the thought of a thought

7/24/2019 The Thought of a Thought

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The Thought of a Thought - Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is best known as a literary figure, a writer of short storiesand poetry, but a surprising amount of his thought was devoted to natural science, withwhich he seems to have had a love-hate relationship, as illustrated by his "Sonnet toScience"

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart...?

In this attitude Poe is somewhat reminiscent of Goethe (1749-1832), who spent so muchtime and effort on his own private theory of colorsand the indivisibility of light, trying tooverthrow the teachings of Newton (1642-1727). Indeed, Goethe himself is said to havevalued his "scientific" work more highly than his literary creations (an opinion not sharedby anyone else). Another artist who struggled with the emerging scientific culture wasWilliam Blake (1757-1827), who wrote

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rouseau,Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain...The Atoms of DemocritusAnd Newton's Particles of lightAre sands upon the red sea shoreWhere Israel's tents do shine so bright.

The fascination and ambivalence these men felt toward Newton, the personification ofScience, is well illustrated by Blake's famous painting "The Ancient of Days", showing akneeling God-like/Satanic figure spanning the darkness with a compass of light.Remarkably, Blake's illustration of "Newton" is essentially the same figure, in the samepose, viewed from the side.


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This gives some idea of how great, throughout the 19th century, was the prestige ofNewton as the discoverer of the only true laws of nature, the indisputable confidant ofGod, especially among intellectuals, including poets and artists as well as scientists. It'snot surprising that many creative and independent men felt, as Blake put it, that

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.I will not reason and compare, my business is to create.

We may also remember Laplace's remark thatNewton was the greated genius who ever existed and the luckiest, because we cannot find morethan once a system of the world to establish.

What does this leave for his successors? Since Newton associated every action with a re-action, it's only fitting that there was a reaction against the scientific Enlightenment of the18th century, leading to the Romanticism of the 19th century. One characteristic of those

who rebelled against the Newtonian approach to knowledge and understanding was (andstill is) an antipathy for mathematics. Prior to the scientific revolution, it was possible forscholastic philosophers and thinkers of all kinds to engage with the great questions ofnatural science in the verbal and teleological tradition, but Galileo and Newtoneffectively put an end to this. Among serious thinkers with little or no inclination towardmathematics, imagine how discouraging must be the famous words of Galileo:

Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the universe - which stands continuously open toour gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language andinterpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics... withoutwhich it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these one is wanderingabout in a dark labyrinth.

In response, men like Blake and Goethe reply that mathematics is merely "narrow

reasoning and comparing", and does not constitute comprehension. As Blake wrote,"...May God us keep / from single vision and Newton's sleep!" This was a sentiment withwhich Poe sympathized. Ironically, despite (or perhaps because of) their commonstandings as scientific dilettantes, Poe disparaged Goethe as insufficiently analytical. Incontrast, Poe often regarded himself as a paragon of rational thought (like his detectiveDupin), but he seems to have held a characteristically Romantic view of rationality,seeking to apply an artistic esthetic as the ultimate criterion for "scientific" truth. Forexample, he acknowledged the seemingly unassailable validity of Newton's mechanicsand his law of universal gravitation, but he felt deeply that a true understanding of thesethings was lacking in the mathematical Newtonian world view. In various writings Poe


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presented (often surreptitiously) his own thoughts on natural science, culminating in oneof his final major works, the prose poem called "Eureka" (1848), in which he ostensiblydescribes what we might call his Theory of Everything.

It's easy to question whether Poe was really serious about the scientific (or quasi-scientific) ideas that are expressed in Eureka and other works. A plausible case can bemade that he was perpetrating a gigantic intellectual hoax (similar to Sokal's hoax of the1990's). In support of this point of view we could, for example, note that Poe had at timesreferred unflatteringly to Alexander von Humboldt, the world-famous scientists to whomEureka is dedicated "with profound respect". Was Poe just pulling our legs? It's certainlypossible, but we shouldn't overlook the fact that Poe seems to have had a love-haterelationship with just about everything and everyone. For example, his reviewscharacteristically alternated wildly between praise and scorn, between adoration andcontempt. Poe's style was well-enough known to be an object of parody; one satiricalimitation of his reviews had him calling a book "a mass of insufferable trash, without one

redeeming quality" and then "one of the most delightful books". After reading Poe's(authentic) review of her poetry, Elizabeth Barrett was appalled by "the two extremes oflaudation and reprehension, folded in on one another... you would have thought it hadbeen written by a friend and a foe, each stark mad with love and hate, and writing thealternate passages". Perceptively she speculated that it seems as if the reviewer wasexperiencing some kind of "crisis". Similarly his aggressive attacks on Longfellow wereaccompanied by claims that Poe had a very high admiration for him. The same pattern isto be seen in Poe's personal letters, such as to his foster father John Allen, in which healternates between "insolence and cravenness" (as his biographer Kenneth Silvermannicely expressed it.) For this reason, it's difficult to confidently judge what - if anything -Poe meant to be taken seriously, and what was simply a hoax. Possibly he had ideas

which he wished would be taken seriously, but as a defense mechanism he presentedthem always in a form that could plausibly be sloughed off as a joke.Examples of Poe's "scientific" ideas can be found in many of his short stories. In fact,some of those stories seem to be little more than literary pretexts for the presentation ofabstract notions that Poe wished to express, but knew would be ridiculed if he presentedthem as serious scientific ideas. For example, the story "Mesmeric Revelation" consistsof the words of a dying man who has been placed in a trance to ease his suffering, and inthis state he is questioned by his attendant. The mesmerized man discourses on"unparticled matter", a medium thinner and more tenuous than the "luminiferous ether"permeating all of space. He suggests that thought (as opposed to mind) consists ofmotions of this unparticled matter. He also discusses the (then) current theory that the

luminiferous ether exerts a drag on comets and accounts for anomalies in their orbitalmotions. Interestingly, several years later Poe discussed this very same subject (in thefirst person) in Eureka, but by that time he had learned that more careful analyses of thecomet orbits had eliminated the "anomalies", so there was no longer any justification forthe ether. (Would he have made this correction if he had simply been joking all along?)Another story into which Poe inserted his scientific ideas is "The Unparalleled Adventureof One Hans Pfaall", which facetiously describes a journey from the Earth to the Moon ina hot air balloon, and observations of the Moon made from the Earth by means of agigantic telescope. At the end of this tale, Poe added five pages of "Notes" in which heostensibly drops the pretense and discusses the obvious fallacies of such stories. Again hereviews topics that he was later to include in "Eureka", such as the astronomical


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observations of Lord Ross, and various other points of astronomy, buoyancy, optics, andso on. He concludes by scolding all previous authors of such "moon trip" stories for being"utterly uninformed in respect to astronomy", and claims that "Hans Pfaall" has at least a

semblance of verisimilitude (unlike all other such stories that have appeared), and that itrepresents a sound application of scientific principles "so far as the whimsical nature ofthe subject would permit".In his famous story "Descent into the Maelstrom" Poe includes remarks on Archimedesand fluid dynamics (e.g., the flow of fluids past spheres and cylinders), and it isn'tsurprising that Archimedes' famous exclamation of discovery would become the title ofPoe's later Theory of Everything. Interestingly, we find references to the mythical MareTenebrarum (Sea of Darkness) described by the mysterious Nubian geographer PtolemyHephestion repeated not only in "Maelstrom" and "Eureka", but also in "Eleonora","Mellonta Tauta", and "Berenice". In his story "The Power of Words" we find adiscussion of Laplacian determinism and the ether as the "medium of creation". The story

"Three Sundays in a Week" gives an amusing look at the relativity of time under theinfluence of motion, and it's easy to imagine Henri Poincare reading Poe, who was almostmore popular in France than in America at the end of the 19th century.One of the most systematic efforts of Poe to discuss technological and scientific ideaswas in the story "1002nd Tale of Scheherazade", which consists of a series of seeminglyincredible claims substantiated by footnotes providing the scientific basis. In these notesPoe has occasion to discuss petrified forests, phosphorescent fungus, the maximum speedof travel achieved by humans up to that time (71 miles per hour in a train), chess-playingautomatons, Babage's calculating machine, electrolysis, platinum wires with a diameterof 1/18000 of an inch (used in telescopes), the frequency of violet light (900,000,000cycles per second) as determined by Newton, voltaic piles, the telegraph, optical

experiments, the Daguerreotype, the speed of light (which he gives as 167,000 miles persecond, the same value he quotes in Eureka), the parallax observations of the star 61Cygni (which he also discusses in Eureka), Lord Ross' observations of stars millions oflight years away (which he also mentions in Eureka), and so on.Beginning in 1844 Poe wrote a series of articles which were published under the title of"Marginalia", consisting of a fascinating compilation of notes he had taken on varioussubjects. Some are no more than epigrams ("I make no exception, even in Dante's favor: -the only thing well said of Purgatory is that a man may go farther and fare worse"),whereas others are extensive discussions of literary, social, or scientific matters. Thesearticles contain some remarkable passages that seem to anticipate important scientificideas of later generations. For example, consider his appraisal of time, which could easily

have suggested the operational definition of time put forward by Henri Poincare (1854-1912) about 50 years later (in France, where Poe was widely read), leading the way tospecial relativity:

We appreciate time by events alone. For this reason we define time (somewhat improperly) as thesuccession of events; but the fact itself--that events are our sole means of appreciating time--[leads to] the erroneous idea that events are time--that the more numerous the events, the longerthe time; and the converse. This erroneous idea [we would] absolutely entertain in all cases, butfor our practical means of correcting the impression--such as clocks, and the movements of theheavenly bodies--whose revolutions, after all, we only assumeto be regular.

This is a remarkable passage, not only for its grasp of the operational meaning of time,but also for the observation that we only assume(or perhaps we should say define) themotions of clocks and the planet's, etc., to be regular. In effect, Poe has understood that


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our "uniform measure" of time is really just the largest and most consistent equivalenceclass of mutually uniform sequences of similar events. Even today Poe's appreciation ofthis point would be considered sophisticated. He goes on to make the analogous

observations about space - indeed he seems always to have noted the interchangeabilityof time and space, going so far in "Eureka" as to assert that "Space and Duration areone". Naturally we shouldn't credit Poe for the spacetime of Poincare, Einstein andMinkowski, but it is nevertheless an interesting premonition, and, as noted above, Poewas widely read in Europe, especially France, where Poincare quite likely would haveencountered some of his writings.Poe was born in Boston in 1809. His natural parents, Elizabeth (Arnold) and David Poe,were both actors, but Edgar and his older brother and younger sister were orphaned bythe age of two, and were split up and sent to live with separate foster-families. Edgar wastaken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. When Edgar was 6 theAllan's moved to England, and Edgar attended a boarding school in London until he was

11, when the family moved back to Virginia. At the age of 17 Edgar enrolled at theUniversity of Virginia, where he was one of the top students academically, but he took todrinking and gambling, and was forced to leave after just one year. By this time hisfoster-mother had died, and John Allan was not interested in having anything more to dowith Edgar. Back in Boston, Edgar tried unsuccessfully to find a job, and then enlisted inthe Army under an assumed name (Edgar A. Perry). While stationed at FortIndependence in Boston Harbor he managed to get a book of his poems published,anonymously. About this time he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and wasdischarged from the Army in 1829, and eventually went to live with his aunt, Maria (Poe)Clemm and her daughter Virginia, who he later married. During this time he publishedanother book of poetry.

In the summer of 1830 Edgar applied and was accepted at West Point, but he begandrinking and gambling again, and was court-martialed early in 1831. (While at WestPoint he encouraged the belief that he was a descendant of Benedict Arnold.) By this timeJohn Allan had completely disowned him (refusing even to answer the letters that Edgaraddressed to "Dear Pa"), so Edgar moved back in with his Aunt Clemm. In 1833 he wona $50 prize for a short story he submitted to a Baltimore magazine, and this led to jobswriting for various periodicals. The prize story was "MS. Found In A Bottle". (This motifseems to have had a particular appeal to Poe, because 15 years later he began his finalwork, "Eureka", with another "manuscript found in a bottle".)About this time it's possible that Edgar took up the use of opium in the form of laudanum,following in the footsteps of other artists of that period, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(1772-1834), Elizabeth Barrett, and others. Laudanum was widely available in thosedays, prescribed for all manner of afflictions. Coleridge had become addicted to opiumafter it had been prescribed to help him cope with a serious illness as a young man, andhe remained addicted to the drug for the rest of his life, despite his efforts to get free of it.His great masterpiece, "Kubla Khan", on the subject of poetic inspiration - a subject onwhich Poe also wrote - was composed as he was emerging from an opium dream.(Incidentally, an attempt by the rulers of China to shut down the opium trade led to thewar of 1839-1842 between Great Britain and China.) The extent of Poe's use of opium isnot know, although we do know that Poe attempted suicide in 1848 by taking an overdoseof laudanum.Throughout the years from 1833 to 1848 Poe continued to write short stories, literary


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criticism, and poetry, inter-mixed with nervous breakdowns and alcoholic episodes. Hislast book was "Eureka", published in 1848, dedicated "with very profound respect" toAlexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the world-famous German naturalist. In late

September 1849 Poe had another alcoholic relapse, and his whereabouts during the fivedays from September 28 to October 3 are unknown. On the 3rd a doctor was asked tocome to a saloon in Baltimore, near a place where Poe had been found lying unconsciousin the sidewalk. He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died on October7 after days of delirium and tremors. Reportedly his last words were "Lord help my poorsoul".Eureka itself is a fascinating book. Poe called it a "prose poem", though he seems to havebeen conflicted about what it really was, and what he should call it. Poe certainly gaveevidence throughout his career of being able to summon enough critical judgement toconstruct viable works, even in his worst state of deterioration. His romantic (not to saykooky) side may have believed that Eureka contained The Answers to all The Big

Questions, the ultimate scientific theory of everything, but the sober editor in him surelyrecognized that what he had written was nothing like a scientific work - certainly not inthe Newtonian mathematical sense - and would never be taken seriously by the scientificcommunity. Accordingly, he prefaced the book with the somewhat awkward disclaimer"What I here propound is true...nevertheless, it is as a Poem only that I wish this work tobe judged...". He later wrote in a desperate letter to his dear Aunt Maria that he no longerhad any will to live, because since completing Eureka he felt he could accomplishnothing more. If this was all part of a hoax, and he regarded Eureka as nothing more thana joke and a demonstration of how gullible people are, then it was a remarkably elaborateand well-played joke. We'll review Eureka as it stands. Regardless of how seriously Poeintended it, it contains some very interesting passages and suggestions of ideas that came

into mainstream science only decades after Poe's death.Poe sums up the basic premise of his world view with the words

In the original unity of the first things lies the secondary cause of all things, with the germ of theirinevitable annihilation.

This brings to mind the youthful poems of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), with whom Poehad much in common, including their peculiar poetic symbolism, their lyricism, and theirpublic readings, not to mention their early deaths due to alcoholism:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees, is my destroyer.

Poe begins Eureka (whose title is obviously from Archimedes' exclamation in his bathtub when he discovered the law of buoyancy) by directing the reader's attention to

...a remarkable letter, which appears to have been found corked in a bottle and floating on the

Mare Tenebrarum... The date of this letter, I confess, surprises me even more particularly than itscontents; for it seems to have been written in the year two thousand eight hundred and forty-eight.

In other word, the manuscript in the bottle is dated 2848 AD, exactly 1000 years in Poe'sfuture. (Poe is generally credited as the originator of modern science fiction, in additionto being the originator of the modern detective story in such works as "Murders in theRue Morgue".) In the manuscript, an observer of the distant future comments satiricallyon the foolish philosophical notions of the past, especially the idea that there are only tworoads to truth, namely, the a priorideductive method of Aries Tottle and the a posterioriinductive method of Hog, i.e., the Baconian method. (We're asked to make allowancesfor the possibility that the historical names may have been corrupted over the centuries).Since Aries is the Ram, this dichotomy is presented as a dialectic between the Hog and


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the Ram. The point made by the futuristic observer is that both of these methodsapproach truth by means of a definitepathfrom here to there, either from the general tothe specific or from the specific to the general, whereas he contends that all real

knowledge is acquired by intuitive leapswhich are neither inductive nor deductive.This is intriguing, because it anticipates the intuitionist approach to mathematics andlogic espoused by L. E. J. Brouwer, Poincare, and others of a later generation. IndeedPoe's futuristic observer goes on to explicitly discuss axiomatics and the basic principlesof reasoning, even challenging what Aries Tottle called the Law of the Excluded Middle,i.e., the proposition that exactly one of [A] and [not A] must be true. This was preciselythe point of Brouwer's attack on formalism and logicism at the beginning of the nextcentury. But Poe (or his futuristic spokesman) goes even further and declares that twocontradictory statements can bothbe true, or at least that we have no basis for an axiomasserting that they cannot. He approvingly quotes John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) as sayingthat our ability or inability to conceive of something is in no case to be taken as a

criterion of truth. Alas this profound assertion turns out to be the only insight of Mill'sthat Poe (or his spokesman) can endorse. The letter pokes fun at Mill by implying that hewas just parroting the ideas of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832, almost exactlycontemporaneous with Goethe), who was Mill's teacher. Bentham was a proponent ofUtilitarianism, and as such was a natural object of Poe's derision. (He is mentioned morethan once in Poe's writings.) Interestingly, although highly regarded in his own time, themodern verdict on Mill is that "his mind was essentially illogical, and his philosophy wasnotable mainly for its intricate sophistry". (See R. P. Anschutz's "Philosophy of J. S.Mill", 1953.)Regarding Poe's suggestion that contradictory things might both be true, one wonders ifWalt Whitman (1819-1892) might have been influenced by those comments when he

later wrote that he was content even proud - to be large enough to entail contradictions.Whitman too was part of the on-going reaction against Newtonian science (see his "WhenI Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"), as was his almost exact contemporary, HermanMelville (1819-1891), whose imagery for poems like "The Portent", not to mention theprose poem "Moby Dick", owes much to Poe's influence.The letter from the future concludes with an appreciation of Johannes Kepler, who is saidto have essentially just guessedhis three laws of planetary motion in leaps of pureimagination. He is compared with Champollion (1790-1832), the decipherer of ancientEgyptian hieroglyphics, and we are challenged to decide whether such feats areaccomplished by inductive or deductive reasoning. The final words of the letter quoteKepler's famous exclamation when he discovered his third law

I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readerswhen God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen thegolden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my sacred fury.

The sense of poetic unity that Poe regarded so highly in literature is evident here in the"Egyptian connection" between Champollion and Kepler's quote. Poe's literary esthetic isalso apparent in the stress he placed on the individualityof the universe, just as he arguedthat a short story must be grasped as an individual entity. (It's interesting how accuratelythe futuristic letter-writer knew the names of Champollion and Kepler, in contrast withhis confusion as to the names of Aristotle and Bacon.)Poe then takes up the subject of infinity, arguing that the word does not actually expressan idea, but only an effortat one. The word "infinity", he says, represents but the thought


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of a thought. Ironically he echoes Aristotle here, who likewise maintained that thecompleted infinity was inconceivable, and that the word "infinity" is to be understoodsimply as signifying the tendency to endlessness, a process without end. We also note

that Poe denies the axiom of infinity on grounds that he earlier agreed (with Mill) wereinvalid, namely, the grounds of inconceivability. He argues that we cannot actuallyconceive of infinity, and therefore it must not be admitted. Furthermore, in consideringwhether the Universe itself may be finite or infinite, and whether conceiving of one ofthese alternatives is more impossible than conceiving of the other, he says it makes nosense to talk about more or less impossible tasks, because "a task is either possible or notpossible, there are no gradations". Readers would be more likely to accept thisuncritically if Poe had not, just a few pages earlier, argued so vehemently that mutuallycontradictory propositions cannot be ruled out a priori. Perhaps his most persuasiveremark on the problem of infinity is that the Deity has not designed it to be solved.Poe draws a distinction between what he calls the universe of stars and the universe of

space, and he borrows Pascal's description in saying that the universe proper (by whichPoe means the universe of space) is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whosecircumference is nowhere. The universe of stars, Poe contends, is necessarily finite, andall matter must once have been compressed into a single individual point. Then at someepoch God caused this point to radiate a huge (but finite) number of discrete atoms inspherical waves emanating outward from the central point. He also believes that thematter must be distributed homogeneously, and he spends considerable time trying toreconcile how all matter can emanate from a central point and yet be distributeduniformly. He seems very pleased to see a way - which he believes to be the uniqueway -for this to happen. He reasons that the outermost shell of particles must have been emittedwith the greatest "force" (which is why they are outermost), and he guesses that the force

must have been proportional to the square of the shell's radius. He also asserts that thenumber of particles in each shell is directly proportional to the force with which the shellwas emanated. As a result, the number of particles at any given radius from the center isproportional to the square of the radius. Since the surface area of a sphere goes as thesquare of the radius, he argues that this gives uniform density of particles throughoutspace. Poe further explains that the irradiation of all matter from the original onenessmust inevitably be reversed, and all the atoms of the universe will coalesce back intooneness. The similarity is obvious between Poe's vision and 20th century ideas about acosmological "Big Bang" from a single quantum fluctuation, producing a finite butunbounded homogeneous universe.In formulating his geometrical theory of the Universe, Poe was evidently was groping for

a model such as is provided by the expanding surface of a sphere, but doesn't seem tohave availed himself of this model. As a result he is forced later to address a possibleobjection to his theory, namely, that the outermost shell has nothing in front of it, andrepresents an asymmetry. He could have avoided this by using a closed-surface model,but instead he argues ingeniously (if not entirely persuasively) that the natural principlesof action are not applicable to the boundary, because that is by definition the demarcationof the limits of the Universe in which the principles apply. We might charitably allowthat Poe intuited the existence of a model of perfectly homogeneous and symmetricalexpansion, without boundary, even though he wasn't able to explicitly conceive of it. Poe's explanation for the Newtonian inverse square law of gravitation was essentially justto regard the natural tendency for atoms to return to the center as a reaction to the force


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that propelled them to their present radial distance from the center, which (recall) he hasdecided must be proportional to the square of the radial distance. He then argues, withimperfect clarity, that by running the process in reverse, the reaction force tending to

impel atoms back toward the center is the inverse of the original outward force, andhence is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. With some effort we mightcharitably be able to construe this as an attempt to apply Gauss' law, showing thatconservation of "charge" requires the force of gravity to fall off in inverse proportion tothe surface area. However, Poe's verbal argument seems to hang on using the word"inverse" in two distinct senses, one meaning a reversal of direction, and the othermeaning the reciprocal of a value. In addition, he argues unpersuasively that a generaltendency toward the original center of mass (so to speak) is sufficient to imply universalmutual gravitation between every pair of atoms. (He is on much firmer ground when helater argues the converse, i.e., that mutual attraction between every pair of particles in aspherical cloud has the effect of drawing each atom toward the center.) It's also

interesting to notice again that Poe's notion of each particle's tendency to "return to whereit belongs" is distinctly Aristotlean.In a more interesting direction, Poe re-interprets Newton's law of gravitation by placing iton a discrete basis, saying that the force of each atom toward every other atom isinversely proportional to the distance between them. Thus he eliminates the continuousmass variable, and makes gravity a discrete force between identical unit atoms. Thenotion of atomism dates back to Leucippus and Democritus (c. 450 BC), and wasdiscussed (and rejected) by Aristotle (384-322 BC). It was taken up again by Epicurus(341-270 BC), whose ideas have come down to us in the form of the long poem "DeRerum Natura" (On the Nature of Things) by the Latin Poet Lucretius (c. 50 BC).Subsequently the authority of Aristotle was sufficient to keep atomism out of the

mainstream of philosophical thought for over sixteen centuries. Atomism was onlyrevived in modern times by Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and later by John Dalton (1766-1844). Poe makes no mention of Dalton, but he does allude at one point to "the trueEpicurean atoms", so it seems that his inspiration may have been the earlier sources.Nevertheless, the atomistic view was not widely accepted in the scientific communityuntil the 20th century (and was vigorously rejected by the likes of Ernst Mach (1838-1916)), so Poe was certainly ahead of his time by basing his world view so unequivocallyon atomism. Also, the atomistic structure enabled Poe to make the modern-soundingclaim that the Universe is established on a purely geometrical basis, involving onlydiscrete distances and their relations. (Oddly enough, Poe never mentions Pythagoras.)He even asserts that matter is nothing other than conceptual placeholders for the relations,

suggesting that the relations themselves are the primary ontological entities.Incidentally, when Poe refers to "atoms", it seems he is referring to what we would callsub-atomic elementary particles, such as electrons and protons. He does, however,decline to claim that even these are indivisible. He invokes the principle of simplicity tosuggest that the particles must be of one kind, of one nature, yet each an individual entity,and undivided, although notindivisible

...only because He who created it [i.e., divided the original oneness], by dint of his Will, can by aninfinitely less energetic exercise of the same Will, as a matter of course, divide it.

Poe's insistence on the individuality of the elementary particles seems not entirelyconsistent with the interchangeability of particles in quantum mechanics, but there iscertainly a sense in which our modern elementary particles are both identical and


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individual, so we can credit Poe with focusing attention on this subtle issue.Even more interesting is Poe's intuition that the variety of structure and forms which weobserve in the configurations of matter requires some force of repulsion, "a separate

something... to prevent proximate atoms from lapsing at once... into absolute onenessamong themselves". Indeed the question of what keeps the electron and proton of ahydrogen atom separate, when their mutual attraction (and the radiation of orbital energy)ought to cause them to immediately collapse into each other, was a puzzle that occupiedphysicists such as Neils Bohr (1885-1962) in the early 20th century. Even if we "solve"this problem by postulating a minimal quantum "orbit", we still must ask what preventsall the electrons in an atom from occupying the same orbital state, i.e., how can weaccount for the variety of atomic structure, and for the chemical interactions betweenatoms? The modern answers to these questions involve the quantization of energy statesof an atom, along with Wolfgang Pauli's (1900-1958) exclusion principle, according towhich two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state. This principle alone accounts

for the intricate valence shell structure of atoms, necessary for all the variety ofsubstances and chemical interactions that we observe in nature. These are deep waters,and perhaps we can understand Poe when he says

The design of the repulsion - the necessity for its existence - I have endeavored to show, but fromall attempt at investigating its nature have religiously abstained; this on account of an intuitiveconviction that the principle at issue is strictly spiritual - lies in a recess impervious to our presentunderstanding - lies involved in what now - in our human state - is not to be considered - in aconsideration of Spirit in itself. I feel, in a word, that here the God has interposed, and here only,because here and here only the knot demanded the interposition of the God.

In general Poe seeks to identify all attraction (the tendency to return to unity) as gravity,and all repulsion as what he called electricity, in which he included the phenomena ofmagnetism and also heat. But he was surely aware that magnetism is bi-polar, i.e., both

attractive and repulsive, and the same is true for electrostatic forces. Conversely, thetendency of bosons to occupy the same quantum state - making lasers possible - could beregarded as an attractive force. It seems that, in order to make any sense of Poe'sdiscussion, we must make some allowances for his qualitative classification of forces andeffects, at least when trying to place them in correspondence with the elements of moderntheories. For example, he says

The amount of electricity.. of two bodies [i.e., the electrical force between them] is proportional tothe difference between the respective sums of atoms of which the bodies are composed.

which makes sense, and can actually be construed as (more or less) true in commonsituations, provided we allow the word "atoms" to signify electrons, because mostmanifestations of electrostatic force that we observe are due to an imbalance of electrons.

Of course, to make the sums come out correctly in general we need to account for therelative number of positive charges, as well as the effects of the interacting valenceshells. As Poe says, "Man neither knows, nor employs, a force sufficient to bring twoatoms into contact" - at least until the first man-made fusion reactions in the 1950's. Poealso claimed that ultimately the force of gravity must overwhelm the repulsive forcesbetween atoms, which brings to mind the process of gravitational collapse involved in themodern stellar model of the progression from white dwarfs to neutron stars to "blackholes", finally overcoming the exclusion principle.One of the most intriguing intuitions in Poe's "Eureka" is his identification of electricityand magnetism with light. He says

To electricity... we may not be wrong in referring the various physical appearances of light, heat,


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and magnetism.

This is impressive because it wasn't until a generation later that James Clerk Maxwell(1831-1879) unified optics with electromagnetism by suggesting that light is an

electromagnetic wave, and it wasn't until 1905 that Albert Einstein (1879-1955) showedhow magnetism is really just electricity viewed from a different frame of reference.(Incidentally, numerologists have made much of the fact that Newton was born the sameyear Galileo died, making allowances for calendar differences, but it seems to be lesscommonly remarked that Einstein was born the same year Maxwell died.)Another interesting parallel between Poe's ideas and modern theories is the dichotomybetween gravity (attraction, body, material) on the one hand, and the multitudinousphenomena of electricity, magnetism, heat, light, etc. (repulsion, soul, spiritual), on theother. This corresponds to the dichotomy in modern physics between gravitation as aphenomena of spacetime itself - i.e., the left hand side of Einstein's field equations - andall the remaining forces and entities of nature, which we collectively group on the "right

hand side" of Einstein's field equations.Next Poe defends his thesis that the material of the universe of atoms is actually a finitespherical cloud of particles rather than an infinite uniform expanse of particles. Hisargument is that if the cloud of particles extended infinitely in all directions, there wouldbe infinitely many material particles in all directions surrounding any given particle, soit's resulting direction of forced motion would be indeterminate. He says there can be nodifference in magnitude between two infinite numbers, so the forces of attraction on eachparticle would be balanced, and nothing would ever move. This is interesting because it'sessentially the same argument that Newton made (in a letter to Bentley) in favor of aninfinite static universe. However, according to Newtonian theory the gravitationalpotential goes as 1/r, so the potential at any point in a uniformly distributed infinite cloud

of particles would be infinite. This is now recognized as a fatal flaw in simplisticNewtonian cosmologies, and it seems fair to say that, on this point, the non-mathematicalromantic (Poe) saw more clearly than Newton himself. (On the other hand, from a strictlymathematical standpoint, Poe's remark about all infinities being equal might bechallenged by Georg Cantor (1845-1918) in light of his notion of cardinalities.)In the next section Poe gives a flowing description of the nebular hypothesis for theformation of the solar system. This was originally put forward by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), combining Newtonian mechanics with Descartes idea of a vortex, and it wasfurther elaborated by Pierre Laplace (1749-1827). Ironically, Poe's futuristic letter writerheaps derision on Kant earlier in "Eureka" (changing the K in Kant to a C), and yet this isthe cosmology that Poe finds most plausible. Perhaps he attributed it entirely to Laplace,

who he seems to have regarded as an imaginative speculator akin to Kepler. In any case,Poe does not seem to be aware of the relatively slow rotation rate of the Sun, and thedifficulty this poses for the nebular hypothesis.Throughout "Eureka" Poe notes (correctly) several astronomical facts, such as that theMoon's orbital and rotational motion are gravitationally linked (explaining why only oneface is ever visible from Earth), that the rotating planets are actually spheroids, bulging attheir equators due to their rotation, and that the center of the Sun is not exactly the inertialcenter of the solar system. He also says (incorrectly) that the Moon must be slightly self-luminous, because it is faintly visible even when the near face is in shadow. In additionhe offers some remarkably Velikovskian speculations about how the formation of theplanet Venus might have affected life on Earth in the distant past, referring specifically to


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the ultra-tropical vegetation found on the Melville islands. From this outlandish topic heimmediately switches to a subject that is actually of scientific interest today. He says,matter-of-factly,

...we know that there exist non-luminous suns - that is to say, suns whose existence we determinethrough the movements of others, but whose luminosity is not sufficient to impress us.

He doesn't elaborate on what tell-tale "movements" he is referring to, but presumably itwas the movements of the visible components of binary star systems. (The relativemotions of visiblecomponents were first observed by Hershel in 1803.) The only othermotion he could conceivably have meant is the rotation of the galaxies, which even todaypresents a puzzle to astronomers and physicists, because the amount of visible matterseems insufficient to hold them together given their observed rotation rates. This isregarded as evidence for a large amount of "dark matter" in galaxies, which goes part ofthe way toward putting the mass density of the universe near the critical point.However, Poe explicitly rejects the suggestion of J. Fourrier (1768-1830) and J. H.

Madler that the galaxy is rotating about a supermassive center, because he conceives ofour galaxy (and all others) as being roughly spherical, and he prefers the idea of inwardconvergence rather than rotation. He also challenges the possibility that any evidence ofsuch rotation, with a period of more than 100 million years, could have been detectedover the brief time of historical observations. It's remarkable that Poe, writing in 1848,was knowledgeable of Madler's work in this area, since it was only in 1848 that Madlerthough he had found a general motion about a center of gravity in the Pleiades, whichPoe specifically mentions. He must have been writing about these astronomicaldiscoveries as they appeared in current periodicals. In any case, Poe's skepticism aboutMadler's alleged discovery turned out to be justified, because subsequent observationsshowed that Madler had been misled by the effects of parallax due to the Sun's own

motions. On the other hand, it is now accepted that many galaxies, including the MilkyWay, are disk/spiral-shaped, and do indeed rotate about their centers, with periods ofhundreds of millions of years. Also, the "reveries" of Fourrier about a supermassive bodyat the center of the galaxy, which Poe thought hardly even "worth a sneer", have latelybeen given credence, and it is considered quite possible that a huge gravitationallycollapsed conglomeration of stars (possibly a black hole) lies at the center of manygalaxies.One striking aspect of Poe's review of astronomy is his apparent conviction that theobjects which had formerly been discerned only as hazy "nebulae" are, in fact, othergalaxies, similar to the Milky Way galaxy in which our Sun resides.

The clusters...are merely what we have been in the practice of designating "nebulae" - and of these"nebulae", one is of paramount interest to mankind. I allude to the Galaxy, or Milky Way... TheGalaxy, let me repeat, is but one of the clusters which I have been describing - but one of the mis-called "nebulae" revealed to us... as faint hazy spots in various quarters of the sky. We have noreason to suppose the Milky Way really more extensive than the least of these "nebulae".

These comments are remarkable, considering they were written in 1848, because onetypically finds in modern astronomy books the claim that "At the opening of this [20th]century we did not know that there are galaxies beyond our own." The Shapley-CurtisDebate of 1920 was a famous dispute among astronomers as to the nature of the hazynebulae. We're told that it wasn't until 1924 that Edwin Hubble announced his findings onCephid variables in Andromeda, proving that the nebulae were, indeed, other "islanduniverses" akin to the Milky Way. We're also told by modern texts that the rotation of ourGalaxy was never even imagineduntil about 1940, and yet Poe quotes Madler's estimate


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of 117 million years for the period of rotation (compared with the modern figure of 200million years). Since Poe wrote "Eureka" in 1848, this all seems to suggest that modernastronomers have a somewhat imperfect recollection of how and when certain important

conceptions were formed.Another apparent anomaly concerns the speed of light. According to the history books,the best estimate in 1729 was based on Bradley's aberration sightings, giving a value of188,500 miles per second. In 1849, the year of Poe's death (and the year after he wrote"Eureka"), Fizeau used a toothed wheel to measure the speed of light as 194,000 milesper second, and this value was not improved until Foucault's rotating mirrormeasurements in 1869, which yielded a value of about 184,760 miles per second. Oddlyenough, in 1848, Poe (who was obviously well informed) stated that the speed of light is167,000 miles per second. There is no indication of where he got this value, which ismore than 10% low. Is this just a misprint? Or did a widely available source in Poe's timegive this value?

One particularly interesting passage in "Eureka" concerns Poe's thoughts on "theimportant phenomena of vitality [life], consciousness, and thought".

Looking at the matter, first, in detail, we perceive that not merely the manifestation of vitality, butthe importance, consequences, and elevation of character, keep pace, very closely, with theheterogeneity, or complexity, of the animal structure... Now this is in precise accordance withwhat we know of the succession of animals on the Earth. As it has proceeded in its condensation,superior and still superior races have appeared. Is it impossible that the successive geologicalrevolutions... have themselves been produced by... successive variations in the solar influence onthe Earth? Were this idea tenable, we should not be unwarranted in the fancy [of]... yet a newmodification of the terrestrial surface, a modification from which may spring a race bothmaterially and spiritually superior to Man.

Needless to say, this was not the first suggestion of the evolutionary development of life

on Earth, ascending in complexity to more and more superior species. Jean Lamarck(1744-1829) published his theory of gradual evolution of life forms throughout geologichistory in 1801. (Lamarck's belief that acquiredtraits were passed on to offspring waslater discredited by studies of genetics.) Still, it wasn't until 1858, nearly ten years afterPoe's death, that Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published his theory of evolution andnatural selection - simultaneously with Alfred Wallace (1823-1913). The fact that Poeand Darwin were the same age (and were both schooled in England) is suggestive of thepossibility of common influences in the educational basis and intellectual climate of thattime.Yet another fascinating passage in "Eureka" contains Poe's consideration of what wetoday call Olber's Paradox. This was first mentioned by the Swiss astronomer J. de

Cheseaux in 1744, but received little notice until it was independently rediscovered andpublicized by Heinrich Olbers (1758-1840) in 1826. The paradox is based on the premisethat the universe contains an infinite, static, and uniform distribution of infinitely oldstars with constant brightness. On this basis we should expect every point of the night(and daytime) sky to shine with infinite brightness (just as the gravitational potentialshould be infinite), or, if we assumed each star was opaque and not in thermalequilibrium, then at least as brightly as the surface of the Sun, because every line of sightwould terminate on a star. Poe describes this paradox (without mentioning either deCheseaux or Olbers), and uses it to bolster his claim that the Universe of stars musttherefore be finite. He does, however, offers twoingenious considerations by which itmight be possible to reconcile an infinite universe of stars with the dark night sky. First,


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he points out the possibility that some stars may be so far distant that no light from themcould haveyetreached us. He doesn't say what he means by "yet", i.e., he doesn't saywhen the star is assumed to have begun shining, but presumably his reasoning applies

only if the age of the universe (of stars) is finite. Poe discounts this possibility, sayingthat we have absolutely no reason to think it is the case, and it requires us to assume auniverse of infinite extent but finite age. Nevertheless, this is essentially the modernresolution of Olber's paradox based on the Big Bang cosmology, which implies that theuniverse has a finite age.The second explanation, if it can properly be called that, is even more intriguing. Poesuggests that, just as the local stars form a cluster, and just as the local galaxies form acluster of clusters, we could argue that there may be an infinite hierarchy of clusters ofclusters.

Have we, or have we not, an analogical right to the inference that this perceptible Universe - thatthis cluster of clusters - is but one of a series of clusters, the rest of which are invisible through

distance - through the diffusion of their light being so excessive, ere it reaches us, as not toproduce upon our retinas a light-impression...?

We can illustrate a hierarchy of clusters by means of the simple schematic shown below

Obviously we could take three copies of the above figure and form a still larger triangle,and so on. Suppose each dot represents a particle of mass, and suppose the distancesbetween the particles in the smallest triangles are all r. Also, suppose the distancesbetween the centers of these triples at the next level is 4r, and the distances between thecenters of thosetriples is 16r, and so on. Now, the gravitational potential exerted on oneof these particles by its two immediate neighbors is proportional to 2/r. At the next level,there are 3(2) = 6 particles, and they are each roughly 4r away, so their contribution to thepotential of the original particle is 6/(4r). At the next level there are 9(2) = 18 particles,each of which is roughly 16r away, so the contribution to the potential is 18/(16r). If weimagine an infinitely extended hierarchy of clusters following this same pattern, the totalgravitational potential at a point is given by the infinite geometric summation

Thus the gravitational potential converges to a finite value, and, by the same token, themean level of illumination of the night sky would be finite, with a value dependent on the

number k of components per cluster and the ratio of distances between clusters from

one level to the next. The sum converges provided the ratio k/is less than 1, and with a


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sufficiently small ratio the higher-order terms can be made as small as we like, despitethe fact that we are assuming an infinite number of infinitely old particles. The reasonOlber's Paradox does not apply to this case is that we are not assuming the particles are

uniformly distributed. This hierarchy of clusters is similar to what today are commonlycalled fractal structures, such as Sierpinski's gasket.Next we find Poe's presentation of Kepler's laws, even including a formal definition of anellipse:

An ellipse is a curve, returning into itself, one of whose diameters is longer than the other. In thelonger diameter are two points, equidistant from the middle of the line, and so situated otherwisethat if, from each of them a straight line be drawn to any one point of the curve, the two lines,taken together, will be equal to the longer diameter itself.

It would be interesting to know if this was Poe's own wording, from memory, or if heborrowed it from an elementary geometry text. He goes on to praise Kepler (again) forguessinghis three laws of planetary motion, which he says were "subsequentlydemonstrated and accounted for by the patient and mathematical Newton". Poe seems tobe defensive here, commenting that

...it is far too fashionable to sneer at all speculation under the comprehensive sobriquet, "guess-work". The point to be considered is, whoguesses. In guessing with Plato, we spend our time tobetter purpose, now and then, than in hearkening to a demonstration by Alemaeon.

Should we surmise that Poe's speculations have been sneered at? Did he ever submit anyof his guess-work to a scientific journal? If so, it isn't hard to imagine what the responsewould have been."Eureka" continues with Poe's recitation of the distances to the known planets, which hetries to convey by means of counter-factuals comparisons, e.g., if the distance from theSun to the Earth were one foot, then the distance to Neptune ("Leverrier's planet",discovered only in 1846, just two years prior to Poe's writing "Eureka") would be 40 feet.

He then goes on to say "and the star Alpha Lyrae would be 159", but here Poe is beingtheatrical for effect, because he then explains that although the ratio of 159 to 40 mayseem great, he omitted to say that Alpha Layrae would be 159 milesin this account. Hethen discusses the use of parallax from different points on the Earth's orbit to determinethe distance to stars, noting Besel's recent parallax observations of 61 Cygni. Lastly herecounts the observations of Lord Rosse (formerly William Parsons) who in 1845 built atelescope with a mirror 6 feet in diameter, with which he discovered the spiral structureof some nebulae, and estimated the distances to nebulae as far away as 100 million light-years. Thus, the images we see today are in fact the images of things that occurred 100million years ago. It is this discussion of the convertibility between distance and time,with the speed of light as the conversion factor, that prompts Poe to assert that "Space

and Duration are one".From this identification of space and time, Poe goes on to discuss the identity, or ratherthe reciprocity, between causeand effectin all natural phenomena. Here he distinguishesbetween human constructions and the Divine. As he says

...in human constructions a particular cause has a particular effect; a particular intention brings topass a particular object; but this is all; we see no reciprocity. The effect does not react upon thecause; the intention does not change relations with the object. In Divine constructions the object iseither design or object as we choose to regard it - and we may take at any time a cause for aneffect, or the converse - so that we can never absolutely decide which is which.

This can be seen narrowly as an expression of the time-reversibility of natural laws,which in itself is interesting, but Poe is getting at something deeper here, seeing beyondthe absolute predictability of Laplace's determinism to a conception of the entire universe


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including its entire history, all grasped at once as a single individualentity, rather than asan artificial sequence of disjoint causes and effects. He reverts to the literary esthetic todescribe this as follows:

The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in the ratio of the approachto this species of reciprocity [between cause and effect]. In the construction of plot, for example,in fictitious literature, we should so arrange the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, ofany one of them, whether it depends on any other one or upholds it. In this sense, of course,perfection of plot is really, or practically, unattainable - but only because it is a finite intelligencethat constructs. The plots of God are perfect. The universe is a plot of God.

In the remaining pages of "Eureka", Poe struggles with what he seems to have regardedas a crucial question, namely, whether the galaxies are rotating and thereby stableconfigurations, or not rotating and therefore "in a state of progressive collapse". Herightly perceives a reluctance on the part of the leading astronomers of his day (JohnHerschel, Madler, Dr. Nichol) to conclude that the structures of the universe arecollapsing in on themselves, returning to unity as Poe would say, "on account of a

prejudice; - merely because the supposition is at war with a pre-conceived and utterlybaseless notion - that of the endlessness - that of the eternal stability of the Universe."Indeed, as late as 1917, Einstein succumbed to this same prejudice when he introducedthe cosmological constant to his field equations in an effort to force them to yield aneternal static solution. Only when Hubble observed the dynamic expansion of theUniverse did Einstein finally discard that prejudice and recognize the necessity of Poe'spremise of a dynamic Universe with a finite past - and quite possibly a finite futureending in complete collapse.Poe goes on to stress the importance of symmetryprinciples for guiding ourinvestigations, along with the principle of perfect consistency, in words that could easilyhave been written by the mature Einstein a century later. He then discusses the case of

Enck's comet, whose orbital variations led many people to believe (for a time) that sometenuous ether permeating space must be influencing it's progress. However, Lagrange"came to the rescue", showing that a more accurate analysis of the orbit, taking intoaccount all the known perturbing effects, completely explained the motions of the comet.Poe says "The facts thus demonstrated do away, of course, with all necessity forsupposing an ether..." However, Poe has in mind a different sort of ether, "radicallydifferent from the ether of the astronomers, inasmuch as theirs is matter and mind is not".Poe's ether is

a subtle influence which we know to be ever in attendance upon matter, although becomingmanifest only through matter's heterogeneity. To this influence- without daring to touch it at all inany effort to explain its awful nature - I have referred the various phenomena of electricity, heat,light, magnetism; and more - of vitality, consciousness, and thought - in a word, of spirituality.

There seems to be an echo here of Blake's "fearful symmetry", and a forerunner of themore recent speculative ideas of Roger Penrose on the possible connections betweenquantum phenomena and consciousness. Poe continues with a suggestion that, followingthe universal collapse into unity, there might be succeeding generations of Universes: "anew and perhaps totally different set of conditions may ensue - another creation andirradiation returning into itself", similar to the "mix-master cosmologies" discussed bymodern authors.At the end of "Eureka" Poe returned to his natural poetic mode, and presented this lyricalconclusion which, had he lived, would have made stirring material for one of his publicreadings:


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The phenomena on which our conclusions must at this point depend, are merely spiritual shadows,but not the less thoroughly substantial. We walk about, amid the destinies of our world existence,encompassed by dim but ever present memories of a destiny more vast - very distant in bygone

time, and infinitely awful... conscious, first, of a proper identity, secondly and by faintindeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being... Think that the sense of individualidentity will be gradually merged in a general consciousness - that Man, ceasing imperceptibly tofeel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize hisexistence as that of Jehovah. In the mean time bear in mind that all is Life - Life within Life - theless within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.

The obviously sacrilegious and pantheistic nature of these words were deeply troubling toPoe's friends. The earlier lecture ("The Universe") on which Eureka was based hadapparently concluded in a way that seemed harmonious with Christianity, but Poe addedthis new ending to Eureka, and lost close friends because of it, most notably LouisaShew, who broke off their relationship. She told Poe that he would only be saved by thelove of a woman "fond and strong enough to manage his affair in his best interest", and

Poe agreed. He wrote that "unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me,I shall hardly last a year longer...". He died the next year.It's notable that throughout "Eureka" Poe seems to adopt a strictly relational view ofmotion. For example, although he contends that all the particles are attracted back to acentral point of origin, he is careful to explain that the attraction is not really to theabstract point of space, but between the particles. It just so happens that each particle,wherever it resides, sees more of its fellow particles in the direction of the center, so allmove in that direction. As Poe says

Nothing like location was conceived as their origin. Their source lies in the principle, Unity. Thisis their lost parent. This they seek always - immediately - in all directions - wherever it is evenpartially to be found; thus appeasing, in some measure, the ineradicable tendency, while on theway to its absolute satisfaction in the end.

Knowing Poe's life history, orphaned at the age of 2, separated from his brother andsister, the metaphor is especially touching, and this passage more than any other in"Eureka" reveals the true nature of the work. It would be going too far to say the entirebook is a conscious allegory, because it seems clear that (at least on some level) Poe tookthe scientific implications seriously, but it's also clear that his scientific ideas were deeplygrounded in his own spiritual and emotional needs and outlook. Hence the book's prefaceis addressed, somewhat surprisingly, considering Poe's pride in his own powers ofrationality

To those who love me and whom I love - to those who feel rather than to those who think - to thedreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities - I offer this Book of Truths,not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true.To these I present the composition as an Art Product alone - let us say as a Romance, or, if I be not

urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.

the thought of a thought

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