JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is a follow-up to a post from yesterday about the transcendental/mystical science found in Edgar Allan Poe’s last work, Eureka.  Today I was looking at one of his great “Marginalia” pieces that appeared in the Democratic Review for June, 1845, called “The Power of Words”. And it seems quite literally so–that the force of (I assume) spoken words is an actual physical thing, atoms at play with others from one point to the next, ad infinitum. Poe writes: It is indeed demonstrable that every such impulse given the air, must, in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe…”

Full text of the 1845 piece here:  https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293013987718&view=1up&seq=526

• “ You are well aware that, as no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result. We moved our hands, for example, when we were dwellers on the earth, and, in so doing, we gave vibration to the atmosphere which engirdled it. This vibration was indefinitely extended, till it gave impulse to every particle of the earth’s air, which thenceforward, and for ever, was actuated by the one movement of the hand. This fact the mathematicians of our globe well knew. They made the special effects, indeed, wrought in the fluid by special impulses, the subject of exact calculation — so that it became easy to determine in what precise period an impulse of given extent would engirdle the orb, and impress (for ever) every atom of the atmosphere circumambient.”