Poe knows light

A paradox as daylight drifts into winter hiding and dark tales add shivers not temperature related.

Why if it’s “star light, star bright” is space so dark?

Poe tried to tell them. But it didn’t pay off for him. About $14 bucks is all.

Edgar Allan Poe knew they would call him mad.

Shadows hungry as the wolf: half-breeds born of uncertain darkness and clarifying light. Real mutts©

His stories were reason enough, but that essay: “Eureka, An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe” did it.

All that “because Nothing was, therefore All things are”

Along with “space and duration are one”

“Spirit and matter are made of the same essence”

A few words spun about “the speed of stars, diameters of planets and distance between them, the weight of Earth, and the orbit of the new Leverrier’s planet”(Neptune).

Then there was that odd at the time thought that the universe started with a single particle, a “primordial particle” which suddenly, for some reason, blew apart and formed all the particles of the universe.

Public reaction was mixed in 1848.

• At the time, people scoffed the essay was all a joke. Pointing at all the puns and parodies of names of experts and historical thinkers.
• Some were offended and called it anti-religious. Poe actually called God an author and “the Universe a plot of God”. Then that bit about everyone looking for God was because originally all were small particles of God. But Poe did say “the plots of God are perfect”, so that should have made it OK, right?

Poe himself called it a poem and asked the essay be judged as a work of art. He believed in later years the essay would be understood and proved true.

Not Poe, but source of his essay title. Archimedes shouting “I’ve got it” after pondering displacement while splashing in his bath. (Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist,engineer, inventor and astronomer)(Arlindi1999.Commons.wikimedia.org)

Oddly, science fiction often does become science fact or at least science theory. 

In 1987, cosmologist Edward Robert Harrison published “Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe” where he cites Poe’s ideas as being on the right track after all.

(Read more here. There’s isn’t space to go into red shifting, blue shifting, Olbers’ Paradox. Poe seemed be the first to offer a plausible explanation of why the sky is dark and a “cosmological theory that anticipated black holes and the Big Crunch theory”)

So was Poe a mad man or simply ahead of his time?

• French author Paul Valéry (1871-1945) considered Poe’s essay “an abstract poem based on mathematical foundations” and said it should be valued for both the poetic and scientific merit.
• Astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) said “Eureka is not a work of dotage or disordered mind”
• Albert Einstein called Poe’s Eureka “a beautiful achievement of an unusually independent mind.”
• And then there’s the modern group who feel Eureka can be used to decipher meaning from all Poe’s fiction – that all his works involve similar theories. (And if you think about it, you can see….)

And you thought he only wrote scary stories.

Sigh. $14.00 for a masterpiece with legs. Now that’s the real horror.

Don’t let it haunt you.

Phil, the Philosopher Mouse of the Hedge

Looking for a haunting Poe-style story?  1. here,  2. here, or 3. here.

Art imitates life. Artist/sculptor Alberto Giacometti said he was “sculpting not the human figure but ‘the shadow that is cast’ ” And so he did. ©

 

---

Discover more from Philosopher Mouse of the Hedge

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.