To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 21:18:45 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Fw: Edgar Allan poe and the history of science
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/02/arts/02TANK.html?pagewanted=all&positio
n=b
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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."
.
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