up at the stars. Why should we look at any of his conclusions as anything less than possible. After all this world is full of people that are not formally trained in an area of expertise making some very insightful discoveries and observations. Yet we are trained to dismiss these things out of hand. This dismissal is often times unjustified.
Remember Gene Roddenbery? He came up with a transporter because the model shots of shuttlecraft landing would have been too expensive to shoot every week. That transporter was accepted into science fiction as just that fiction; yet slashdot is full of article about how one discovery or another is getting us one step closer to that reality. I don't know that transporters will ever be reality but if they do finally invent it we should give the credit to Gene for making us all dream that it could one day become.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
In his book Flatland, Abbott laid out a basic idea that looks an awful lot like the theory of relativity. Not to mention being a mind bending book any way.
Anyone read 'Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light' by Leonard Shlain? That book highlights some similar occurrences to this throughout history, showing parallels between Salvador Dali to Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton, and dozens more, examining and comparing pieces of art to scientific discoveries and theories, then going into lots of detail and explaining each side of the equation.
:)
The book shows through the course of history how artists have stumbled upon and understood in art what scientists later theorized and proved in science. It helps shed a light on not only the parallels between art and science but explain the inner workings of each, and treads through history looking at different art movements and explaining where they're coming from as wellExtremely interesting and compelling read, fairly heady at times, but overall quite good and DEFINITELY worth checking out if this subject interests you.
As described in a very bad Ken Russell movie, Gothic . Based on just the slightest bit of truth
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
How many morbid, alcoholic poets do we have reading these threads, anyway? I'd wager more than a few...
Even so, we know little about the universe outside of ourselves.
:P
This may sound stupid, but it isn't more unlikely then the big bang being likely so
Our "souls" or whatever might possibly know things from previous lives or whatnot that extreamly creative people might manifest in some form of art, yet not be able to understand it.
Did anyone else misread this as "Edgar Allen Poe, A Cosmotolgist"?
What is Muslim Physics? Physics is EXACTLY THE SAME whether the physicists involved are Muslim or not.
I think of some famous Muslim physicists like Abdus Salam (a Nobel Prize Laureate)or K. Rammal
(who pioneered the use of ultrametric structures
in spin glass theory). Their work is not
different from the work of their Atheist, Hindu or
Christian colleagues.
By the way I am not Muslim, Hindu or Christian.
I grew up in a Catholic familiy but like many other scientists I am an Atheist.
...a few years back John Astin was here in Des Moines beta testing a one-man show on Edgar Allen Poe. He gave a talk a few days beforehand, and mentioned, among other things, something Poe wrote that did deal with astronomy, and in particular Olbers' Paradox. If memory serves, he said Poe argued for what is in fact the correct answer (stars aren't uniformly distributed).
(If you happen across this, Mr. Astin, I hope you enjoyed the copy of The Quantum and the Jaguar, and the show was great.)
If you want to get to know more about the lesser known sides of Edgar Allan Poe go see Once Upon a Midnight. John Astin (yes, Gomez Adams from the old TV show) gives a fantastic solo performance as the tormented poet.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Initial trials already yielded amazing results. A group of alchoholics from one of our larger international development centers is unanimous in pre-discovering a device that shrinks one's enemies and then forces them to go to a specific body part of the user. The developers were all trying to use this device on the product manager who was waking them up and asking them to verbalize their thoughts.
To apply, reply to this message with your own visions of the future. In compliance with local laws, potheads will be considered, but only if they have glucoma.
Poe wrote this in 1848, the big bang idea became popular in the 1960's, the article says. Did someone only now in 2002 just discover that Poe had the same idea? I guess there doesn't need to be an ocassion for interesting tidbits. Poe is cool.
MAKE YOUR TIME
Hmm, how are we doing today?
"News": Well, Martin Gardner wrote about Poe's Eureka as cosmology in an article entitled "The Irrelevance Of Everything", reprinted in his excellent The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938-1995 . Maybe it was news 7 years ago...
"For Nerds": Real nerds don't click through links requiring "Free Registration" to get at pulpy science "news" articles. They are also conversant with the work of Martin Gardner.
"Stuff That Matters": Uh, yeah.
Look, fellows, if I want to read the NYT Science section, I'll subscribe to the NYT. Could we please quit recycling it all on /.?
So this is basically like the whole Pink Floyd Wizzard of Oz fiasco, right?
Puff puff give. Puff puff coincidence...
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right. By EMILY EAKIN n 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe published "Eureka," a 150-page prose poem on the nature and origin of the universe. The work, an overheated grab bag of metaphysics and cosmology, was a flop. A reviewer for Literary World likened it to "arrant fudge." A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the critical consensus. "Eureka," he wrote, "makes no deep impression . . . because we are aware of Poe's lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural science." Of course, Eliot had a point: "Eureka" was the work of an amateur, a backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time. But Eliot -- himself no scientist -- was underestimating his fellow poet. Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary science's best guess for explaining how the universe began. >Well so could anyone. Expansion from a point source is hardly a 'wondrous' idea that only a genius could explain. Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash." >Modern Physics does not have anything to say about particles. To say otherwise is to misunderstand the theoretical constructs that pervade Quantum Mechanics. "From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically -- in all directions -- to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space -- a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms." > He could easily be as easily expressing a view on the origin of radioactivity as to anything else. Clutch at more straws please. The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into "previously vacant space"), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's. > All details are wrong. Depending on their context, some others could be considered musings close to other people's later hypothesis. This wasn't Poe's only uncanny display of prescience. He also came up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einstein's equations in 1922. > Prove this. No really. Where is the math? Did you ever read Chicken Lickin? Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely accepted until the 1930's, > No it was Einstein who FIRST cam up with the idea. He later retracted it in the face of overwhelming astronomical evidence against it. This issue is still to be resolved!!! after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data from the velocities of far-flung galaxies. Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too. > Prove it. And he was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. >The Math of which is presented here: www.wildpresumptionswithoutmathematicalbacking.com
If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).
> Yeah? You mean Poe Presumed. He had no evidence.
So what accounts for Poe's prophetic genius?
> Your sensationalist journalistic attempts to
get an undeserved promotion just because you
managed to get yourself bribed to the front page??
Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesn't explain
> Doesn't explain? he just makes wild assumptions without evidence?
just how the poet derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book, "Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time" (Joseph Henry Press), he argues that the history of astrophysics is littered with such "prediscoveries," or "instances of theoretical anticipation."
> So? Someone says "The universe is like an
onion." Does that mean they discovered M-brane
theory? NO. If no evidence is presented or a
pretention of proof, then its not science.
"There are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of what's known and what's already been found,"
> That is the point of theoretical developement, duh!
Mr. Siegfried explained in a telephone interview. "The distinction with prediscovery is that theorists discover the existence of something observers have never seen.
> And so the charlatan is exposed!
Siegfried does not understand that theory only PREDICTS. It does NOT discover.
It's one thing to figure out an explanation for the observation. It's another thing altogether to suggest something exists that no one had any idea about beforehand."
> Fantasy is easy. Just look at your local book
shop's shelves.
Unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of "flying machines" or Jules Verne's descriptions of submarines and televisions decades before such objects were ever made, scientific prediscoveries, as Mr. Siegfried defines them,
> Pre-design maybe. Prediscovery... anyone can
doodle. Without the physical calulations it is just a doodle.
are not human inventions awaiting technological realization, but rather insights into the nature of reality.
"Eureka" may be Mr. Siegfried's most striking example, a literary mind hitting the cosmological jackpot. But his list of bona fide prediscoveries includes an impressive number of contemporary physics' most basic concepts: antimatter, electromagnetic waves, neutron stars, neutrinos, quarks and atoms.
> FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD
In the 1860's the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell inferred the existence of invisible radiation from a mathematical analysis of electricity and magnetism. (Nine years after his death, Maxwell was proved right when the radio waves were discovered by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz.)
> Yes, but this has to do with what exactly?
Maxwell had studied his field... Emily Eakin,
clearly has not.
In 1931 the English physicist Paul Dirac came up with a more preposterous-sounding notion: antimatter. From the mathematical equations of other physicists, Dirac concluded that electrons, one of the observed building blocks of atoms, must have identical but oppositely charged twins.
> More FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD
Dirac WROTE the definitive version of Quantum
Mechanics: P and Q algebra.
True, he discovered anti-matter. But Emily
shows a complete lack of how and why and
forgets that he was aknowledged of this fact
almost immediately (in comparison to the point she is trying to draw).
The following year Carl Anderson, an American physicist, identified a positively charged electron, or positron, the first antiparticle.
And around the same time, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli prediscovered the neutrino:
> FUD!!!!!
He THEORISED the existance of the neutrino!!
The proof of its existance can be found in
amongst others, the Super Kamiokande experiment which is stil running today!!!!
a neutral particle so light and undetectable that it could pass through a lead wall trillions of miles thick without a trace.
> Please keep believing that. Science is better
without you.
Given the number of successful prediscoveries in the past, Mr. Siegfried argues, some of the wacky ideas floating around in astrophysics today are bound to be validated sooner or later.
> If a millions monkeys sit at a type writer....
That turns out to be an alarming proposition: Mr. Siegfried's book is filled with enough mysterious hypothetical entities --
> ie. Mr Siegfried's book is full of Bullshit.
some of which, under the right circumstances could snuff out the earth in a nanosecond -- to sustain a dozen Hollywood thrillers.
> The same circumstances that would allow the
atom bomb was to ignite the atmosphere? I
contend it is all Bullshit.
Which object will turn out to be real? Cosmic Q-balls ("lumps of super matter that may have formed when tiny superparticles coagulated in the hot dense phase of the early universe")?
> You really don't underastand what you are
saying do you?
Wimpzillas (particles "heavier than a million billion ordinary subatomic particles")?
> You mean weakly interacting massive particles. Where the hell did the Zilla part come from?
Are you trying to make your own legacy???
Or quark nuggets (a four-ton object less than one twenty-fifth of an inch long that could "shoot through Earth like a bullet through butter")?
> Sensation!
Any of these concepts might help solve the mystery of "dark matter," the unidentified stuff that astronomers believe makes up 90 percent or more of an average galaxy's mass.
> No. Black Hole galactic nuclei have solved that problem, lassie
Personally, Mr. Siegfried said, he's betting on WIMP's -- that's short for weakly interacting massive particles -- thought to be heavy, generally unstable particles that hover in the outer regions of galaxies and rarely interact with ordinary matter.
> No, they are supposed to be neutrinos that have larger mass than we suspect due to errors in our calculations.
As extravagant as some of these potential prediscoveries sound, the astronomers behind them have a substantial leg up on Poe.
> You assume much!
They're working within a scientific world, using the latest technology, trading information and comparing notes.
> Comparing notes? You assume even more!
And yet Mr. Siegfried raises the tantalizing possibility that valuable scientific ideas may lie outside science, awaiting a mathematical mind to seize on them:
> No shit Sherlock. But it doesn't help when
people with hindsight try to put words into
dead people's mouths.
Alexander Friedmann, the man credited with inferring the expansion of the universe from Einstein's theory, he notes, loved Poe.
> No Friedman is credited with saying the
universe evolved over time.
Did Friedmann read "Eureka?" No one seems to know.
> Has any credible scientist? Have you? Properly?
Nevertheless, Mr. Siegfried speculates, it's quite possible "that Friedmann was conditioned by Poe's imagination to see the true meaning of Einstein's equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not."
> Speculate to accumulate.... or just guess.
Without proof.
As for Poe, he never doubted that his ideas would eventually get their due. "What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science," he wrote to a friend in 1848. "I say this calmly -- but I say it."
> And so he was placed along side other science
fiction writers, because he never proposed a
proof of his work by prediction.
Emily,
You have writen a very nice piece of fiction here. I hope my debunking does not loose you your job. But I hope it does make you realise that you can not post sensationalist clap trap (about a subject with which you are only vaguely familiar)to a national news paper without putting yourself up for ridicule.
Please feel free to debate any of the comments I have made. My e-mail should be available should you need.
Regards,
Chembryl (a graduate in astophysics)
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
This is off my head of course, but I remember reading somewhere that the Titanic disaster was, to use the article's term, pre-discovered, in 1898 by an American author. She wrote a book called "The Titan" (I think), which was about an 8000 ton ocean liner that was reputedly unsinkable, but crashed into an iceberg in its maiden voyage from England to New York. I believe it was meant to be a sort of commentary on the vanity of the ruling classes then.
It's interesting to note that "Titanic" the movie was released exactly 100 years later.
More than mere navel gazing.
Three Cheers for Poe for imagining the Big Bang, black holes, and coming up with a solution to Olber's Paradox. But honestly, whenever I read about Olber's Paradox I wonder if I'm missing something. So go off on that tangent with me for just a minute...
Olber said basically that an infinite number of stars should produce an infinite amount of starlight, so why does it get dark at night? Paradox.
Sorry, but no. The brightness of the sky would depend on how much of that infinite starlight has had time to reach the Earth. The fact that the sky isn't infinitely bright right now doesn't mean it won't get that way someday. No paradox. The only paradox is that this is called Olber's Paradox instead of Olber's Idle Musing.
Don't know why Olber's Paradox gets me going, but it always does. Or am I missing something really simple and obvious, and just being a complete jackass about this?
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Edgar AllAn with an A! Bad spelling shall be lifted...NEVERMORE! /me suddenly realizes that people on SLASHDOT think I'm nerd...bringing my self-esteem to new lows
Well if we, on the planet, constitute a group brain, then what about all the squirrels and iguanas and frogs and lions and wombats and single-celled organisms out there? Huh? Where do they fit in?
I don't think the group brain idea holds water--or spinal fluid. I think if we're a group brain, we've got an awfully bad case of... you name it: Multiple Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, (and the biggie) Schizophrenea (sp?).
Nah, really though, I mostly agree with the other people who repsonded to your post. Sorry. Collective Unconscious idea has worn out it's welcome. Why not try memes instead?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Why has noone yet posted the Google mirror of this story?
People who post NYTimes stories should include this to start with.
Poe might not be considered a cosmologist, but he was certainly a cryptographer -- or at least a dabbler in the field. Like many very creative geeks, he did have something of a substance abuse problem. BTW, Absinthe is making something of a comeback in Europe -- the bar at one of the local universities here sells a drink based on Absinthe.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Why doesn't slashdot just create a permanent link on their site for NYT online?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus there is such a thing as being too profound."
This is my most loved Poe, I even used it in a scientific article I wrote not too long ago.
>If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times.
That's somewhat misleading because, although there aren't an infinite number of stars (and other luminant stellar objects), there are enough stars to "illuminate the sky at all times." It's just that the amount of light isn't quite perceptable to humans. There are other (mostly nocternal) animals that can see just fine at night, and with light amplification devices (a.k.a nightvision goggles) so can we. So it's not a matter of it being dark at night, it's just a matter of us not being able to see with that level of light.
Of course there's also the matter of there being a finite number of stars and light that hasn't reached us yet, but that's besides the point.
---
Open Source Shirts
Uhm, it may be trolling, but at least it's (kinda sorta) historically accurate trolling.
To say someone pre-discovered that which is not factual is sheer rubbish. Big-bang/darwinism on the macro level can not be proven scientifically, thus there is no possible way for anyone to "discover" these two theories, let alone pre-discover. Now they can be hypothicised. At the same time, the scientific community is ignorantly accepting some of these cosomological theories as fact when these theoris cannot be proven scientifically.
Now for those of you who are going to jump all over the previous statement, a scientific theory can only be proven by observable and repeatable circumstances. Thus, history itself cannot be scientifically proven.
In order to graduate with a BA in English, I wrote a paper on Poe, and my thesis was that Poe used a variety of reptitive sounds in order to build mood and suspense, and in a few cases, to link his stories to his cosmogny/afterlife beliefs.
An example of what I am talking about can be gound in the Tell Tale Heart. The sound of the beating heart that exists only in the mind of the protagonist is one of the repetitive sounds used by Poe. Of course this technique is widespread today, especially in the use of music in movies.
Also, Poe used a sound to illustrate his belief that the afterlife was sort of a reincarnation cycle in which the dead waited in the black void of space for long periods, thinking over their sins, etc., before being recalled to life, in which time, a repetitive sound could be heard by the dead. This sound was supposed to be the "heartbeat of the universe" or something like that.
CHaracters who were up to no good would hear echoes of this heartbeat of the universe, which may have been some sort of premonition/echo/remembrance of past life cycles on the part of the protagonists, reminding them that they would pay for their sins here by having to relive them while in limbo.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
Hi:
Poe had a condition that is kind of a hyper-reaction to alcohol. A few snootful makes him drunk as a lord.
He was also insecure and uneasy with success. On more than one occasion, he sabotaged his own career by having a having a drink before a major appearance.
Needless to say, the manner of Poe's demise only added fuel to the fire.
A literary critic named Quinn was chosen to do his biography after Poe's death. Quinn couldn't stand Poe and basically published an unflattering portrait. The Quinn biography was the only scholary work on Poe for a generation, and solidified the perception.
Just the opposite. Solipsism is the belief that only you exist and that everything is a figment of your imagination. I'm saying, rather, that everything exists, and you are a figment of your imagination.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Oh, sure, you can include them too, and you get what's called the "Gaia hypothesis." Personally, I think that all distinctions are a product of cognition. We look at the universe, which is one whole thing, and we cut it up into little pieces so that we can think and talk about it, but the distinctions are arbitrary and imaginary.
I totally agree about memes, though, they provide a much better and more complete explanation of these things.
This thing that we call a "man" is only one small part of the thing we call the "universe". The distinction is arbitrary and can be very limiting, restricting our affections to the close circle of those around us. Our task must be to overcome this limitation by extending our circle of compassion to include the entire universe." -- Einstein
(I may have some of the words of that quote wrong, but I've got the gist of it. Einstein said this to someone who came to him seeking consolation on the death of his son.)
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Can find an acorn sometimes...
He's a professor at a community college.
No wonder he said such idiotic crap.
- "The tangible world is movement, say the Masters, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects 'in movements', it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement... This movement is a continued and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy (in Tibetan tsal or shoug). All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events."
There are better examples out there, but the idea that the tangible world is made up of movement, which itself is made up of flashes of energy (particles, let's say) is pretty spot on to have come up with before even Newtonian physics."Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
...why such a big deal.Don't you ever read Eureka?
There is only so many basic ways to look at things. Some religion or philospher has used them before. Hindus, Muslims, and others can show these seed ideas in there scriptures.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done there is nothing new under the sun"
...a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court.
It was like he was from some future time and then went back there and was bored, knew he couldn't tell anyone how or why he was there. So he decided to make the most of it and write and say stuff, get money from it, hang out, womanize, etc etc. but then grew tired of it and decided to drink himself to death.
so a less pleasant story than the Twain one, but that was what it made me think of.
I don't of course really think that is true, but it was what I pondered as I read the article.
Poe was someone that has always piqued my curiosity - I worked on his cipher, eventually breaking it, and I've read all of his works. I grew up near where his haunts were, and just tend to always perk up and listen when things about him come up.
I hope to someday be found face down in a puddle on the side of the road after a long binge of drinking to eventually die of pneumonnia (sp?). that just seems like the way to go if you ask me.
or strippers/whores, X, heroin, and coke.
one of the two.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
we don't KNOW anything about history; it's all speculation. For that matter, you don't KNOW what happened yesterday, because you only have your memories, which could be wrong.
The article is ABOUT people who dreamed something up and it turned out to seem relatively true; they in no way tried to "discover" anything or state it as fact.
How can you discover something that has never been proved? Just wondering... _Neuros_[]ut_
- Neuros { }UT -
An infinite number of stars does not mean that the sky is entirely full of stars. For example, if the number of stars is countably infinite, but space is not, then despite the infinite amount of light produced, we would expect the night sky to be dark.
"...we're taught that the Civil War... was fought to free the slaves... rather than the fact that the South had a lot more money and power than the North..."
Whoa, where'd you come up with that gem, Reb?
If the South had more money, why didn't they use paid labor instead of slave labor? If the South had more money why didn't it just buy a mercenary army? If the South had more power... should I go on? The Civil War wasn't fought over slavery or because "the North was jealous of the South", anymore than World War II was fought to rescue the concentration camp victims. The Civil War was fought over Federalism versus states' rights, y'all.
Space appears black because the universe is expanding--the other stars are drawing away from us; from our frame of reference this causes a change in the frequecy of light we perceive (i.e, red shift). If the universe were collapsing, space would be white.