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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."
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!
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
What is with all these angry posts? Nobody's suggesting they rewrite the physics text, give credit to him for the Big Bang theory, or arguing that poetry is as precise as equations.
They're just pointing out an interesting little fact. Good grief, doesn't anyone here take the slightest joy in learning intriguing historical quirks?
Humorless bunch of...
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.
Oh come off it.. does it hurt your image of Stephen Hawking as a god, that someone so ignorant in this field could have possibly had such thoughts? You don't have to live and die for one idea. It may make you an expert, but then again everyone else is an expert too. That doesn't mean that you can't think outside the box every so often.
You're nothing; like me.
Some of [the writer's] fringe beliefs will turn out to be true. The writer will seem prophetic. It's of little significance.
One of the most famous examples of this was Gulliver's Travels, wherein Jonathan Swift successfully guessed not only that Mars has two moons, but that they're extremely small and fast-moving. This was a remarkable non-intuitive guess, but it was just a guess. In his annotated version of Gulliver, Isaac Asimov suggested that Swift might have guessed two moons by imagining a supposed numeric progression from Earth (one Moon) to Mars (X moons) to Jupiter (thought from Galileo's time to have four moons). 1, 2, 4... Swift's idea was clever, and by coincidence he got it right. Shrug.
Arg, did you even look at some of what he had written? There are comments on Aristotle, Euclid, Kant... and I've barely gotten past the first section. Anyone who actually thinks about some of the things he did has an enormous amount of imagination and smarts than about %90 of the people I know, and I believe, the population in general. :P
> This seems to be yet another example of what Jung was saying about the collective unconscious. Over and over in history there seem to be cases of people either prediscovering things, like Poe, without any basis or proof
It is very popular among kooks to count the hits and ignore the misses. What percentage of all "prediscoveries" actually turn out to be true? Is it a reliable method of investigating the facts of nature?
>
The thing about the shoulders of giants, is that they're big enough for lots of people to stand on at the same time. We get lots of simultaneous discoveries because science and technology advance on a chronological wavefront.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Probably because it isn't true.
Cleopatra was a nymphomaniac and once had a horse lowered down on her,
Nor is that.
Hemp was made illegal to protect DuPont's recently discovered method of making paper from wood pulp
If by "discovered" you mean they looked up Dahl's 1879 method in an encyclopedia then perhaps.
We are furtunate that most of the research at the Vatican, including the first copy of the King James Bible
I don't think you'll find the first copy of the English Protestant Bible in the Vatican unless they bought it off someone, it certainly is not the result of Vatican research.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"