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

Jung and the Collective Unconscious

[freejung]

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, 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).

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...

Re:Jung and the Collective Unconscious

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever looked into the research of Rupert Sheldrake? (www.sheldrake.org) He's, I guess you could say, a neo-Jungian and has had some VERY interesting experiments probing that collective subconscious. (the most famous of these, although actually conducted by students of his, was the "crossword puzzle experiment," wherein they found that a group of test subjects performed significantly better on day-old crosswords than on current ones)

Poe's Death...

[Keithel]

For those that do not know, it is generally believed now that Poe did not die of alcohol toxicity, as was originally rumored and believed.

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.

Indians knew it even earlier....

[Annoyed Coward]

Science works with proof and logical explainations. Indian mythology has theory since more than 2000 years, about creation of universe. Most of the theory assumes that the universe is created by 5 fundamental things. Pruthvi(solid material), AAp(liquid), tej(energy), vaayu(gas) and akash(vacuum).

Also Kanaad had detailed explaination about atoms and related theories.

Re:Lagrange was first.

[Chembryl]

Lagrange... as in the 3 body problem. The Lagrangian points symetrical positions between 2 or more massive bodies create positons of zero gravitational influence. The opposite points produce instances of masximal gravitational influence. This is vector calculus as devised by Newton!!! Refinde by Lagrange.

Re:No I didn't and...

[Chembryl]

Its misinterpreted 'trivia' like this that belittles the actual work of the professional scientist. Good grief!! If someone as simple as Poe can come up with the origin of the universe what the hell are we paying Stephen Hawking for?!?!? Sack him! He is not worth his wheel chair my man!!! ... and so we all become cretins.

Re:Pre-discovery?

[ramzak2k]

but that still cant take away the credit for what could have been a potential presight from these imaginative authors. The whole article seems to be NOT about throwing away credit for discovery to these authors, but about the possibility "of discovery not being discovery itself" but a mere realization of something already existing - a very interesting thought. A quote for you from the article:

"as Mr. Siegfried defines them, are not human inventions awaiting technological realization, but rather insights into the nature of reality."

Think about this , when we go to the movies and we know that the movie is going to have aliens & a futuristic theme - why do we go in expecting aliens to look in a particular way (egg shaped heads with long oval eyes) ? flying saucers to be circular ? architecture to be composed of tall towers ? If you think that it is because of the way they have been habitually potrayed in the movies, my question is

"How has there been so much uniformity in such thoughts/imaginations about the future among those who have pictured it that way ?"

Re:Actually, it was considered before Poe was born

[glazed]

This was also suggested by French physicist Pierre Laplace at the same time. (Mitchell was a philosopher). The idea was that light being a particle would go up, and then do a sort of softball like arc back down. So while it was close in that light couldn't escape it was off in the behaviour of light.

I don't remember learning this in High School

[tres3]

It is funny that I wasnt' taught about Poe beinging an alcoholic while I was in high school. I remember being taught about how bad drugs were and that drinking led to alcoholism. I remember having my mind filled with all of the horror stories that you can imagine but I don't remember being taught the truth. I was taught that Edgar Allen Poe was one of America's greatest poets and we all had to read the Raven. When I brought it to the attention of the teacher that Mr. Poe often went on wild binges where he would awake from his stupor weeks later and hundreds of miles from home with no recollection of the previous weeks experiences I was quickly chastised. I showed Mrs. Eaglton, my English teacher, a research paper that backed up my assertion and was told that the class would hear nothing of this. I said "but we are studying the Raven. I think it is relevant that Mr. Poe has no recollection of writing it. It just happened to be in one of his journals after awaking from an opium and alcohol induced binge." My grade was quietly changed from failing to an A when I stated that I would be willing to defend my analysis of work in front of the school board if necessary. If only we were taught the truth about things then we would have more faith in our teachers.

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.

Re:None of these are "discoveries".

[Hater's Leaving, The]

There is a model of how black holes behave.

There is a model of how other objects near things that behave like black holes behave.

They have detected something that behaves how the model that predicts how other objects near things that behave like black holes behave precicts.

They have concluded this it must therefore be a thing near a black hole.

They have concluded that there must be a black hole.

As "proof" goes, that's fairly feeble. It's a demonstration of, and provides evidence for, but it doesn't constitute a proof unless it would have been possible to set up an experiment where the result might not have occured. Given that they didn't set up this experiment at all, they're well short of the mark. The web page you direct us towards doesn't even use the word "proof". It says "provides overwhelming evidence", which I completely agree with. But to a scientist it's not a proof yet.

THL.

That's Nothing...

[GojiraDeMonstah]

I think you could argue that Buddhist Monks came up with rough ideas about particle physics hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Maybe it's a stretch, but to cite but one example (from "The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects"):

• "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.