Category: Anticipation, History of

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2803

I heard about Edgar Allan Poe’s “prose poem”,  Eureka, an Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe (1848) , and its mystical relationships to scientific bits and bobs, but not much more than that. Looking at it it must’ve looked high-inspired Outsidery back in the day, the language and created references being somewhat impenetrable, and sometimes insufferable, except that it is was a piece of highly creative writing. The book was not well-received at all when published–the public reception was terrible, and it must’ve been a blow to Poe as hr thought that this was the best work he had ever done, and ever could do.  The pity is that he would be dead at age 40 only months later. The book is terrifically mysterious and probing, theologico-sci-fi-osohpy enthrallingly not-science science, and almost the entire audience he wrote for mostly hadn’t yet been born.

• Link to the text of Eureka: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32037/32037-h/32037-h.htm

There’s an endless amount here that is interesting, if not obscure and obscured—much of what I find interesting is also heavily endowed with double-inscrutable jargon, though I think I can make out the meaning but for the words. [Caveat: that said, I’m no Poe guy whatsoever, though I do like his work, particularly the “Marginalia” series–which puts me in mind of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project–but in general I’m just a general reader of the man with no expertise whatsoever.]

To start this walkaround in the science in Poe I did a very simple word search: I looked for “Newton” (25 hits), followed by“Newtonian” (19 hits). Then came “God” (42), “particle” (23), “word” (71), “gravity (35), “love” (3), “mass” (38 ), and “soul” (20), and some others, none giving me the skeleton key I was looking for. (I haven’t read the whole book and didn’t have the time for it given that I only spend about an hour on each one of these blog posts.) I found my prize with “atom” (147 hits!) and read the appropriate sections, and that got me to where I wanted to go, or at least close to it.

It begins with a rough entry:

• “What I wish to impress upon the reader is the certainty of there arising, at once, (on withdrawal of the diffusive force, or Divine Volition,) out of the condition of the atoms as described, at innumerable points throughout the Universal sphere, innumerable agglomerations, characterized by innumerable specific differences of form, size, essential nature, and distance each from each. The development of Repulsion (Electricity) must have commenced, of course, with the very earliest particular efforts at Unity, and must have proceeded constantly in the ratio of Coalescence—that is to say, in that of Condensation, or, again, of Heterogeneity”
• “Thus the two Principles Proper, Attraction and Repulsion—the Material and the Spiritual—accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship, forever. Thus The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand.”–pg 80

Poe then goes on to describe the formation of the Solar System (which he estimates to the limits of the revolutions of newly-discovered Neptune to be “6 thousand million miles” which is very close to being correct) as the result of the meeting of two not-diametrically-opposed atoms, which nearly join together, and start spinning around each other, joined by other atoms, and so on, until an enormous uncohesive mass is form after which a collapsing takes place to form the planets as we know them. 

•  “For ages, this mass of matter has been undergoing condensation, until at length it has become reduced into the bulk we imagine; having proceeded gradually, of course, from its atomic and imperceptible state, into what we understand of visible, palpable, or otherwise appreciable nebulosity….”–pg 85

This is all some pretty interesting thinking for a man with no science background, sitting in a room.

We did get to “Ultimately individual consciousnesses will collapse back into a similar single mass, a “final ingathering” where the “myriads of individual Intelligences become blended”, (pg 132) which does have a sort of Black Hole appeal to it.

And then backtracking a bit I came upon this, 

• “Let us now endeavor to conceive what Matter must be, when, or if, in its absolute extreme of Simplicity. Here the Reason flies at once to Imparticularity—to a particle—to one particle—a particle of one kind—of one character—of one nature—of one size—of one form—a particle, therefore, “without form and void”—a particle positively a particle at all points—a particle absolutely unique, individual, undivided, and not indivisible only because He who created it, by dint of his Will, can by an infinitely less energetic exercise of the same Will, as a matter of course, divide it. “–page 30

I then came to what I think I was looking for, to a sort of Big Bang, or a cosmology that at least entertains some Big Bang bits:

• “The assumption of absolute Unity in the primordial Particle includes that of infinite divisibility. Let us conceive the Particle, then, to be only not totally exhausted by diffusion into Space. From the one Particle, as a centre, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically—in all directions—to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space—a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.”(pg 31)

Lemaitre is still far off in the distance at this point, as are Gamow/Alpher/Herman–none would be born for another 50-60 years or so. But here we have some very probing thinking in an area that has something to it,  that can call on the prequel to the Big Bang, all rolled up in an enormous cosmotheology by a poet/writer/editor back in the year of revolutions, 1848.

Poe knows that he is way out on a limb here, I imagine, and perhaps he was even being heretical: “I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical—of the Material and Spiritual Universe:—of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny. I shall be so rash, moreover, as to challenge the conclusions, and thus, in effect, to question the sagacity, of many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men.”

Here’s where the “heresy” part might come into play, with endless god-beings in infinite space, even before existence existed

• “…a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space”) who wades through eternity absolutely compacted and expanded, I guess ( “…a Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion” ). And it is in that compacted part that all beings are created in their consciousnesses, and that eventually all of that will be molded into one big ball of being (“Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.”)

And now off to the finishing bits, the closing paragraphs on p 143:

• “for pleasure and for pain:—but the general sum of the sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself. These creatures are all, too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.”

I hope I haven’t done a disservice here to Mr. Poe, or that I’ve gotten things terribly wrong–this is how it reads to me. Poe’s writing is dense and light at the same time, even transcendental–and so to try and nail a piece of writing like this to the floor it hovers above may be the entirely wrong thing to do.