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...

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.

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.