What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.
In 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe published âEureka,â a 150-page prose poem on the nature and origin of the universe. The work, an overheated grab bag of metaphysics and cosmology, was a flop. A reviewer for Literary World likened it to âarrant fudge.â A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the critical consensus. âEureka,â he wrote, âmakes no deep impression ⊠because we are aware of Poeâs lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural science.â
Of course, Eliot had a point: âEurekaâ was the work of an amateur, a backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time.
But Eliot â himself no scientist â was underestimating his fellow poet. Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Poe, it turns out, came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary scienceâs best guess for explaining how the universe began.
Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single âprimordial particleâ in âone instantaneous flash.â
âFrom the one particle, as a center,â he wrote, âlet us suppose to be irradiated spherically â in all directions â to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space â a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.â
The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into âpreviously vacant spaceâ), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didnât find mainstream approval until the 1960âs.
This wasnât Poeâs only uncanny display of prescience. He also came up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einsteinâs equations in 1922. Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasnât widely accepted until the 1930âs, after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data from the velocities of far-flung galaxies.
Black holes? Poe envisioned something like those, too. And he was the first person on record to solve the Olbers Paradox, which had dogged astronomers since Kepler: the mystery of why the sky is dark at night. If the universe was infinite, as 19th-century astronomers believed, there should be an infinite number of stars as well, plenty, in other words, to illuminate the sky at all times. Poe understood why this in fact was not the case: the universe is finite in time and space (and light from some stars has not yet reached the Milky Way).
So what accounts for Poeâs prophetic genius? Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesnât explain just how the poet derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book, âStrange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Timeâ (Joseph Henry Press), he argues that the history of astrophysics is littered with such âprediscoveries,â or âinstances of theoretical anticipation.â
âThere are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of whatâs known and whatâs already been found,â Mr. Siegfried explained in a telephone interview. âThe distinction with prediscovery is that theorists discover the existence of something observers have never seen. Itâs one thing to figure out an explanation for the observation. Itâs another thing altogether to suggest something exists that no one had any idea about beforehand.â
Illustration: Harry Clarke for Edgar Allen Poe via this post by kateopolis