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."

Comments

Re:No I didn't and...

[nomadic]

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...

Re:In his idols footsteps...

[Allen Varney]

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.

Re: Jung and the Collective Unconscious

[Black Parrot]

> 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?

> ...or of people coming up with the same idea at about the same time without any apparent connection between them (e.g. the invention of calculus).

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.