The Scientific Anticipations of Eureka
… the novelty & moment of my views. What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly—but I say it.
—Edgar Allan Poe1
Looking back over more than one hundred and sixty years now, we can safely say that Poe’s Eureka did not itself revolutionize the world of physical science, let alone the world of metaphysics (no one uses the phrase “metaphysical science” anymore, at least not among the scientifically literate). But in Eureka Poe anticipated, remarkably, at least nine theories and developments in twentieth-century science, and in their own good time they proved novel and momentous indeed.
I use the word “anticipated” cautiously. In the Introduction to their annotated edition of Poe’s Eureka, Stuart and Susan Levine state that “There exists a literature by Poe fans about how Poe predicted twentieth-century physics and astronomy. This does not strike us as a fruitful argument; Poe did not magically predict Einstein or intuit subatomic physics.”2
One should be able to see the problem here. Words like “fan” and “magically” tend to function much as words like “fruitcake” and “nut.” They are negative, or more accurately derogatory, and do not serve to further the discussion.
There is a further problem, widespread in academia outside of the natural sciences, specifically in the humanities, including philosophy, which is the view, strongly expressed, that no one is in any meaningful sense ahead of his or her time, that scientists and their theories, in particular, are products of their contexts along with the rest of us. We shall see this in Chapter 6 when we examine modern contextualist history of science. We can also see it in the Introduction by the Levines, who state that Eureka “is plainly a product of the science of the day and of a moment in the history of science when the promise of science seemed cosmically bright,” that “Eureka is a window on the 1840s.”3
In a very real sense, of course, Poe was a product of his time, as are we all. How could he, and we, be otherwise? But that, in itself, cannot be used to deny that he was nothing more than a product of his time. Any good philosopher will tell you that it all depends on what one means by “ahead of his time.” In Marshall McLuhan’s meaning, “in the electrical age there is no longer any sense in talking about the artist’s being ahead of his time” (italics mine). This is because for McLuhan “The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.”4 Much more recently Jerome McGann, on whether writers can be “in advance of their time,” makes a similar point concerning “a commonplace of cultural studies: that every historical moment is pregnant with futurities and that certain writers are their midwives,” such that in McGann’s view, for example with regard to Poe’s “anticipations of a ‘Big Bang’ cosmology in Eureka,” Poe “draws them out—leaps to them—by his suppositious poetic style.”5
One can surely make a strong case for Poe as a man of “integral awareness,” but I disagree with McLuhan that in the age of information there can no longer be a legitimate meaning of “ahead of his time.” Similarly, one can make a case for an historical moment being “pregnant with futurities,” but I disagree with McGann’s loaded metaphor of Poe as a midwife. Poe did not bring something out of the womb of his environment; instead, he was the parent. But even the parental metaphor breaks down, since Poe created, with his mind, something genuinely new, something more mature than infant even, rather than just another baby drawn from a pre-existing meme pool. What I have in mind is a meaning of “ahead of his time,” then, that literally goes beyond that of integral awareness and the metaphor of midwifery, a meaning that is pursued in this chapter and the rest of this book, namely, that of scientific imagination. In that sense, contra McLuhan, McGann, and many others, one can indeed (or so I shall argue) be ahead of one’s time. I do not mean, of course, “educated guesses” or “happy guesses” that turn out to be right, a meaning in philosophy of science that we shall explore in the next chapter. Instead, keeping in mind that a definition is that which so describes its object as to distinguish it from others, by “ahead of one’s time” I mean the educated imagination that takes in information that was available to others at the time but that arranges and adds to it in a strikingly new and superior way, a way that anticipates future understanding of the domain in question, future knowledge. This also doubles as a definition of scientific imagination when the domain is scientific, while the ability to see what those with scientific imagination saw could be called second-order scientific imagination. Both definitions, of course, assume that there is such a thing as knowledge and superior understanding, a position we shall examine in the next chapter, especially in the section on Thomas Kuhn.
The view that nobody is ever ahead of their time is often expressed in a form that is little more than a dogma or mindless mantra, and as such is perhaps the greatest barrier to an examination, or rather the reception, of the poetic dénouement of this book, namely, the illumination of scientific imagination. And it highlights a core antinomy, or dissonance, that pulls virtually each and every college and university in opposite directions. One of the things that is remarkable about Poe’s Eureka, viewed today, is its capacity to bring out this opposition, these opposing forces pulling at the brains of those who read it, including especially academics.
One can even see this opposition, this paradox, within individual authors themselves. Take again Stuart and Susan Levine. In the very same Introduction quoted from above, in the same pages in which they affirm they employed the services of a “scientific consultant,” they can also be found stating that Poe in Eureka “did think through intelligently the implications of what was known in his day,” that “Poe’s understanding of space and time is unusually advanced for his day,” that “Poe’s general scheme may loosely be said to be equivalent to the ‘Big Bang’ theory,” that “his notion of the ‘reciprocity’ of matter and energy is roughly akin to the modern understanding of the relationship represented by Einstein’s e = mc2,” that “Poe comes close to anticipating astrophysical speculation that the universe is ultimately going to coalesce,” that “Poe’s idea of seeing electricity as one among several other forces, as yet not well defined, is an interesting guess or projection,” that “At best, one can say, ‘Poe loosely predicted much of what science believed a few years ago,’” and that “it is fair to say that Poe … was thinking in the right directions, certainly speculating creatively.”6
Well, which is it? Was Poe ahead of his time or not? Or do we have here a case of Schrödinger’s cat, both simultaneously alive and dead according to the logic of the consensus interpretation of quantum physics? (I will discuss Schrödinger’s cat in the first section below.) I suggest that the Levines are not alone but are rather symptomatic of a modern reading of Eureka outside of natural science, that one feels strongly pulled in opposite directions, in the one direction toward the denial that Poe was ahead of his time because no one is, (that is the received view in the humanities,) and in the other direction toward the affirmation that Poe remarkably anticipated many developments in twentieth-century science (that would be the natural response in the natural sciences).
At any rate, the point and purpose of this chapter is not to claim that Poe “magically predicted” anything in twentieth-century science, but instead that he provides us with a prime example of scientific imagination, which in turn justifies the following chapters. I intend to prove, then, once and for all, in the sense of beyond a reasonable doubt, that Eureka vindicates Poe and provides his credentials for taking him seriously on the topic of scientific imagination.
In what follows, the method I employ is to juxtapose the words of twentieth-century scientists in describing a particular theory or development with Poe’s own words, to which I add the necessary background. The order of topics follows Poe’s order of presentation in Eureka, inasmuch as that is possible, since the order is not clear and distinct, as Poe often touches on a subject or idea only to expand on it later in the text, and even so his substantive order of topics is not necessarily the most logical order in terms of scientific reasoning. What we have to keep in mind, after all, is that Poe named the book Eureka, and that it was not meant as a systematic treatise (although it contains plenty of argumentation) but mainly as a work of inspiration.7 This is in spite of his claim, apart from what he calls “the sole absolute assumption of my Discourse” that we shall examine in §II below, that the rest of Eureka involves “a train of ratiocination as rigorously logical as that which establishes any demonstration in Euclid,” which he then claims is “so thoroughly corroborated by induction.”8 (The effervescent hyperbole in Poe’s prose should be received, in my view, as part of the fun of reading him, rather than as a reason not to.) Later in Eureka Poe seems to acknowledge the lack of systematic presentation, stating that rather than following an arrangement that is “merely natural” he is following an arrangement that is “almost altogether … moral,” which explains “If then I seem to step somewhat too discursively from point to point of my topic.” His purpose is to produce “that chain of graduated impression by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to comprehend them.”9 Whatever the order of the presentation of his topics, the result of the series of juxtapositions presented below should be much the same, namely, a crescendo-like unity of effect, culminating in a lucid awakening on the part of the reader, an impression of the greatest force and vivacity, that Poe was not a fraud but the real deal, that he had and exercised true, genuine, scientific imagination, and that the nature of it needs to be investigated.
In “The Purloined Letter” (1844), Poe has his ace detective Dupin reject the supposition, “of which I am confounded at the universality with which it has been conceived,” that “the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths.”10 Again he says, “Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth.” Poe has Dupin argue that geometry and mathematics are “merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity.” Genuine axioms exist there, for Poe, but they break down when applied to other topics. One of these is morality. Two motives, says Dupin, when combined, are “not, necessarily, … equal to the sum of their values apart.” Similarly, in chemistry, he says, “the axiom fails.” Poe is clearly referring to the synergistic effect, which is the effect of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. This effect, of course, is well known. In math, 2 + 2 = 4, never 5. But in medicine, for example, an ounce of this can make you feel a little sick, an ounce of that can make you feel a little sick, but when both are taken together they can make you feel more than twice as sick—in fact, you might end up on your sickbed as a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.
By the time Poe came to write Eureka he went much further. Now he rejected all axioms as necessarily or self-evidently true, including those in geometry and mathematics and even in logic itself. The doctrine is espoused in his imaginary epistle that opens Eureka, allegedly written a thousand years ahead of his time (the rejection of axioms is also found later in Eureka). As Poe has the writer of the epistle put it in 2848, regarding “axioms, or self-evident truths,” it is a “now well understood fact that no truths are self-evident.”11 The claim is repeated a little further along as “for no such things as axioms ever existed or can possibly exist at all.”12
What is especially interesting are the reasons given. One is based on a kind of relativity from history, that what was once considered an axiom was later no longer considered as such. The letter writer states, “for, even in their own day, many of their long-admired ‘axioms’ had been abandoned:—‘ex nihilo nihil fit,’ for example, and a ‘thing cannot act where it is not,’ and ‘there cannot be antipodes,’ and ‘darkness cannot proceed from light.’” “How absurd, then,” says the letter writer, “to persist in relying upon a basis, as immutable, whose mutability had become so repeatedly manifest!”
This argument is borrowed from a classic of Poe’s time, John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (1843), a work of philosophy of science in the inductive mode that Poe quotes from and had clearly studied, probably using the 1846 Harper & Brothers New York edition.13 Mill, Poe notices through his letter writer, rejected the “Ability or inability to conceive” as “a criterion of axiomatic truth,” and rightly, says the letter writer, for then “a truth to David Hume would very seldom be a truth to Joe.” But the letter writer then uses this against Mill. “We will select,” says the letter writer, “no axiom of an unquestionability so questionable as is to be found in Euclid. We will not talk, for example, about such propositions as that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, or that the whole is greater than any one of its parts. We will afford the logician [Mill] every advantage.” Notice, at this point, that Poe’s letter writer does think these axioms are not really such, that they and all supposed axioms can be false. Instead, the letter writer goes deeper into the well, to the rock bottom, and says, “We will come at once to a proposition which he [Mill] regards as the acme of the unquestionable—as the quintessence of axiomatic undeniability. Here it is:—‘Contradictions cannot both be true—that is, cannot cöexist in nature.’ Here Mr. Mill means, for instance,—and I give the most forcible instance conceivable—that a tree must be either a tree or not a tree—that it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree.” And what, asks Poe’s letter writer, is Mill’s reason for believing this? “The sole answer is this:—‘Because we find it impossible to conceive that a tree can be anything else than a tree or not a tree.’” Poe clearly, then, has charged Mill with self-contradiction, that his own rejection of the psychological criterion of axiomatic truth returns to bite his acceptance of the co-called law of contradiction, leaving the matter as Poe’s letter writer puts it: “Thus all—absolutely all his argumentation is at sea without a rudder.”14
This is profound, and on a number of levels. For one, it is an indictment of the lack of imagination in many thinkers, limiting in actuality science itself. As Poe’s letter writer puts it, “That a tree can be both a tree and not a tree, is an idea which the angels, or the devils, may entertain, and which no doubt many an earthly Bedlamite, or Transcendentalist, does.” Angels or devils, call them what you will, geniuses or madmen, the true giants of scientific discovery and understanding are not hampered in their imaginative abilities (or at least not always) but rise above the common man, and so are as angels. It is the hoi polloi that look upon them as deformed, failing all the while to see their own gross deformity. (We shall return to the significance of madmen and imagination in Chapter 7.)
Next, Poe’s analysis begs comparison with Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment against realism in quantum physics, known as “Schrödinger’s cat.” As Schrödinger argued back in 1935, if the realist interpretation of quantum physics is true, then if a cat in a sealed chamber would be in a quantum state, (due to a “diabolical device” involving radioactive decay,) it would be in a superposition of states, both dead and alive simultaneously, until someone looked into the chamber to observe it, which would “collapse the wave function,” (a wave function is a mathematical description of a probability distribution,) thereby resulting in the cat being either dead or alive with a fifty-fifty chance of one or the other. As Schrödinger put it, “The ψ-function [wave function] of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation.”15
In 1935 there was a growing realist interpretation of quantum physics, (that quantum physics is not only predictive but actually descriptive of reality,) and Schrödinger at the time was trying to oppose it. The collapse of the wave function “prevents us,” he says, “from so naively accepting as valid a ‘blurred model’ for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory.” Since 1935, however, despite the best efforts of Einstein and Schrödinger, and some others, the realist interpretation of quantum physics continued to grow into a consensus, which became hardened following the Alain Aspect experiments conducted in 1982. According to the modern consensus, the quantum world, contrary to “common sense,” really is as weird as experiments in quantum physics have routinely indicated, not only with the subatomic world as inherently and irreducibly probabilistic or statistical, as in radioactive decay and the quantum jumps (transitions) of electrons, but as inherently indeterministic as well, as in the position and momentum of an electron and the duality of Schrödinger’s cat, such that in a quantum system in which an observation has been made, thus collapsing the wave function, “The state of the system is ‘sharp’ in these observables only” (italics mine).16
Now recall Poe’s statement above, against the law of contradiction, according to which “a tree must be either a tree or not a tree—that it cannot be at the same time a tree and not a tree.” The comparison is striking.
Quantum physics, of course, as anyone who has studied it knows,—with its double-slit experiment along with wave–particle duality, the phenomenon of entanglement, and its uncertainty principle combined with an underlying indeterminacy, which includes the principle of quantum transitions as events of pure chance combined with irreducible laws of probability,—absolutely defies the axioms of common sense, and yet it is the most powerfully corroborated theory in all of science. There has even been developed a quantum logic to go along with it, logic with not two truth values for propositions (classical logic) but three (quantum logic): “true,” “false,” and “indeterminate.”17 Now add Einstein’s theory of relativity with its curved space and so much more. One may also go outside of physics, into biology, for example, with Darwin’s rejection of what in his day was called the “axiom” of species immutability and independent creation, to see that Poe’s rejection of axioms as necessarily or self-evidently true has been vindicated by modern science over and over again.
But Poe’s point is more, which is that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding is hampered in most people because their imaginations are weak and underdeveloped, because they cannot imagine what they ought, for evidential reasons, to believe, and so they do not believe it. Darwin made a similar point in On the Origin of Species (1859), to which we shall turn in the following chapter, in defense of his argument for evolution by natural selection and against critics, which is that “His reason ought to conquer his imagination.”18 Poe, as we shall see in Chapters 6 and 7, takes the point a major step further, not only that the lack of imagination is a hindrance to science, but also that great achievements in science were also great achievements in imagination.
But is it proper to say that Poe in Eureka really anticipated the rejection of axioms in twentieth-century physics? Arthur Quinn, in what is still overall the best biography of Poe, put the question to a physicist back in 1940 (or thereabouts). This is what Dr. Paul R. Heyl wrote to Quinn:
Poe’s discussion of axioms is interesting. In 1848 the axioms of geometry were still regarded as self-evident truths. Poe questions this [assumption]. Our whole concept of geometrical assumptions has changed, due to the work of Lobachevsky and of Bolyai, which resulted in non-Euclidean geometry. We now regard the axioms of geometry as mere space definitions. By leaving out the parallel axiom it is possible to develop a geometry quite different from that of Euclid, but just as self-consistent. True, it is inconceivable, but inconceivability no longer troubles the mathematicians. Nothing but inconsistency can do that.
Lobachevsky’s first publications antedate 1848, but were not translated from the Russian until much later. Bolyai (a Hungarian) published an abstruse article in Latin in 1831, but it attracted little attention until 1866 when it was translated into French. It is impossible that Poe should have heard of these men and their work.19
The nineteenth century saw further developments in non-Euclidean geometry. When János Bolyai first published his work on non-Euclidean geometry, the “Prince of Mathematicians” Carl Friedrich Gauss, a good friend of Bolyai’s father, claimed that he had already developed the same ideas but refrained from publishing them. Non-Euclidean geometry was extended later in the century most notably by Gauss’ student Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, who famously developed in the 1850s a geometry of curved space, for the sheer mathematical beauty of it. But none of this was applied, or even imagined to apply, to physics. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in Physics, puts it: “Gauss and Riemann and the other differential geometers of the nineteenth century had no idea that their work would ever have any application to physical theories of gravitation.”20 It was only when Einstein was working on his theory of gravitation that non-Euclidean geometry was combined with physics. As Weinberg notes, Einstein asked his friend Marcel Grossmann if there existed a mathematics to handle curved space in three or four dimensions, who replied that there was and he taught it to Einstein. Weinberg adds, “The mathematics was there for Einstein to make use of.”
It therefore needs to be remarked, given that quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity both began in the early twentieth century, that in rejecting axiomatic truth in general and Euclidean axioms in particular, Poe in Eureka anticipated the application of the new geometry to the physical world. Einstein and the quantum physicists did the real work, of course, but Poe clearly had the requisite foundational vision many decades earlier.
The word cosmogony refers to the origin of the Universe, cosmology to the nature of the Universe. The Big Bang theory, which is not to be confused with the TV show, is both a cosmogony and a cosmology (one often finds the words used indiscriminately). The theory, which is really a fact now, (in the sense of beyond a reasonable doubt,) rests on the related fact that the Universe is expanding, like a balloon, that every galaxy is moving farther away from every other. The basic idea of the Big Bang is that this process traces back in time to a beginning, to when all the matter and energy of the Universe existed as an extremely small and exceedingly compressed something, which then suddenly exploded.21 The current estimate is that the Big Bang occurred 13.7 (some say 13.8) billion years ago, but that is not an essential part of the theory per se. Neither is what caused the Big Bang, nor what was happening before the Big Bang (a consideration that physicists usually take to be meaningless). Perhaps in the future, if these questions get settled, (if they are not already,) then the so-called Big Bang theory will be more inclusive. Theories, after all, tend to evolve.
Of course, whether Poe “anticipated” Big Bang theory depends on how one defines “Big Bang theory” (and also on how one defines “anticipated.”) Here is how Weinberg defines the theory in his classic on the Big Bang, The First Three Minutes: “The theory that the expansion of the universe began at a finite time in the past, in a state of enormous density and pressure.”22 I quote this definition to shut up those who would define away Poe’s anticipation of Big Bang theory.
How did this theory in modern science begin? First of all, it is to be noted, as Weinberg points out, “in the 1950s, the study of the early universe was widely regarded as not the sort of thing to which a respectable scientist would devote his time.”23 But there was indeed some important activity going on in this regard. Einstein’s formulation of what he called his general theory of relativity, his revolutionary theory of gravity, reached its definitive formulation in his paper “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” (1916). A year later, in his “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity” (1917), which is the application of general relativity to the Universe as a whole, Einstein added a totally invented “cosmological constant” to his field equations of gravitation, representing an anti-gravitational force, solely for the purpose of keeping the Universe stable, in a theoretical sense. This was because his original equations entailed that the Universe must be either expanding or contracting. As Steven Hawking puts it, “so strong was the belief in a static universe that it persisted into the early twentieth century. Even Einstein. …”24
A few scientists, however, took Einstein’s original equations seriously, notably the Russian mathematician Aleksandr Friedmann. But it was the Belgian mathematician, physicist, and Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who is most notable for our tale, for he launched the modern theory of the Big Bang. In 1927, in an obscure Belgian journal, he argued for an expanding Universe by altering Einstein’s equations and combining them with the observation that galaxies are surrounded by a red glow, which he took to be a shift toward the red end in the spectrum of light, a kind of Doppler effect, meaning that the galaxies are moving away from us. In 1929, Edwin Hubble, using the new telescope at Mt. Wilson, confirmed that the red glow was indeed a red shift and hence that the Universe is expanding, he noticed that the red shift is greater in more distant galaxies, and he even measured the rate of expansion, (known as the Hubble constant,) a finding close to Lemaître’s prediction in 1927, which caused Einstein to deeply regret his cosmological constant. But physicists were still resistant to the idea of the Universe having a beginning. Lemaître’s 1927 paper was brought to the attention of the general scientific community in 1931 by his former professor, the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who had Lemaître’s 1927 paper translated and published in an English journal. The paper, it should be emphasized, does not contain a theory of the beginning, but ends only with “It remains to find the cause of the expansion of the universe.”25 Around the same time, Eddington made it known in the journal Nature that although he accepted “mainly through the work of Prof. Lemaître” that the Universe “is expanding rather rapidly,” he expressed his feeling that “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me.”26 Lemaître quickly replied with a letter published seven weeks later in Nature. There he wrote, “If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. I think that such a beginning of the world is far enough from the present order of Nature to be not at all repugnant.”27
Although Lemaître would later use the term “primordial atom” for what in 1931 he referred to as “a unique atom,” “the total mass of the universe,” his more common phrases in his 1931 letter are in terms of a quantum,—“a single quantum,” “the original quantum,” “a unique quantum,”—so that he was clearly referring to what he believed was the original quantum of energy from which the Universe began, “all the energy of the universe,” as he put it, “the whole story of the world” following not necessarily like “the disc of a phonograph” but possibly “written step by step.” Lemaître’s original model in 1927 was in terms of relativity theory, not quantum theory, but he did not present a theory of the origin of the Universe, only of its expansion, whereas by the time of his 1931 letter he realized the necessity of a quantum approach, and suggested as a possibility that the Universe began by the “unique atom” dividing “into smaller and smaller atoms by a kind of super-radio-active process.” This approach was further developed by George Gamow and two of his students in the late 1940s, who added that the “primordial atom” must have been in an extremely hot state, not a cold state as Lemaître had supposed, which would allow for nucleosynthesis (the formation of atomic nuclei) as the Big Bang explosion cooled.28
During the time of the weaning of the Big Bang theory in physics, a competitor theory emerged, known as the “Steady State” theory, begun in 1948 by Fred Hoyle and others—Hoyle actually coined the term “Big Bang” in a 1950 radio broadcast, as a term of disparagement.29 According to this theory, the Universe has always been more or less in a steady state, with new matter and eventually new galaxies continually being created to fill the gaps between the galaxies as they move apart from one another, so that the Universe will always and has always been basically the same. This theory was destroyed, and the Big Bang model became the “standard model,” with the discovery in 1965 of the cosmic microwave radiation background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, which was, as Weinberg puts it, “one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.”30
While Lemaître coined the term “primordial atom” for the initial state of the Big Bang, the initial state in the standard model is typically described mathematically as a “singularity.” Steven Hawking, for example, writes of “the big bang singularity,” which he says was “when the universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense,” when “the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot.”31 Similarly, Weinberg refers to “a state of infinite density and infinite temperature.”32 This language follows from the mathematics of relativity theory, which entails that if the Universe is expanding then it must have begun with a singularity, a point in space-time where, because of the infinities already mentioned, the laws of nature do not apply. From the perspective of quantum theory, however, the initial state leading to the Big Bang, as with Lemaître’s “primordial atom,” is defined physically, without infinities. As John Gribbin puts it, “the entire physical Universe expanded out from a seed much smaller than a proton.”33 This seed, by the way, was remarkably homogeneous. As the astrophysicist Peter Shaver recently put it in his popular account, all the Universe was “in an extremely compressed state,” a state “extremely dense, hot and uniform,” consisting of “only a few variables and virtually no complexity.” Nucleosynthesis “occurred in the first minutes of the universe, and produced the light elements.”34
When it comes to the origin of our universe, Poe provided a theory surprisingly similar in many respects to modern Big Bang theory. What led him there is another matter. It was not, of course, Einstein’s equations or quantum theory or evidence of a Doppler shift in receding galaxies. Poe himself says it was “Intuition,” which he defines for the second time in Eureka as “the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason, or defy our capacity of expression.”35 In fact Poe calls his theory of the origin of our universe “the sole absolute assumption of my Discourse.” It is that God created, purely by “Volition,” what Poe calls “the primordial Particle,” a unit of matter “in its utmost conceivable state of—what?—of Simplicity,” matter “in its absolute extreme of Simplicity.”36 Poe in this context uses the term “Imparticularity,” but it apparently has basically the same meaning as “unparticled matter,” Poe’s term in “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844) for matter “without particles—indivisible—one,” in other words, “infinitely rarified matter.” There is no Big Bang theory of the Universe in “Mesmeric Revelation,” but there is the idea that unparticled matter “is God,” and as such “not only permeates all things but impels all things—and thus is all things within itself,” and also is what constitutes “what men called mind.”37 Later, in Eureka, Poe leaps further, claiming not only that God created “the primordial Particle,” but that God is the primordial Particle: “the first and most sublime of Acts—that act by which a God, self-existing and alone existing, became all things at once, through dint of his volition, while all things were thus constituted a portion of God.”38
Following “the first and most sublime of Acts” came the second, the Big Bang proper, what Poe calls “the ultimate purpose for which we are to suppose the Particle created,” which is “the constitution of the Universe from it, the Particle.” This, he says, was “effected by forcing the originally and therefore normally One into the abnormal condition of Many.” It was what he calls a “diffusion from Unity.” “From the one Particle,” he says, “as a centre, let us suppose to be radiated 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.”39 This too is God. As Poe puts it near the end of Eureka, “the material and spiritual God—now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and … the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.”40
Poe’s concept of “radiation” here, by the way, is not at all like the radiation of light, and he is very clear about this. With light, he says, “there is a continuous outpouring of ray-streams, and with a force which we have no right to suppose varies at all.” What he has in mind, instead, is “that of a determinate radiation—one finally discontinued.”41 He later provides some reasons for rejecting the idea of continuous radiation, one of which is that the idea “if not positively disproved, is at least not in any respect warranted by telescopic observation of the stars.”42 This answer leads to another, which is more evidently an anticipation of his solution to Olbers’ paradox, which we shall examine in §V below. If one supposes, he says, “Matter to have been diffused by a continuous or infinitely continued force,” then one is led to the supposition of an infinite Universe of matter, such that “there is an infinity of atoms on all sides of the atom proposing to move.” Because of the gravitational force of all atoms in the Universe affecting all atoms in the Universe, “the atom in question must remain stationary forever.” In that case, says Poe, “there could have been no aggregation of Matter—no stars—no worlds—nothing but a perpetually atomic and inconsequential Universe.”43
Poe goes on in Eureka to discuss the nature of particled matter and laws of nature, and he applies Laplace’s nebular hypothesis to explain the formation of stars, planets, and moons. Whether Poe’s reductio ad absurdum of the infinite Universe of matter assumption works, the comparison of Poe’s cosmogony with twentieth-century Big Bang theory—minus, of course, the theology—is nothing short of remarkable. Even more remarkable is Poe’s anticipation of the idea that the expanding Universe would reach a point of maximum expansion and then enter a contraction phase, ending with the Universe as a singularity once more. In twentieth-century physics, following the Big Bang consensus, the competing hypotheses were between an expanding Universe ending in heat death, maximum entropy, and an expanding Universe with a contraction phase following the current expansion phase, possibly repeating over and over again, an “endless cycle of expansion and contraction,” every big bang eventually followed by a “big crunch,” for the simple reason, as Weinberg puts it, that “Some cosmologists are philosophically attracted to the oscillating model, especially because, like the steady-state model, it nicely avoids the problem of Genesis.”44 The philosophical sentiments turned scientific over growing indirect evidence for what they called “dark matter,” non-luminous matter in space that was hypothesized to explain, by virtue of its gravitational force, the way the Universe is expanding. The issue then became one of quantity. As the physicist John Gribbin puts it in his entry on dark matter, “many cosmologists believe that the best way to explain how the Universe was born … requires that there be enough matter in the Universe to make it gravitationally ‘closed,’ so that the present expansion will eventually be brought to a halt.”45 The debate got only more complicated with the discovery in 1998, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, (so much for the Hubble constant?,) such that now the debate is over what they call “dark energy,” energy that has “a repulsive force across the Universe.”46
Unlike modern physics, Poe thought the Universe is in a contraction phase, that it is currently returning to the original Unity. He says, for example, “we have reached the conclusion that, on the hypothesis that matter was originally radiated from a centre and is now returning to it, the concentralization, in the return, proceeds exactly as we know the force of gravitation to proceed.”47 One can focus on the differences between Poe’s theory and modern Big Bang theory, including what Poe says here about the force of concentralization, along with his conjecture that the Big Bang was followed by a finite series of progressively smaller big bangs so as to fill the finite Universe of space, what he calls “a limited sphere of Space,” so as to produce a “generally equable distribution,”48 from which, in the contraction phase only, stars and planets would gradually form from coalescing nebulae due to gravity. One can also quibble about whether Poe’s rejection of axioms is consistent with “the sole absolute assumption of my Discourse,” which he defends as “at least preferable, as a logical basis, to any axiom ever propounded, or to all axioms combined.”49 His topic, after all, is the Universe, which he is trying to make sense of as a whole.
At any rate, whatever the differences between Poe’s theory of the origin of the Universe and the modern theory of the Big Bang, those differences should not be used to obscure the fact that the similarities between the two theories are highly remarkable, especially given that Poe was writing in 1848. As the astronomer Alberto Cappi puts it in his critical assessment of “Poe’s physical cosmology” from a modern scientific point of view, “the astronomical knowledge of the first half of the 19th century is inserted by Poe in the framework of an evolving universe. This revolutionary and extraordinary synthesis is what gives Eureka a modern flavour.”50 He also claims that “the collapsing Newtonian universe described by Poe represents a self-consistent prerelativistic model of the Universe,” that “Poe seems to have had the mind of a cosmologist,” (an example, I might add, of it takes one to know one,) that Poe was “the first to conceive a Big Bang,” that Poe’s early awareness that for a consistent Newtonian cosmology “it was necessary to accept a non-static, finite universe of matter” is “one of the most important aspects of Eureka,” that “Eureka contains … the first modern application of the anthropic cosmological principle,” (which we have not yet got to,) and that Poe’s multiverse theory, (which we also have not yet got to,) which is a “similar concept of parallel universes … presently found in quantum mechanics or inflationary cosmology,” is “the most imaginative.”51
What is yet further remarkable is Poe’s criticism of scientists in his time for failing to entertain the idea of an expanding or contracting Universe, which is similar to Lemaître’s criticism of Einstein and his followers, which is that they should have reasoned from what they had to the Big Bang cosmogony. Poe finds J.P. Nichol, for a start, on stellar nebulae, stating that “all around them, on every side, there are volumes of stars, stretching out apparently as if they were rushing towards a great central mass in consequence of the action of some great power.” He finds Alexander von Humboldt, “whose generalizing powers have never, perhaps, been equalled,” admitting that objectively rather than perspectivally “we find many groups of them [stars] moving in opposite directions,” and yet Humboldt states that “the data as yet in hand render it not necessary, at least, to conceive that the systems composing the Milky Way, or the clusters, generally, composing the Universe, are revolving about any particular centre unknown.” Instead Humboldt says that “It is but Man’s longing for a fundamental first Cause, that impels both his intellect and his fancy to the adoption of such an hypothesis.” Finally, Poe finds John Hershel stating that “without a rotary motion and a centrifugal force, it is hardly possible not to regard them [stellar nebulae] as in a state of progressive collapse.”52 So then why did not Herschel entertain the possibility that each stellar nebula, and indeed the Universe as a whole, is collapsing toward a center (the latter preceded, of course, by an expansion)? Poe’s answer, in the case of Herschel specifically, (but he implies the same for the others,) is that he failed “Simply on account of a prejudice;—merely because the supposition is at war with a preconceived and utterly baseless notion—that of the endlessness—that of the eternal stability of the Universe.”53
That Poe did not share that prejudice, but went on to anticipate the Big Bang theory of modern astrophysics, was not because of a willingness to be incautious where real scientists were cautious. Poe had good reasons that fit into the picture, notably his solution to Olbers’ paradox, which his fellow theorists did not solve, almost certainly again because of what Poe calls their preconceived prejudice for an essentially infinite Universe of stars. (We shall turn to Olbers’ paradox when it arises in the order of Poe’s theorizing in Eureka.)
Poe even entertained the possibility of an oscillating Universe, though not for philosophical but for aesthetic reasons. Near the end of Eureka he says:
But are we here to pause? Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue—another creation and radiation, returning into itself—another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief—let us say, rather, in indulging a hope—that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?54
It will be noticed that the idea expressed here by Poe is reminiscent of what he elsewhere says is the essence of poetry, a recurring theme in his literary theory examined in Chapter 2, namely, “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty” using words, which we have seen goes back at least to his writings of 1842, and which gives us a strong reason to believe that Poe called Eureka a “Prose Poem” mainly because of its subject, the Universe, and the way he conceptualized it. We have also seen in the second-last section of Chapter 1 that in the period of 1844–1845 Poe was expressing the idea of God as “unparticled matter, permeating & impelling, all things” and that “The Universe is a Plot of God.” But there was yet no clear inkling of a Big Bang, let alone of a Big Crunch. Those ideas properly began, apparently, with the writing of Eureka.
At this point, in order to properly contextualize the matter, let us indulge in an exercise of imagination. Try to imagine how alone Poe must have felt, intellectually and spiritually, for the last sixteen months of his life, from the publication of Eureka in July 1848, his self-avowed magnum opus, to his tragic death in October 1849. To fully get the point, imagine the spirit of Poe standing behind you and breathing over your shoulder, as he reads with you the following passage written by the physics phenom Stephen Hawking in his second bestseller: “Despite these difficulties with the idea of a static and unchanging universe, no one in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, or early twentieth century suggested that the universe might be evolving with time.”55 No one except Poe, of course. And he didn’t get his theory published—no mere suggestion—in an obscure Belgian journal, but in America by a major publisher, in full view, only to be ignored and forgotten. Hawking continues in the passage to say Newton cannot be blamed for failing to see the light, but Einstein “should have known better,” given his formulation of relativity in 1915. I should say, instead, that Einstein and his generation of physicists should have known better along with the two generations of physicists preceding them, but for the negative image of Poe created mainly by his literary executor, a crime against the legacy of Poe which eventually got its poetic justice—the split and splatter of Ludwig Griswold’s chest by the razor’s edge of the huge pendulum in the 2012 movie The Raven.
What is the relation of the fundamental laws of nature to one another? Are they independent, or are they locked together in some way? At first glance they would seem logically independent. Newton’s inverse square law of gravity, for example, would seem to be independent of the speed of light in a vacuum. Conceivably one could alter one of them and not the other, without contradiction. There is thus no logical reason for why they should be connected. But maybe they are physically connected, such that altering one would automatically alter the other. And then maybe they are teleogically connected, in that slight alterations would fail to produce certain ends, such as us. Of course none of this is something that scientists can experiment with—at least not yet (as far as I can tell). So we are back to our original problem situation.
Up until the second half of the twentieth century, the fundamental laws of nature were conceptualized by scientists as independent, for there appeared no good reason to think otherwise, as independence seemed the simpler, and hence the default, hypothesis. As scientists came to learn more about the nature of and the relations between what came to be known as the “fundamental constants” of the Universe, however, a number of scientists came to believe that the fundamental laws of nature are not independent but interrelated, “fine-tuned” as some of them liked to put it. Today it is known as the anthropic principle, or the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence, which is that the fundamental laws of the Universe, the cosmic constants, seem fine-tuned collectively so as to produce stars, planets, life, and ultimately intelligent life like us. For example, if the force of gravity would be roughly twice of what it is, then stars would shine roughly 100 times brighter than they do and burn out much sooner, such that a star like our Sun would burn out after roughly 100 million years, clearly not enough time for life on Earth to evolve beyond the stage of bacteria. Gravity is but one variable. Consider another. The synthesis of carbon atoms in stars, which is absolutely essential for life as we know it, requires an energy interplay between the strong nuclear force, the force that holds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of an atom, (a force much stronger than gravity,) and the electromagnetic force, the force of attraction between electrons and atomic nuclei. If the force of the strong nuclear force would be greater or less than what it is by as little as 1 percent, then carbon atoms would never be able to form, and none of us would be here.56 And if the strong nuclear force would be different from what it is by a few percent, then not even stars would be able to form.57 Depending on who one reads, there are as few as twenty of these fundamental constants and as many as fifty.
The term “anthropic principle” was coined by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973, and since then the literature on this topic has mushroomed, with some, such as the physicists Paul Davies, John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and the geneticist Francis Collins, accepting the existence of God as the best explanation,58 and others, such as the physicists Steven Weinberg, Lee Smolin, Victor Stenger, and the biologist Richard Dawkins, rejecting it,59 to name but a few from each side of the debate.
Interestingly, Poe’s view of the Universe in Eureka is heavily law-based, and he does indeed seem to have anticipated the modern fine-tuning argument. He rejects what he calls “the fashion with astronomical treatises,” which is to explain certain phenomena by appeal to “the finger of the Deity itself” when explanations based on laws of nature fail. This was the case, he says, with the synchronous orbit of the Moon, never showing its dark side. It was thought necessary to suppose that God “found it necessary to interpose, specially, among his general laws, a set of subsidiary regulations, for the purpose of forever concealing from mortal eyes the glories, or perhaps the horrors, of the other side of the Moon.” And then the correct answer was figured out scientifically by astronomers. The same is going to be the case, says Poe, “of two forces so seemingly independent”—what he calls “the gravitating and tangential”—in the case of the position of planets to suns. He says the planets have “an impetus mathematically adapted to the masses, or attractive capacities, of the suns themselves.” This, he says, is an “absolutely accurate adaptation … of two forces so seemingly independent.” Poe then generalizes to “the conclusion that each law of Nature is dependent at all points upon other laws, and that all are but consequences of one primary exercise of Divine Volition.”60
Poe’s reasons for arriving at this conclusion, of course, are suspect, having to do with “the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient.” But, like them or not, in claiming “the infallibility of his laws” and that there is between them an “absolutely accurate adaptation,”—which keep in mind is in accordance with the purpose of the Universe in Poe’s view, examined in Chapter 3,—it is safe to say that Poe anticipated a major development in twentieth-century cosmology, or at least a genuine debate among scientists, even if the majority of modern physicists do not accept the God hypothesis (and they do not).
Did the fundamental laws of nature exist before the explosion of the Big Bang? Or did they come into existence subsequent to it? In other words, did the singularity, or original quantum, from which our universe sprang, already contain the fundamental laws, or did they emerge later, following the explosion? Here’s how Stephen Hawking puts it: “Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time.”61 I take that to be a no, although I would not bet my life on it. A little more clear on the matter is Andrei Linde, one of the founders of multiverse and inflationary theory, to which we shall turn in §VI below. According to Linde, in reference to standard Big Bang theory on the singularity preceding the Big Bang, “One usually assumes that the current laws of physics did not apply then. They took hold only after the density of the universe dropped below the so-called Planck density, which equals about 1094 grams per cubic centimetre.”62
Poe on laws of nature in Eureka is, again, nothing short of fascinating. Let us begin with the law of gravity, which Poe fully accepts as a “fact,” which “Newton deduced … from the laws of Kepler”63 and which Poe takes to have been empirically proven beyond a reasonable doubt by “the Maskelyne experiments.”64 We have seen that in the beginning, according to Poe’s cosmogony, there was only God, who by an act of volition turned into “the primordial Particle,” and then there was the Big Bang. Gravity, says Poe, in a number of places and in a number of ways, and most clearly and poetically in the following, is to be understood “as the rëaction of an act—the expression of a desire on the part of Matter, while existing in a state of diffusion, to return into the Unity whence it was diffused.”65 This, he says a little earlier, is “the modus operandi of the Law of Gravity.”66
The question then arises, “When did gravity begin?” Poe’s answer is that gravity, as an agent or force, accurately described by Newton’s inverse square law, did not begin until the Universe began to contract following its maximum point of expansion. He says, for example, that “There could have been no rëaction had the act [the ‘exercise of the Divine Volition’] been infinitely continued. So long as the act lasted, no rëaction, of course, could commence; in other words, no gravitation could take place.” Poe then says, “But gravitation has taken place; therefore the act of Creation has ceased: and gravitation has long ago taken place; therefore the act of Creation has long ago ceased.”67 Later in Eureka, near the end, Poe says, “Going boldly beyond the vulgar thought, we have to conceive, metaphysically, that the gravitating principle appertains to Matter temporarily—only while diffused—only while existing as Many instead of as One—appertains to it by virtue of its state of radiation alone—appertains, in a word, altogether to its condition, and not in the slightest degree to itself.”68 In order to save Poe from contradiction, it would seem that “particulate matter” only came to exist following the point of the maximum expansion of the Universe, when God’s act of creative volition ceased.
The other fundamental force, agent, or law of the Universe Poe calls “Repulsion” or “Electricity, with its involute phænomena, heat, light and magnetism.”69 Earlier in Eureka Poe makes it clear that “far less shall we be liable to err in attributing to this strictly spiritual principle the more important phænomena of vitality, consciousness, and Thought.”70 But let us not bother here with that. The force of repulsion would be necessary, says Poe, early in Eureka, so as to “at the same time allow the approach, and forbid the junction, of the atoms; suffering them infinitely to approximate, while denying them positive contact; in a word, having the power—up to a certain epoch—of preventing their coalition, but no ability to interfere with their coalescence in any respect or degree.” This force would come into effect “on withdrawal of the diffusive Volition.”71 Clearly for Poe the expansion phase of the Universe, the diffusion or radiation of unparticled matter into a homogeneous sphere, was not driven by the force of repulsion. Instead it was driven by God’s volition, and Poe apparently thought of this phase as occurring instantaneously. In fact to make the point explicit he added, in pencil as a revision to his copy of Eureka, “Here describe the whole process as one instantaneous flash.”72 The point of maximal expansion was then followed by an ever so gradual contraction phase, allowing for the formation of stars and planets and the evolution of life. As Poe puts it, “Our solar system … is now to be considered as an example of the innumerable agglomerations which proceeded to take place throughout the Universe of atoms on withdrawal of the Divine Volition.”73 For this to happen, however, the force of attraction would have to be stronger than the force of repulsion, otherwise the Universe would expand rather than contract, and keep expanding forever. And indeed Poe states that gravity “must be the strongest of forces,” which he says is “an idea reached à priori and abundantly confirmed by induction.”74
Early in Eureka, commenting on both of these forces, Poe says “No other principles exist.”75 A little later he states that “The Thought of God is to be understood as originating the Diffusion. … Then comes Rëaction, and through Rëaction, ‘Principle,’ as we employ the word. It will be advisable, however, to limit the application of this word to the two immediate results of the discontinuation of the Divine Volition—that is, to the two agents, Attraction and Repulsion.” From these two, then, you get higher-level laws: “Every other natural Agent depends, either more or less immediately, on these two, and therefore would be more conveniently designated as sub-principles.”76
Even though Poe’s presentation of the above matter is somewhat diffuse, it should be abundantly obvious that according to Poe none of the laws of the Universe, including its two most fundamental laws, existed as features of “the primordial Particle,” the “singularity” or “original quantum” in the language of modern physics. The laws came into existence later, only after the start of the Big Bang. This is truly remarkable.
In 1823 the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers had a paper published entitled “On the Transparency of Space,” in which he wrote the following: “If there really are suns throughout the whole of infinite space, and if they are placed at equal distances from one another, or grouped into systems like that of the Milky Way, their number must be infinite and the whole vault of heaven must appear as bright as the Sun.” He also put it in a simpler form: “if the fixed stars stretch away to unlimited distance, the entire sky must be ablaze with light.”77 Olbers was not the first to express the paradox. In fact in his paper he examines and then rejects the solution given by Edmund Halley, of Halley’s Comet fame, and Newton and others were well aware of the problem.78 But the name of the paradox became associated with Olbers due to the contingencies of history along with (or because of) two of his contributions to the problem. As the physicist and astronomer Edward Harrison points out in his book on the topic, in Olbers’ paper “we encounter for the first time the realization that stars need not be uniformly distributed and may be grouped into milky way systems that nowadays we call galaxies.” The second is that “for the first time we encounter the powerful line-of-sight argument.”79 In other words, in an infinitely large universe with infinitely many stars the paradox remains whether the stars are grouped into galaxies. In either case, in whatever direction we look in the night sky our line of sight should end not only with a star or galaxy, but the light from that star or galaxy should be multiplied by light from other stars and galaxies. In the case of a single star, the light from the star is dimmer the further we are from it not because light rays get weaker the further they are from their source but because they are less packed together. In an infinite universe with infinite stars, however, in whichever direction we look in the night sky our eyes should be blasted by light rays. This is because the light coming from the star or galaxy directly in our line of sight is combined with all the light coming indirectly from other stars and galaxies in our sky, with a total effect similar to looking directly at the Sun. But of course this is not at all what we experience.
Olbers’ solution was to retain an infinite universe with infinite stars but to reject the assumption that empty space is perfectly transparent. Instead he argued for a degree of absorption of starlight by interstellar matter, such that a “small amount of absorption in an endless star-filled universe is more than sufficient to create the conditions observed on Earth.” Olbers, it turns out, was wrong. As Hawking points out, “if that happened [absorption by interstellar matter in an infinite universe with infinite stars] the intervening matter would eventually heat up until it glowed as brightly as the stars.”80
In Eureka, Poe states that “Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy—since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”81 According to Harrison, “The first clear and correct solution to the riddle of darkness, though only qualitatively expressed, came from Edgar Allan Poe,” that “only twenty-five years after Olbers wrote his paper on the riddle of darkness, it [Eureka] contains the first anticipation of a formally correct solution.”82 This view is seconded by Alberto Cappi, what he calls Poe’s “finite age solution.”83 Poe’s solution, as Harrison puts it, is that “the light of the ‘golden walls’ has not yet reached us. When we look far out into space we look far back to a time before the birth of the stars.” In other words, the stars are “not old enough.”84
At this point I want to suggest that Poe’s solution to Olbers’ paradox is the key to understanding the science of Poe’s cosmology in Eureka. Solve Olbers’ paradox by rejecting the assumption of an infinite universe of stars, then you get a finite universe of stars. Accept a finite universe of stars, then the next step is to accept gravitational collapse. Accept gravitational collapse, and the next step is to accept a massive explosion to get the matter out there necessary to make the stars in the first place. Accept a massive explosion, then it’s natural to suppose a “primordial Particle” of some sort, one not made of matter at all but that is convertible into matter. And so on. Now add Poe’s literary theory and his theological concerns and you have OMG. All of a sudden all the nine topics in this chapter, each of them a speculation forged by Poe in his imaginarium, seem to come together and make sense as a unified whole. But we still have four more of Poe’s anticipations of twentieth-century science to go.
In 1979 the physicist Alan Guth developed a version of Big Bang theory that has come to be known as “inflationary cosmology.” As Peter Shaver puts it, “He suggested that, at a very early stage, about 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe may have undergone an extremely fast and phenomenal expansion due to a ‘phase transition’ in response to the rapidly decreasing temperature (a similar phase transition is that from steam to water, or water to ice). The dimensions of the universe may have increased by more than an incredible factor of at least 1030 in just 10-33 seconds. That’s an increase of over a million trillion trillion in less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.”85 (Sounds to me much like Poe’s “one instantaneous flash.”) The theory solved a number of problems that had been plaguing Big Bang cosmology, such as the need to explain the homogeneity of the Universe (although it is globular in the sense of stars and galaxies, it is nearly uniform in its distribution of dark matter and in the temperature of the cosmic microwave radiation background). Moreover, the theory made predictions that have since been tested and confirmed, such that the theory is now widely accepted. But most interestingly, the theory raises the possibility that our own universe, with its laws, might be just one little universe produced from “a random fluctuation in a pre-existing ‘quantum ocean,’” an ocean that repeatedly produces innumerable universes each from a random fluctuation, each universe starting with its own big bang, each with its own constants and laws, such that, as Shaver puts it, “Our entire universe may be just one speck in a huge sea of frenzied quantum foam of false vacuum, with the seeds of endless universes continually being created randomly by quantum fluctuations.” Rather than inflationary theory being part of Big Bang theory, then, the situation by inflationary cosmologists is thought to be the reverse. In short, says Shaver, “Welcome to the Multiverse!”86
Almost at the beginning of Eureka, Poe distinguishes between two meanings of “Universe” that he intends to employ throughout the work. One is the Universe of space, by which he means “the utmost conceivable expanse of space, with all things, spiritual and material, that can be imagined to exist within the compass of that expanse.” The other meaning, which Poe says “is ordinarily implied,” is “the Universe of Stars.” “Why this distinction is considered necessary,” he says, “will be seen in the sequel.”87 The “sequel” is merely the latter part of Eureka. We have seen above in §II that Poe claims that our universe, what we normally call “the” Universe, was created by “a God.” Poe’s distinction between the Universe of space and the Universe of stars is necessary because he supposes—he shifts between the words “infer,” “imagine,” and “fancy”—that the Universe of space is populated by many, indeed infinitely many, universes of stars, of which our universe of stars is but one. “The human brain,” he says, “has obviously a leaning to the ‘Infinite,’” and so he supposes “an interminable succession of the ‘clusters of clusters,’ or of ‘Universes’ more or less similar,” a “limitless succession of Universes, more or less similar to that of which we have cognizance,” such that “Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.”88
But would this not raise anew the problem of Olbers’ paradox, that the night sky should be blazing with light? Poe didn’t think so. This is because each universe, begun by its own God, would not necessarily have the same laws of nature. As he puts it in the same passage, each universe “having had no part in our origin, they have no portion in our laws.” Poe entertains a number of possibilities here in order to avoid Olbers’ paradox, including excessive diffusion for visual perception, lack of light production altogether, and not enough time due to distance. As he puts it rhetorically in a long run-on sentence, “Have we, or have we not, an analogical right to the inference that … the rest of which [the other universes] are invisible through distance—through the diffusion of their light being so excessive, ere it reaches us, as not to produce upon our retinæ a light-impression—or from there being no such emanation as light at all, in those unspeakably distant worlds—or, lastly, from the mere interval being so vast, that the electric tidings of their presence in Space, have not yet—through the lapsing myriads of years—been enabled to traverse that interval?” That each universe deserves to be called a universe in its own right, rather than merely a part of one total universe, is because, as Alberto Cappi explains, “these universes do not interact” and “Each universe will have its origin and its laws.”89
Even the language and imagery that Poe used is remarkably modern. As Poe put it in a letter dated September 20, 1848, with regard to Laplace’s nebular hypothesis on the origin of individual solar systems, “The ground covered by the great French astronomer compares with that covered by my theory, as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats.”90 Poe might well have used the same imagery for his multiverse theory, each universe a bubble, expanding and then contracting, which is the imagery used for modern multiverse theory. As Shaver puts it, “Our entire universe may be just one speck in a huge sea of frenzied quantum foam of false vacuum, with the seeds for endless universes continually being created randomly by quantum fluctuations.”91 Sounds like bubbles to me, and in fact “bubbles” is the common word used in inflationary multiverse theory. Andrei Linde, for example, the theorist who gave us chaotic inflation and eternal inflation, states that “In essence, one inflationary universe sprouts other inflationary bubbles, which in turn produce other inflationary bubbles. This process, which I have called eternal inflation, keeps going as a chain reaction,” to which he adds, “for all practical purposes, one can consider the moment of formation of each inflationary bubble as a new ‘big bang.’”92 Similarly Guth uses “bubbles” in his book on inflationary cosmologies, on “the eternal reproduction of universes,” with bubbles “very much like the boiling of water,”93 as does Weinberg in his review of Guth’s book, in which he is attracted to the view that “although our own Big Bang had a definite beginning about ten to fifteen billion years ago, the bubbling up of new big bangs may have been going on forever in a universe that is infinitely old,” to which he adds, (although he doesn’t like the terminology,) “Loosely put, each bubble of ordinary space could be called a ‘universe.’”94
But how original was Poe with his own multiverse theory? According to the Levines, “There is a philosophical precedent … for Poe’s idea of multiple universes and multiple gods in the thinking of the presocratic philosopher Anaximander.”95 This sixth-century B.C. philosopher, however, merely assumed that there was one original stuff, what he called the aperion, (meaning “not limited or bounded,”) from which, as quoted (or paraphrased) later by Theophrastus, “come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, ‘according to necessity.’”96 This is hardly a clear “precedent” for Poe’s multiverse theory, with its infinity of universes, each universe beginning with a big bang and having its own laws. But alas, if Anaximander’s thinking, of which we see through a glass darkly and about which we know next to nothing, is allowed to provide a “precedent” for Poe’s multiverse theory, then why is not Poe’s thinking in Eureka, of which we see through a glass lightly and about which we know much, not allowed to provide an “anticipation” of modern Big Bang theory? The mind reels at the asymmetry in judgment by the Levines here. Nemo me impune lacessit.
In the Scholium to Definition VIII of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1686, Isaac Newton stated that “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects.” Of time, he wrote: “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called ‘duration’; relative, apparent, and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time, such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.” And of space, he wrote: “Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces, which our senses determine by its position to bodies and which is commonly taken for immovable space; such is the dimension of a subterraneous, an aerial, or celestial space, determined by its position in respect of the earth.”97
The Newtonian revolution, with its framework of absolute space and absolute time, dominated physics and astronomy for over two hundred years, until it was replaced with a new framework, marking a new scientific revolution, namely, the relativity framework of Albert Einstein, introduced to the world with his revolutionary paper of 1905, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” in which he introduced what he would later call his special theory of relativity (in contradistinction to what he would call his general theory of relativity, which generalized his relativity principle to include gravity). Here is how Einstein put it in “The Problem of Space, Ether, and the Field in Physics” (1934), one of his many popular accounts: “With the discovery of the relativity of simultaneity, space and time were merged in a single continuum in a way similar to that in which the three dimensions of space had previously been merged into a single continuum.”98 Accordingly, physicists today talk of “space-time” or “four-dimensional space-time,” (both meaning the same,) not “space and time.”
In “Marginalia” (November 1844), Poe provides some thoughts on the nature of space and time that are important for understanding what he says in Eureka.99 Beginning with time, he notices that we mark or “appreciate” time by means of events and then proceed to “the erroneous idea that events are time,” thinking that with more events there is more time. With space, he then says, the situation is analogous, in that we measure space in terms of “the succession of objects” and then proceed to “the false idea that objects are space—that the more numerous the objects the greater the space.” Accordingly, he says, we can get a vague idea of the distance between the Sun and Uranus because of the idea of the intervening planets, but our mind is “utterly lost” when trying to get an idea of the distance between the Sun and the star Sirius, because we know of no intervening objects between the two solar systems. Poe’s point is the simple yet profound one, not original with him of course, that we should expect a fundamental difference between the nature of space and time, on the one hand, and on the other the nature of how our minds work with respect to space and time. His point, then, can be seen to be of a piece with his rejection of axioms in Eureka.
When we turn to Eureka we naturally expect big things on this topic (given what we have already seen in the present chapter). And, indeed, Poe claims late in Eureka that “Space and Duration are one.”100 This, on the surface of it, certainly looks like an anticipation of something like the modern concept of the space-time continuum. According to Stuart and Susan Levine, “The statement seems to be unambiguous evidence that Poe understood space-time in the modern sense. Although most of the more famous ways in which Eureka ‘anticipates’ or ‘predicts’ twentieth-century science turn out on close examination to be not quite the same as more modern concepts, or shrewd guesses based on not very solid data, this one seems to be a fine extrapolation from firm information that Poe thoroughly understood. It suggests how very good a mind Poe had (Twarog).”101
But we have to be more careful here. True enough, the Levines criticize the rest of Poe’s paragraph, because “Poe never—despite the dramatic dashes he perhaps added to cover his logical tracks—says exactly why vast cosmic distances are necessary.” But we need to look at the context, the bigger picture. The question Poe poses, at the beginning of the paragraph quoted above, concerns the size of our universe, why it is so massive beyond human imagination. Would not a smaller universe have equally served God’s purpose? As Poe puts it, “let us take the opportunity of referring to the difficulty … in accounting for the immeasurable voids alluded to—in comprehending why chasms so totally unoccupied and therefore apparently so needless, have been made to intervene between star and star—between cluster and cluster—in understanding, to be brief, a sufficient reason for the Titanic scale, in respect of mere Space, on which the Universe of Stars is seen to be constructed. A rational cause for the phænomenon, I maintain that Astronomy has palpably failed to assign.” Poe is painting in brushstrokes here. But more important, we have seen in §II, following Cappi, that Poe conceptualized the Universe, beginning with a Big Bang, within a Newtonian framework of space and time. So forget trying to see something Einsteinian now on the topic of space and time. What Poe is doing with his “Space and Duration are one” is quite different. He does not mean “one” in the sense of a continuum. Instead, he means “one” in the sense of co-adaptation, in line with his critique of the Bridgewater Treatises examined in the previous chapter. In fact, in the very two paragraphs in Eureka immediately following “Space and Duration are one,” Poe gives virtually the same exposition of his concept of “Divine adaptation,” what he calls “the complete mutuality of adaptation,” which he then in the next paragraph connects with plots, concluding (or assuming) that “The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.” “Space and Duration are one,” then, for Poe, in the very same sense that we examined in §III above, which is the modern sense of the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, sometimes called the anthropic principle. In this sense the vastness of the size of our universe, according to Poe, is not an accident (that would make our universe an imperfect plot) but instead is mutually adapted or fine-tuned with time, specifically the age or duration of our universe beginning with the time of maximum expansion and continuing through the contraction phase, all for the purpose of allowing nebular clusters to form in accordance with the respective laws of nature, and consequently clusters of stars (galaxies) with planets orbiting stars followed by life evolving on planets. As Cappi puts it, “It is interesting how Poe justifies the time dimension by using the Anthropic Principle. He has well understood the link between dimension, age, and life, which exists in an evolving universe.”102
Poe anticipated, then, not the modern concept of space-time, but the idea that an evolving finite universe requires us to rethink the relation between space and time. For Newton and other physicists up until 1908, space and time were thought to be independent of each other. For Poe in 1848, space and time, not in themselves but as dimensions of our universe of stars, the actual spatial size of it and the actual duration of it, had to be interdependent. Poe didn’t go all the way to the modern view in physics, according to which space and time, because they are connected with matter-energy, do not extend beyond the physical Universe, but what Poe did was nevertheless remarkable.
Here is how the physicist Daniel Orange, in a popular book on physics, defines the difference between matter and energy: “Matter refers to anything that takes up space, no matter how large or small it is. Energy refers to any force that can produce a change in matter.”103 One of the amazing contributions of Einstein, of course, was his argument, which turned out to be one of his many successes, (and also the most dangerous, given that it led to the atomic bomb,) that matter and energy are really the same thing, only in different forms, that “matter” and “energy,” in a very real sense, are synonyms, which is encapsulated in arguably the most famous scientific formula of all time: E = mc2. The idea and the mathematical proof, but not the particular formula, (the latter was first made explicit by Einstein in 1912,) was introduced by Einstein in his second paper on relativity, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon its Energy-Content?” (1905). There he simply states at the end of this short paper that “The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content.”104 Later, for the benefit of the public, for example in “E = MC2” (1946), Einstein explained “the law of the equivalence of mass and energy” as: “The energy that belongs to the mass m is equal to this mass, multiplied by the square of the enormous speed of light—which is to say, a vast amount of energy for every unit of mass.”105
Einstein speaks of the “equivalence” of mass and energy, but by “equivalence” he does not mean “equal,” as with “2 + 2 = 4” or “the equality of man.” At this point I must say that trying to get a clear answer from a physicist to a simple question of meaning is sometimes like pulling teeth, the very teeth for which I, in writing the present section of this book, in the disordered chamber of my brain, in the full fury of my monomania, have repeatedly longed with a phrenzied desire. Indeed Einstein might as well be called Berenice, for he is no exception to my complaint. What Einstein means by “equivalence,” it turns out, after much yanking with my pliers and a close examination of the roots visibly and palpably before me, is numerical identity, one and the same thing in different forms. As Gribbin puts it, “Mass itself is a form of energy, … With mass included in the definition of energy, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but only converted from one form into another. Ultimately, this means that all energy will end up as radiant heat.”106 Or it means that the Universe, if one agrees with Poe, will end up as God returned unto Itself, as pure Unity and ultimate Hot.
A further remarkable feature of Eureka is that Poe, while not anticipating, of course, E = mc2,—one would have to be a Bedlamite on laudanum to propose otherwise,—did indeed anticipate the idea that matter and energy are not two different sorts of entities but, behind appearances, one and the same. There is nothing else we can conclude, keeping in mind the modern definitions of “matter” and “energy” with which we began this section and given that Poe states, near the beginning of Eureka, that “Attraction and Repulsion are the sole properties through which we perceive the Universe—in other words, by which Matter is manifested to Mind—that, for all mere argumentative purposes, we are fully justified in assuming that Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion—that Attraction and Repulsion are matter:—there being no conceivable case in which we may not employ the term ‘Matter’ and the terms ‘Attraction’ and ‘Repulsion,’ taken together, as equivalent, and therefore convertible, expressions in Logic.”107
There it is, Berenice’s “equivalence” and Morella’s “converted,” Poe’s “equivalent” and “convertible.” The mind reels in astonishment! For Poe, remarkably, “m = A + R.” But at this point in Eureka Poe is simply laying out his principles, his language or “Logic.” It is near the end of Eureka that he provides his reasons for the equation. And there we find Poe’s concept of “Matter as a Means—not as an End.” The means is the gradual contraction of the Universe following the state of maximum diffusion, the gradual coalescence of the diffusion requiring “the existence of parts, particles, or atoms,” involving, as physics puts it, “the tendency of ‘each atom &c. to every other atom’ &c. according to a certain law,” the atoms then gradually coalescing over eons of time into stars and planets with life, keeping in mind that light, too, consists of “light-particles.”108
And then comes Poe’s concept of Nothingness. He says, “When, on fulfillment of its purposes, then, Matter shall have returned into its original condition of One … shall have returned into absolute Unity,—it will then (to speak paradoxically for the moment) be Matter without Attraction and without Repulsion—in other words, Matter without Matter—in other words, again, Matter no more. In sinking into Unity, it will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all finite perception, Unity must be—into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked—to have been created by the Volition of God.”109 In a letter dated February 29, 1848, Poe states his “General Proposition” as “Because Nothing was, therefore All Things are,” and he continues in the letter with “Matter, springing from Unity, sprang from Nothingness;—i.e. was created” and that with the return to Unity “then the final globe would be matter without matter—i.e. no matter at all:—it must disappear. Thus Unity is Nothingness.”110
The Levines point out, following earlier critics of Poe, that the attribution of attraction and repulsion to matter, this contribution to molecular theory, was first made by Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, a Croation mathematician and astronomer who died in 1787. But along with Cappi I “do not think it is necessary to see a direct link with Poe’s adoption of the two terms.”111 For one, to add substance to Cappi’s claim, Boscovich did not make the distinction between particled and “unparticled” matter, which apparently is original with Poe and which anticipates, in a remarkable fashion, Einstein’s concept of matter as “frozen energy,” the metaphor commonly used today by physicists for laypeople. For another, a direct link between Boscovich and Poe on the nature of matter has yet to be proven, and given the lack of proof, what exactly—aside from satiating a perverse imp of an instinct for calumny—is to be gained by looking back and making the comparison? Nothing.
What we should be doing, instead, is looking forward, A.P. (After Poe). More specifically, what we should be doing, to really appreciate Poe’s ideas on matter and the origin of the Universe, is comparing Poe’s language with recent physicists, (much more recent than Einstein,) specifically those who might collectively be called the Ligeia of cosmology, namely, the inflationary cosmologists. Here is how Stephen Hawking, for example, puts it in his “no-boundary” contribution to inflationary cosmology:—are you ready for this?—“The inflation … produced all the contents of the universe quite literally out of nothing. When the universe was a single point, like the North Pole, it contained nothing. Yet there are now at least ten-to-the-eightieth particles in the part of the universe that we can observe. Where did all these particles come from? The answer is that relativity and quantum mechanics allow matter to be created out of energy. … And where did the energy come from to create this matter? The answer is that it was borrowed from the gravitational energy of the universe.”112 And where did the gravitational energy of the Universe come from? At this point Hawking becomes Berenice to my narrator, for he does not mention gravitational energy anywhere else in his book, or in its prequel. But no matter, never mind, (and no energy, never matter). Hawking is not alone in modern physics with his language of nothing. Alan Guth, for example, has a chapter entitled “A Universe Ex Nihilo” in his book devoted to theories of inflationary cosmology, in which he says, “To my knowledge, the first serious suggestion that the creation of the universe from nothing could be described in scientific terms was the 1973 paper by Edward Tyron, ‘Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?’ … According to quantum theory, the apparently quiescent vacuum is not really empty at all, but on a subatomic level is a perpetual tempest, seething with activity.”113 The quantum vacuum of modern physicists, the Unity/God of Poe, (take your pick,) either way it is much ado about—Nothing.
Come to think of it, the last line from the quotation above reminds me of the second stanza of one of Poe’s last poems, “A Dream within a Dream” (1849), which I quoted in Chapter 3 but quote here again, and usefully, for the perspective is now modern physics, not theology:
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?114
Quoth the Quantum Ocean “Nevermore.”
In his third letter to Richard Bentley, dated 1693 and referenced in §II above, Newton made clear not only that he rejected the idea of gravity as an innate property of matter—the opposite view was ascribed to Newton by the astronomer Roger Cotes in his Preface to the second edition of Newton’s Principia published in 1713115 and remains a confusion to this very day—but also that he rejected the idea of gravity as action-at-a-distance. “That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter,” he wrote, “so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”116 Just exactly how gravity operated Newton would not say. Years earlier, however, in a letter to the chemist Robert Boyle, dated 1679, (which is seven years before the publication of Principia,) Newton put to pen his “suppositions” about the existence of “an ethereal substance, capable of contraction and dilation, strongly elastic, and, in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtle.” He supposed that “this ether pervades all gross bodies,” he distinguished between “external” and “internal” ether, also between “rarefied” (“finer”) and “denser” (“grosser”) ether, and he used the concept to help explain not only gravity but many other phenomena as well, including certain properties of light and why “a fly walks on water without wetting her feet, and consequently without touching the water.”117
This concept of “the ether,” (as it is commonly called,) a mysterious material substance permeating bodies and existing between them, indeed permeating the Universe, dominated Newton’s thought to the end.118 It also dominated physics past Poe’s time, well up to the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, an experiment on light beams that failed to demonstrate the existence of the ether, but demonstrated instead (to everyone’s astonishment, including Michelson and Morley) the constancy of the speed of light in empty space, thus bringing the existence of the ether into serious question.119 In fact the concept of the ether was maintained in physics well into the early 1900s, kept alive by H.A. Lorentz, for example, whom Einstein greatly admired, who in 1904 continued with the distinction between “the ether” and “ponderable bodies,” and by J.J. Thomson, another prominent example, who in his 1909 presidential address to the seventy-ninth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science stated that “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe . … The study of this all-pervading substance is perhaps the most fascinating and important duty of the physicist.”120 The existence of the ether was even retained by A.A. Michelson of Michelson-Morley fame, who lamented in 1927, a few years before he died, “But without a medium how can the propagation of light waves be explained?”121 No matter, the beginning of the end for the concept was Einstein’s publication of his special theory of relativity in 1905, in which he argued that “The introduction of a ‘luminous ether’ will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here developed will not require an ‘absolute stationary space’ provided with special properties.”122 But it was not until Einstein extended his special theory of relativity to gravity, with his “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” (1916), that the concept of the ether became not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead. There Einstein argued that gravity is not a force, but instead the curvature of space-time around a physical body, and he claimed that the approximation to Newton’s law of gravity, as well as the explanation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, may “be taken as a convincing proof of the correctness of the theory.”123
In looking, however, for a clear statement from Einstein at this point, on the nature of gravity according to the general theory of relativity, I am experiencing once again the frenzied desire of the narrator of “Berenice,” not just a consuming curiosity pervading my soul, but of coveting madly the objects that are the dream of the disordered chamber of my brain. This is because in reading Einstein’s 1916 paper he is palpably unclear on the matter (unless, apparently, you understand the mathematics). Neither is he particularly clear in his later writings. So let us pull the teeth in a different way. What shall surely help is to look at different expressions by physicists of Einstein’s theory. George Gamow, for example, states that “The great idea, which was included by Einstein in the foundation of his general theory of curved space, consists of the assumption that the physical space becomes curved in the neighborhood of large masses; the bigger the mass the larger the curvature.”124 Stephen Hawking puts it this way: “Einstein made the revolutionary suggestion that gravity is not a force like other forces, but is a consequence of the fact that space-time is not flat, as had been previously assumed: it is curved, or ‘warped,’ by the distribution of mass and energy in it.”125
Those examples shall do. And what they leave us with is the conclusion that, in accounting for gravity as curved space-time, Einstein left the concept of the ether with absolutely nothing left to do: it had already lost full-time employment over the propagation of light, following the Michelson-Morley experiment, not long after which it became unemployed following Einstein’s special theory of relativity, perhaps even comatose, after which it gave up the ghost with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, given that there was no longer any action-at-a-distance that required a medium (gravitational effects were fully explained, instead, by the curvature of space-time around bodies). In a sense, then, the concept of the ether simply sank into Einstein’s concept of space-time, where it rests in peace. Einstein himself, interestingly, in “The Problem of Space, Ether, and the Field in Physics” (1934), states that in a sense “physical space and the ether are only different terms for the same thing.”126 Similarly, Gamow, likewise focused only on the ether as the medium for the propagation of light, (the same point would apply to the ether as the medium of gravity,) states that “in modern physics the expressions ‘light ether’ (divested of its alleged mechanical properties) and ‘physical space’ are considered synonymous.”127 In this way the term “the ether” could have suffered a fate similar to the reconceptualization of “species” following the Darwinian revolution. Such is often the nature of concept change in science, that the extension of a term survives (more or less) a radical change in intension due to a revolution in theory. But the term “the ether” has not in fact survived, whereas the term “species” has (to the continued consternation of many in biology and philosophy of biology).
Gamow also states that “the greatest mistake of the physics of the nineteenth century consisted in the assumption that this light ether has properties very similar to those of ordinary physical substances familiar to us.”128 But of course they thought that of the ether per se. At this point enter Poe. In Eureka Poe notes that astronomers, based on the decaying orbits of comets around the Sun, in particular Encke’s comet, concluded that the cause of the decay is the drag of the ether, “an exceedingly rare [i.e., fine] but still material medium pervading space.” But, says Poe, “this ether was assumed, most illogically, on the ground that no other mode than the one mentioned could be discovered, of accounting for the observed decrease in the orbit of the comet.”129 A combination of causes, says Poe, might equally account for the phenomenon. Astronomers also thought that the decreasing orbit of the Moon was caused by the ether, until Lagrange, as Poe puts it, “came to the rescue” with a simpler theory. Poe himself, while not doing away with the ether entirely, reconceptualizes it, such that “the ether thus conceived is radically distinct from the ether of the astronomers; inasmuch as theirs is matter and mine not.”130
If the ether is not matter but is nevertheless real, then what is it? Poe’s answer is that it is “a subtle influence which we know to be ever in attendance on matter,” and he lumps the ether as such with his force of Repulsion, which includes “the various phænomena of electricity, heat, light, magnetism; and more—of vitality, of consciousness, and thought—in a word, of spirituality.”131 The purpose of Repulsion in Poe’s scheme, it will be remembered, is to delicately counterbalance Attraction, but not quite equally, only slightly sub-equally, to allow for the gradual contraction of the Universe from the state of maximal diffusion, to allow for the gradual formation of stars and planets and the gradual (or rather saltational) formation of life on planets, including us. And indeed Poe goes on in Eureka, a couple of pages further, after reiterating his idea of divine adaptation, of the “absolute reciprocity of adaptation,” to state that “With a perfectly legitimate reciprocity, we are now permitted to look at Matter, as created solely for the sake of this influence—solely to serve the objects of this spiritual Ether. Through the aid—by the means—through the agency of Matter, and by dint of its heterogeneity—is this Ether manifested—is Spirit individualized. It is merely in the development of this Ether, through heterogeneity, that particular masses of Matter become animate—sensitive—and in the ratio of their heterogeneity;—some reaching a degree of sensitiveness involving what we call Thought and thus attaining obviously Conscious Intelligence.” Keeping in mind that Poe’s ether is not particulate, but an energy or force, he then adds that “When, on fulfillment of its purposes, then, Matter shall have returned into its original condition of One—a condition which presupposes the expulsion of the separative Ether, whose province and whose capacity are limited to keeping the atoms apart until that great day when, this Ether being no longer needed, the overwhelming pressure of the finally collective Attraction shall at length just sufficiently predominate and expel it:—when, I say, Matter, finally, expelling the Ether, shall have returned into absolute Unity,—it will then (to speak paradoxically for the moment) be Matter without Attraction and without Repulsion—in other words, Matter without Matter—in other words, again, Matter no more.”132
We are now back to Poe’s theology, which is of a piece with his cosmology (and more). But the fact should not be lost that Poe, in trying to work out a consistent and comprehensive understanding of this massive puzzle we call the Universe, rejected the concept, dominant in his time, of the material ether. He did not go in the direction of the modern “mode” of explanation, of course, that of relativity theory. But his vision was nonetheless remarkable, for seeing that within the framework of a finite and evolving universe with a beginning and end—his own concept, which anticipates the modern concept—the concept of the material ether is not required. As Harry Poe aptly puts it, Edgar Poe rejected the existence of the material ether because “It spoiled the plot as an unnecessary addition.”133 Modern physics has rejected the concept of the material ether, too, but as superfluous given Einstein’s theory of gravity. Poe took the direction of spiritual ether,—a vague concept in his hands, to be sure,—not, however, for allowing gravity to work at a distance or for explaining decaying orbits or for providing light with a medium, but for the purpose of his theological and poetical view of the Universe, i.e., for the purpose of a sentient universe, i.e., for God experiencing pleasure through seemingly infinite diversity, pleasure heightened by pain.
Poe’s theological twist on the ether in particular and on the Universe in general might trouble the reader. But given the genuine debate over the fine-tuning argument among physicists in modern cosmology, can anyone be sure, looking a thousand years ahead, say, that some sort of theology will not play a more prominent role in scientific cosmology? Can anyone be so sure today that Poe’s direction was altogether wrong?
Having examined nine major theories and developments in twentieth-century science that Poe anticipated in Eureka, (and having established beyond a reasonable doubt, I believe, that we are justified in using the word “anticipated,”) the time has surely now arrived to turn to what Poe had to say about the nature of imagination, especially the educated imagination, in particular scientific imagination—we should want to know his theory. But first we have to provide an intellectual context in order to fully understand his theory, which means we have to look at what philosophers and historians of science have to say about imagination in science, from Poe’s time to the present. (In terms of enjoying Poe, this might even allow one to derive positive pleasure from a legitimate source of pain.) We shall then turn to two of the greatest scientists of all time,—real scientists, not philosophers or historians, Darwin and Einstein to be specific,—to their use of imagination in their science and what they had to say about the role of imagination in science. In the very last section an argument by analogy shall be made for the inclusion of imagination in the process of science, an argument that adds to Poe on the matter. Only then shall we turn to Poe’s theory of scientific imagination, the penultimate chapter, which shall be modernized in the chapter that follows it.
1.Letters, 650.
2.Eureka, xx.
3.Eureka, xxvi–xxvii.
4.Marshall McLuhan (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 65.
5.McGann, 107.
6.Eureka, xx, xxi, xxii.
7.According to legend, Archimedes (d. 212 B.C.) shouted “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”) when the answer suddenly came to him—after spending a long time trying to figure out the answer—on how to determine the amount of pure gold in what might be an amalgam. That Poe considered Eureka to be fundamentally a work of educated inspiration should be clear not only from what he says in the opening epistle against deduction and induction in favor of intuition, but also from what he says in favor of the discoveries of Kepler and Champollion, which fit his scheme nicely and which we shall discuss in Chapter 7.
8.P&T, 1301, 1303.
9.P&T, 1330.
10.P&T, 692.
11.P&T, 1263.
12.P&T, 1266.
13.Eureka, 121n13.
14.P&T, 1267, 1268.
15.E. Schrödinger (1935). “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik.” Naturwissenschaften 23, 807–812, 823–828, 844–849. John D. Trimmer, trans. (1980). “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (5), 328. For a good summary of the cat paradox, see John Gribbin (1999). Q is for Quantum: Particle Physics From A to Z. London: Phoenix Giant, 434.
16.Fritz Rohrlich (1983). “Facing Quantum Mechanical Reality.” Science 23, 1253.
17.Hans Reichenbach (1951). The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 189, 227. Susan Haack (1974). Deviant Logic: Some Philosophical Issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 8.
18.Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 188.
19.Quinn, 544.
20.Steven Weinberg (1992). Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 154.
21.The Big Bang theory is not to be confused with the creation of the Universe in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which is a very different concept. To think otherwise is to be guilty of gross conceptual sloppiness, more specifically presentism (reading present ideas into the past without sufficient evidence).
22.Steven Weinberg (1977). The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 159.
23.Weinberg (note 22), 4.
24.Steven Hawking (1988). A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam Books, 40.
25.Abbé G. Lemaître (1931). “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulæ.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society March 1931 (91), 489.
26.Eddington surmised that “the original radius of space was 1200 million light years,” that “this equilibrium was unstable,” that “An expansion began, slowly at first,” and that the present radius is “not less than ten times the original radius.” Sir Arthur S. Eddington (1931). “The End of the World: from the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics.” Nature March 21 (127), 447, 450.
27.G. Lemaître (1931). “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory.” Nature May 9 (127), 706. For the (almost) complete story, see John Farrell (2005). The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology. New York: Basic Books. As Mather and Boslough put it, “A letter Lemaître wrote to Nature magazine in 1931 was effectively the charter of what was to become the Big Bang theory.” John C. Mather and John Boslough (2008). The Very First Light. New York: Basic Books, 39. Mather is an astrophysicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.
28.Farrell (note 27), 136.
29.Farrell (note 27), 231.
30.Weinberg (note 22), 122.
31.Hawking (note 24), 46, 117.
32.Weinberg (note 22), 140.
33.Gribbin (note 15), 379.
34.Peter Shaver (2011). Cosmic Heritage: Evolution from the Big Bang to Conscious Life. New York: Springer, 19, 21.
35.P&T, 1276–1277.
36.P&T, 1277. Poe later in Eureka uses a variety of phrases for the same meaning, specifically, “the absolute, irrelative, unconditional Particle,” the “Particle Proper,” and the “absolute Particle Proper.” P&T, 1295, 1303, 1304.
37.P&T, 720.
38.P&T, 1314. That Poe uses the phrase “a God” was no accident and will make sense once we turn to his multiverse theory.
39.P&T, 1277, 1278.
40.P&T, 1357.
41.P&T, 1292.
42.P&T, 1304.
43.P&T, 1305. It is to be noted that the same point, specifically about infinite matter in an infinite space entailing that each particle of matter must rest “in equilibrio,” was made by the English classical scholar and theologian Richard Bentley in his letters to Isaac Newton. In his four letters in reply to Bentley, dated between December 1692 and February 1693, Newton rejected the conclusion by denying the concept of a “mathematical center,” by denying the hidden assumption “that all infinities are equal,” by denying that gravity is “essential and inherent to matter,” and by invoking the intervention of “an intelligent Agent.” H.S. Thayer, ed. (1953). Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections From His Writings. New York: Hafner Press, 46–58. For a modern discussion of the problem, see Stephen Hawking (1993). Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. New York: Bantam Books, 87–88.
44.Weinberg (note 22), 153, 154; Hawking (note 24), 173.
45.Gribbin (note 15), 119.
46.Shaver (note 34), 40. The implications of the science for Poe’s God, of course, are dire, as it means Poe’s God is gradually losing its individuality and will eventually end in heat death. What we have, then, is the ultimate murder mystery in advance. Is the death of God by misadventure, (a miscalculation on God’s part, too much dark energy, not enough dark matter,) or does God have a dark side (literally) that is responsible for the slow and agonizing killing of itself? In either case, Nietzsche’s madman was not only metaphorically but literally wrong. Thinking of the future as the present, it was not we who killed God. All of this is assuming, of course, that the science—the cosmic CSI in this case—is in. I for one do not think it is, and here is why. Given E = mc2, for all anyone knows it is possible that some of the dark energy in the Universe will turn into dark matter, enough even to eventually decrease the rate of the expansion of the Universe, possibly even to the point of halting the expansion altogether and initiating a contraction phase. This is a mere hypothesis, of course, but it does provide a glimmer of Hope in the context of Poe’s theology.
47.P&T, 1292.
48.P&T, 1295–1296, 1301, 1304.
49.P&T, 1303.
50.Alberto Cappi (1994). “Edgar Allan Poe’s Physical Cosmology.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 35, 185.
51.Cappi (note 50), 187, 189, 191, 185, 179, 188.
52.P&T, 1346, 1346–1347, 1345.
53.P&T, 1348.
54.P&T, 1356.
55.Hawking (note 43), 88.
56.Paul Davies (2006). The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? New York: Houghton Mifflin, 138, 143.
57.Paul Davies (1983). God and the New Physics. New York: Touchstone, 187–188.
58.Davies (notes 56 and 57). John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler (1986). The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Francis S. Collins (2006). The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press.
59.Weinberg (note 21). Lee Smolin (1997). The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Victor Stenger (2003). Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Richard Dawkins (2006). The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
60.P&T, 1312, 1313, 1314.
61.Hawking (note 24), 8–9.
62.Andrei Linde (1998). “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe.” Scientific American 9 (1), 99.
63.P&T, 1269–1270.
64.P&T, 1319n.
65.P&T, 1296.
66.P&T, 1290.
67.P&T, 1320.
68.P&T, 1348.
69.P&T, 1315, 1314.
70.P&T, 1282.
71.P&T, 1280.
72.P&T, 1400. Poe’s note corresponds to the end of the last paragraph in P&T, 1295, which is paragraph 96.
73.P&T, 1323.
74.P&T, 1298.
75.P&T, 1282.
76.P&T, 1301.
77.Olbers’ paper is reproduced in translation in Edward Harrison (1987). Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 223–226.
78.Halley is especially interesting here. In his paper “Of the Infinity of the Sphere of Fix’d Stars,” published in 1721 and reproduced in Harrison (note 77), 218–219, in which he deals with the paradox in question, he also argues that in a universe with a finite number of stars “the whole would be surrounded on all sides with an infinite inane [emptiness], and the superficial stars would gravitate towards those near the center, and with an accelerated motion run into them, and in process of time coalesce and unite with them into one. … But if the whole be Infinite, all the parts of it would be nearly in aequilibrio, and consequently each fixt Star, being drawn by contrary Powers, would keep its place; or move, till such time, as, from such an aeqiulibrium, it found its resting place.” This argument by Halley, or arguments like it, quite possibly played a role, along with arguments by others examined above in §II, in why Poe settled upon a contracting universe.
79.Harrison (note 77), 94.
80.Hawking (note 24), 6.
81.P&T, 1328. Poe’s formulation of the paradox is noticeably different from Olbers’, and it is unlikely that Poe ever read Olbers’ paper. As the Levines point out, the paradox is also discussed in Lecture 1 of the published version of J.P Nichol’s lecture series on the Universe, (the lecture series coincident with Poe’s lecture on the Universe,) published in 1848 as Views of Astronomy. Eureka, 150n181. Poe apparently had access to that book before he sent Eureka to press. Eureka, 146n163. Poe also had access to the transcription of the lectures published in the New York Tribune. Eureka, 162n229. In any case, Poe’s source for his understanding of Olbers’ paradox is yet to be determined.
82.Harrison (note 77), 146, 148.
83.Cappi (note 50), 187.
84.Harrison (note 77), 150, 209.
85.Shaver (note 34), 57–58.
86.Shaver (note 34), 61.
87.P&T, 1262.
88.P&T, 1329, 1330.
89.Cappi (note 50), 188.
90.Letters, 689.
91.Shaver (note 34), 61.
92.Linde (note 62), 103, 104.
93.Alan H. Guth (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. New York: Basic Books, 252, 278.
94.Steven Weinberg (2001). Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 172.
95.Eureka, xiii.
96.G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield (1983). The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 118.
97.Thayer (note 43), 17–18.
98.In Sonja Bargmann, trans. (1954). Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein. New York: Crown Publishers, 281–282. In “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905) Einstein actually only relativized time. Not that Einstein ever tried to take credit, but it was his former mathematics professor Hermann Minkowski who, in his “Space and Time” lecture (1908) which was based on the work of Einstein and Lorentz before him, relativized space and time into what he called “a kind of union of the two,” such that “Three-dimensional geometry becomes a chapter in four-dimensional physics.” In W. Perrett and G.B. Jeffery, trans. (1923). The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special and General Theory of Relativity. London: Methuen and Company, 75, 80. Minkowski died less than four months later at the age of forty-four, deprived of seeing his lecture in print, let alone of knowing the fate of his massively important concept, which physicists named after him as “Minkowski space-time,” and which now is simply “space-time.”
99.E&R, 1325–1326.
100.P&T, 1340.
101.Eureka, 157n214. Bruce A. Twarog, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, was one of the scientists that the Levines consulted.
102.Cappi (note 50), 189. It should be added, however, that Poe in Eureka did not have much of a theory of the evolution of life per se. We “perceive,” he says, “that not merely the manifestation of vitality, but its importance, consequence, and elevation of character, keep pace, very closely, with the heterogeneity, or complexity, of the animal structure.” Given Poe’s theory of the finely-tuned condensing Universe, he follows this with “the proposition that the importance of the development of the terrestrial vitality proceeds as the terrestrial condensation.” This is in accordance, he says, with the observation of “successive geological revolutions” and “what we know of the succession of animals on Earth.” But we get next to nothing by way of specific explanation for the complexity of life and its evolutionary progression. What we are given, instead, is the vague statement that “As it [Earth] has proceeded in its condensation, superior and still superior races have appeared.” Poe is not even sure if “the successive geological revolutions” merely “attended” or “immediately caused” the succession of plants and animals on Earth. At any rate, he combines the above with the “suggestion” that the successive geological revolutions were in turn caused by “successive planetary discharges from the sun,”—each a nebulous ring from which each planet evolved by a spiralling condensation,—allowing for the possibility that a further solar discharge could result in “a race both materially and spiritually superior to Man.” “These thoughts,” he adds, “impress me with all the force of truth—but I throw them out, of course, merely in their obvious character of suggestion.” P&T, 1317, 1323. All of this gives us a further reason, in addition to those examined in the previous chapter, to reject the idea that Poe was influenced (positively or otherwise) by Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. And we can certainly dispense with the idea that Poe anticipated Darwin. It is not even clear that Poe entertained the idea of the evolution of species. (In this chapter I give him the benefit of the doubt.) Although Poe uses the word “development” in reference to the “succession” of one species after another, it is not necessarily the same concept as the evolution of one species from another. To think otherwise is to read present ideas into past texts. Lyell himself, for example, the most famous geologist of his time, discussed in Chapter 3, believed in the succession of one species after another, with God creating each succession de novo. He did not become an evolutionist until Darwin gradually changed his mind post-1859. In Poe’s case, it might be more accurate to call him a saltationist than an evolutionist.
103.Daniel Orange and Gregg Stebbens (1999). Everything You Need to Know About Physics. New York: Pocket Books, 5.
104.Perrett and Jeffery (note 98), 71.
105.Bargmann (note 98), 340.
106.Gribbin (note 15), 151.
107.P&T, 1283.
108.P&T, 1354, 1355, 1291.
109.P&T, 1355.
110.Letters, 649. See also Letters, 659–660.
111.Cappi (note 50), 181n4.
112.Hawking (note 55), 97.
113.Guth (note 81), 271–272.
114.P&T, 97.
115.Thayer (note 43), 118.
116.Thayer (note 43), 54.
117.Thayer (note 43), 112–113, 114, 115, 116.
118.A useful discussion on “Newton and the Aether” is to be found in Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield (1962). The Architecture of Matter. New York: Harper & Row, 194–198. My only caveat is that they fail to mention let alone discuss Newton’s letter to Boyle.
119.See, e.g., John Losee (2001). A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 153–154.
120.The Lorentz paper is found in Perrett and Jeffery (note 98), 28. The quotation from Thomson is found in Gerald Holton (1978). The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 48.
121.Quoted in Abraham Pais (1982). “Subtle is the Lord …”: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 115.
122.Perrett and Jeffery (note 98), 38.
123.Perrett and Jeffry (note 98), 145.
124.George Gamow (1961). One Two Three … Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science. New York: Viking Press, 106.
125.Hawking (note 25), 29.
126.Bargmann (note 98), 281.
127.Gamow (note 111), 91.
128.Gamow (note 111), 90.
129.P&T, 1350.
130.P&T, 1352.
131.P&T, 1351, 1352.
132.P&T, 1354, 1355.
133.Evermore, 157.