Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?!
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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
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!
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.
The Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik has been tracking the star S2 near the center of our galaxy since 1992. After measuring 2/3 of the period, they are able to confirm:
1. Black holes exist.
2. There is one at the center of our galaxy.
See http://www.mpe.mpg.de/www_ir/GC/intro.html
Excellent work by a very dedicated group!
Regards,
Mike