From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Mon 11 Nov 2002 - 20:16:28 GMT
What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.
By EMILY EAKIN
In 1848, by then a nationally celebrated poet, Edgar Allan Poe published
"Eureka," 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 "arrant fudge."
A hundred years later T. S. Eliot summed up the critical consensus.
"Eureka," he wrote, "makes no deep impression . . . because we are aware
of Poe's lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural
science."
Of course, Eliot had a point: "Eureka" was the work of an amateur, a
backyard stargazer who read astronomy books in his spare time.
But Eliot — himself no scientist — 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
science's 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 "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash."
"From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be
irradiated spherically — in all directions — to immeasurable but still
to definite distances in the previously vacant space — a certain
inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not
infinitely minute atoms."
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 "previously vacant space"), but here,
unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that
didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's.
This wasn't Poe's 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 Einstein's equations in 1922. Einstein initially
pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely accepted until the 1930's,
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 Poe's prophetic genius? Tom Siegfried, the science
editor of The Dallas Morning News, doesn't explain just how the poet
derived his cosmological theory, but in his new book, "Strange Matters:
Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time" (Joseph Henry
Press), he argues that the history of astrophysics is littered with such
"prediscoveries," or "instances of theoretical anticipation."
"There are lots of things theorists predict on the basis of what's known
and what's already been found," Mr. Siegfried explained in a telephone
interview. "The distinction with prediscovery is that theorists discover
the existence of something observers have never seen. It's one thing to
figure out an explanation for the observation. It's another thing
altogether to suggest something exists that no one had any idea about
beforehand."
Unlike, say, Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of "flying machines" or Jules
Verne's descriptions of submarines and televisions decades before such
objects were ever made, scientific prediscoveries, as Mr. Siegfried
defines them, are not human inventions awaiting technological
realization, but rather insights into the nature of reality.
"Eureka" may be Mr. Siegfried's most striking example, a literary mind
hitting the cosmological jackpot. But his list of bona fide
prediscoveries includes an impressive number of contemporary physics'
most basic concepts: antimatter, electromagnetic waves, neutron stars,
neutrinos, quarks and atoms.
In the 1860's the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell inferred the
existence of invisible radiation from a mathematical analysis of
electricity and magnetism. (Nine years after his death, Maxwell was
proved right when the radio waves were discovered by the German
physicist Heinrich Hertz.)
In 1931 the English physicist Paul Dirac came up with a more
preposterous-sounding notion: antimatter. From the mathematical
equations of other physicists, Dirac concluded that electrons, one of
the observed building blocks of atoms, must have identical but
oppositely charged twins. The following year Carl Anderson, an American
physicist, identified a positively charged electron, or positron, the
first antiparticle.
And around the same time, the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli
prediscovered the neutrino: a neutral particle so light and undetectable
that it could pass through a lead wall trillions of miles thick without
a trace.
Given the number of successful prediscoveries in the past, Mr. Siegfried
argues, some of the wacky ideas floating around in astrophysics today
are bound to be validated sooner or later. That turns out to be an
alarming proposition: Mr. Siegfried's book is filled with enough
mysterious hypothetical entities — some of which, under the right
circumstances could snuff out the earth in a nanosecond — to sustain a
dozen Hollywood thrillers.
Which object will turn out to be real? Cosmic Q-balls ("lumps of super
matter that may have formed when tiny superparticles coagulated in the
hot dense phase of the early universe")? Wimpzillas (particles "heavier
than a million billion ordinary subatomic particles")? Or quark nuggets
(a four-ton object less than one twenty-fifth of an inch long that could
"shoot through Earth like a bullet through butter")?
Any of these concepts might help solve the mystery of "dark matter," the
unidentified stuff that astronomers believe makes up 90 percent or more
of an average galaxy's mass. Personally, Mr. Siegfried said, he's
betting on WIMP's — that's short for weakly interacting massive
particles — thought to be heavy, generally unstable particles that hover
in the outer regions of galaxies and rarely interact with ordinary
matter.
As extravagant as some of these potential prediscoveries sound, the
astronomers behind them have a substantial leg up on Poe. They're
working within a scientific world, using the latest technology, trading
information and comparing notes. And yet Mr. Siegfried raises the
tantalizing possibility that valuable scientific ideas may lie outside
science, awaiting a mathematical mind to seize on them: Alexander
Friedmann, the man credited with inferring the expansion of the universe
from Einstein's theory, he notes, loved Poe.
Did Friedmann read "Eureka?" No one seems to know. Nevertheless, Mr.
Siegfried speculates, it's quite possible "that Friedmann was
conditioned by Poe's imagination to see the true meaning of Einstein's
equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not."
As for Poe, he never doubted that his ideas would eventually get their
due. "What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world
of Physical & Metaphysical Science," he wrote to a friend in 1848. "I
say this calmly — but I say it."
*******
Here's a rather nicely memetic quote from 'Eureka' for youse-
"Let us begin, then, at once, with that merest of words, "Infinity."
This, like "God," "spirit," and some other expressions of which the
equivalents exist in all languages, is by no means the expression of an
idea -- but of an effort at one. It stands for the possible attempt at
an impossible conception. Man needed a term by which to point out the
direction of this effort -- the cloud behind which lay, forever
invisible, the object of this attempt. A word, in fine, was demanded, by
means of which one human being might put himself in relation at once
with another human being and with a certain tendency of the human
intellect. Out of this demand arose the word, "Infinity;" which is thus
the representative but of the thought of a thought."
Find it all at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/eureka.html
- Wade
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