5 December 2015

Edgar Allan Poe’s Cosmology and Natural Theology:

A Constructive Postmodern Appreciation

 

Theodore Walker Jr.

 

 

As graphic artists know, the frame can influence perception of the framed work, sometimes decisively. Edgar Allan Poe’s little book Eureka [also titled Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe; and Eureka: A Prose Poem, and from the first edition’s book spine—Eureka or the Universe] (1848) is conveniently framed by fifteen of Poe’s science fiction essays (chronologically, thirteen published before Eureka, and two afterwards) in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976) collected and edited with an Introduction and Commentary by Harold Beaver. And, as indicated in Beaver’s introduction, Poe’s pioneering contributions to science fiction are celebrated.

 

When we are rigorously attentive to the content of Eureka, and wholly inattentive to its frame (science fiction), we find that in Eureka Poe was seriously attempting to advance ‘truth’ about the universe. Thus, in addition to being “a prose poem” (Poe’s formal frame) framed with Poe’s science fiction (Beaver’s content frame), Eureka is astronomy and cosmology, plus natural theology, not science fiction.

 

For the purpose of appreciating Poe’s cosmology, we can be helped by studying an unframed printing such as Eureka / Edgar Allan Poe (2004 [1848]) edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Textual Variants by Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine. In this printing of Eureka, Poe’s paragraphs are consecutively numbered, from 1 to 266. Plus, there is an Appendix featuring eighteen numbered paragraphs of Poe’s Postscript to a Letter about the Lecture ‘Eureka,’ Notes to Eureka and Poe’s Postscript, a seven-page Bibliography, and a fifteen-page Index.

 

*Hereafter, Poe’s 1848 text will be referenced by Levine and Levine 2004 paragraph numbers.

 

As an essay in cosmology, Poe’s Eureka is remarkable. Despite occasional errors and inconsistencies, in some important respects, Poe was well ahead of his time. For example, Lord Kelvin’s quantitatively correct solution to Olbers’s Paradox in 1901 was preceded by Poe’s qualitatively correct solution in 1848. Cosmologist Edward Harrison says:

 

Lord Kelvin in 1901 tested an ‘old and celebrated hypothesis’ that if we could see far enough into space the whole sky would be occupied with stellar disks all of perhaps the same brightness as the Sun. Kelvin was the first to solve quantitatively and correctly the riddle of a dark night sky, a riddle that had been previously solved qualitatively by Edgar Allan Poe, and is now known as Olbers’ paradox.

(Edward Harrison 1986: 417)

 

Poe was fifty-three years ahead of Kelvin. Furthermore, seventy-nine years before Georges Edouard Lemaître proposed that we live in a homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius (1927), a universe that started from one “primeval atom” (English translation 1950); Poe had already proposed that the equable distribution of matter radiated throughout the universe started from one “primordial particle” (1848).

 

Lemaître’s 1927 conception (of a homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius) explains the red-shifted light from extragalactic nebulae first observed in 1913 by Vestro Melvin Slipher, and more fully observed by Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in 1929.

 

Poe’s 1848 conception (of matter equally radiated in all directions) explains the observed distribution of the stars. The stars are spherically distributed in a way consistent with light radiated equally in all directions from one central point, and “in direct proportion with the squares of the distances” from that point (Poe 1848 [2004: paragraphs 85).

 

Poe was first to propose universal radiation from one originating “absolute Unity” (“multiplicity out of unity”), from the ultimate absolutely unique “Oneness,” the “one particle,” the one “primordial Particle,” the universal singularity from which all “originally created” matter was “radiated spherically—in all directions” (1848 [2004: paragraphs 45-50]). Moreover, Poe proposed that universal “radiation”/expansion is followed by gravity powered universal “concentralization”/contraction, and then by new expansions and contractions in “limitless succession” (Ibid: paragraph 187). Thus Poe “anticipated the expansion, collapse, and possible oscillation of the universe,” says Edward Harrison in Cosmology: The Science of the Universe (2005 [1981]: 510). Similarly, in “Eureka, the Lyceum, and Cosmic Science” (2013) Robert J. Scholnick appreciates Poe’s cosmological anticipations.

 

In Poe’s day (1848), his conception—of universal radiation from oneness followed by universal contraction—was often regarded as sheer fiction. Such regard is not surprising. Poe’s proposal came eighty-one years before the Hubble-Humason observations (1929), and ninety-eight years before George Gamow’s fully modern theory of the expanding universe (1946). Physicist and historian of science Helge Kragh argues that Lemaître’s primeval atom is “a condensed material pre-universe,” not a singularity (1996: 54; also 1993: 373). Thus, Kragh “marks the beginning” of fully “modern big bang theory” (1993: 377) with the publication of George Gamow’s “Expanding Universe and the Origin of Elements” (1946). And according to scientific consultant for Levine and Levine—Bruce Twarog, Poe’s cosmology is “loosely … equivalent to the ‘Big Bang’ theory,” and 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,” and one could plausibly claim Poe intuited “something roughly like a black hole” while coming “close to anticipating astrophysical speculation that the universe is ultimately going to coalesce because it lacks sufficient energy to escape its own gravity” (Levine and Levine 2004: xxi). Hence, Poe was nearly a century ahead of fully modern big bang theory, and more than a century ahead of subsequent big crunch and oscillating universe speculations.

 

In our day (2015f), universal radiation from oneness [singularity] possibly followed by universal contraction—has come to be taken seriously, not as fiction. Nevertheless, many scientists continue to regard Poe’s cosmology (a poetic blend of a posteriori observation, a priori logic, and imaginative-speculative intuition) as not scientific.

 

For example, Helge Kragh describes Poe’s cosmology as a “remarkable example” of “cosmogonic speculations” that “predate the scientifically argued idea” (1996: 39). Obviously, Poe was not a natural scientist in the contemporary sense sharply distinguished from a natural philosopher.

 

The modern natural scientist is said to be distinguished (from the early modern natural philosopher) by failure to appreciate poetry in nature, and by a corresponding failure to appreciate poetic presentations of natural scientific ideas. This late modern separation of science from poetry was marked in the year 1833 when poet and natural philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge lamented that his colleagues in the British Association for the Advancement of Science were not true natural philosophers. Unlike true natural philosophers, they failed to appreciate the poetry actualized in nature. See Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (1981) by Trevor Harvey Levere. In responding to Coleridge’s lament, William Whewell coined the term “scientist” (analogous to “artist”). See the prologue—“Inventing the Scientist”—in The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends [William Whewell, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones] Who Transformed Science and Changed the World (2011) by Laura J. Snyder.

 

“When Poe called Eureka a poem,” write Levine and Levine, “he was placing it in a very long tradition of writings that were poetic and were at the same time attempts to grasp the nature of things” (2004: xii). Thus, Poe was doing natural science and poetry in the tradition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other true natural philosophers, such as naturalist-cosmologist Alexander von Humbolt, to whom Poe dedicated Eureka (Scholnick October 2011). And, as was the case for Coleridge, and for Humbolt; for Poe, natural philosophy includes natural theology.

 

Late modern scientists seldom speak affirmatively of God. By contrast, Poe attributed universal radiation to the Divine Will. The universe, says Poe, swells “into existence” and subsides “into nothingness” (expands and contracts) “at every throb of the Heart Divine” (1848 [2004: paragraph 255). Hence, Poe rejected late modern disregard for poetry, art, natural philosophy, and natural theology.

 

Poe confronted disregard for his methods head-on. Concerning the role of imagination and intuition in science, Poe argued that “true Science” “makes its most important advances—as all History will show—by seemingly intuitive leaps” (1848 [2004: paragraph 14]). Poe argued at length against the conviction “that the Aristotelian and Baconian roads” are “the sole possible avenues to knowledge” (Ibid), and against “repression of imagination” (Ibid: paragraph 15), especially in cosmology where one must generalize.

 

Similarly, Alfred North Whitehead, in Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1978 [1927-28 Gifford Lectures]), explains the “collapse of the method of rigid empiricism” when seeking general truths (p. 4-5). He says:

 

It [collapse of rigid empiricism] occurs whenever we seek the larger generalities. In natural science this rigid method is the Baconian method of induction, a method which, if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it. What Bacon omitted was the play of a free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic. The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

(Whitehead 1978 [1927-28]: 4-5)

 

In addition to affirming “imaginative generalization,” Whitehead combines natural scientific cosmology with natural theology and poetry, thereby describing God as “the poet of the world” (1978 [197-28]: 346). In appreciating poetry in nature, in appreciating natural theology, and in other important respects (such as rejecting dualism and materialism), Whiteheadian natural philosophy and science is radically different from late modern science. This “radically different” philosophy of nature is called “postmodern” and “constructive postmodern” in Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy (2007) by David Ray Griffin. Constructive postmodern thought—of the radically different type indicated by Whitehead—enables us to better appreciate that Eureka is natural scientific cosmology, poetry, and natural theology.

 

 

For more about constructive postmodern appreciation of poetry, art, and natural theology in astronomy and cosmology (including Poe’s cosmology), see The Big Bang and God: An Astro-Theology – wherein an astronomer and a theologian offer a study of interdisciplinary convergences with natural theology both in the scientific researches of Sir Fred Hoyle and in the philosophical researches of Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, thereby illustrating a constructive postmodern trend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) by Theodore Walker Jr. and Chandra Wickramasinghe.

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Works Cited

 

Beaver, Harold, editor. (1976). The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, collected and edited with an Introduction and Commentary by Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin Books.

 

Griffin, David Ray. (2007). Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for its Contemporary Relevance. Albany: State University of New York Press.

 

Harrison, Edward. (1981). Cosmology: The Science of the Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 reprint.

 

Harrison, Edward. (31 July 1986). “Kelvin on an Old, Celebrated Hypothesis” in Nature, a commentary, vol. 322, pages 417-18 [doi:10.1038/322417a0].

 

Humboldt [Baron Friedrich Heinrich], Alexander von. (1866 [1845]). Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, in four volumes, translated by Elise C. Otté. New York: Harper.

 

Kopley, Richard and Jana Argersinger, editors. (2013). Poe Writing / Writing Poe. New York: AMS Press.

 

Kragh, Helge. (1993). “Big Bang Cosmology” in Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives. , edited by Norriss S. Hetherington. New York: Routledge, 2008 digital printing.

 

Kragh, Helge. (1996). Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Lemaître, Georges Edouard. (1927). “Un Univers homogène de masse constant et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques” [A homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae]. Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles, A47, pp. 49-59.

 

Lemaître, Georges Edouard. (1950). The Primeval Atom: An Essay on Cosmogony, translation by Betty H. and Serge A. Korff, preface by Ferdinand Gonseth, foreword by Henry Norris Russell. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

 

Levere, Trevor Harvey. (1981). Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Levine, Stuart and Susan F. Levine, editors. (2004 [1848]). Eureka / Edgar Allan Poe. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

 

Scholnick, Robert J. (October 2011). “Change and Transformation: Voyaging with Poe and Alexander von Humboldt; Douglas Anderson. Pictures of Ascent in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe; Laura Dassow Walls. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America” in the journal Poe Studies, volume 44, issue 1, pages 89-96 [online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi: 10.1111/j.1754-6095.2011.00038.x].

 

Scholnick, Robert J. (2013). “Eureka, the Lyceum, and Cosmic Science” in Poe Writing/Writing Poe. New York: AMS Press, 2013, edited by Richard Kopley and Jana Argersinger.

 

Snyder, Laura J. (2011). The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World. New York: Crown.

 

Whitehead, Alfred North. (1927-28). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures), 1978 Corrected Edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press.

 

This text is a written version of my presentation at the international ‘Positively Poe’ conference, held from 22-26 June 2013 at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA.

Introduction

 

Ladies and gentlemen.

Dear Poe Friends.

For those of you who did not hear my ‘Eureka’ lectures at the Poe conferences in Baltimore (2002) and Philadelphia (2009), I must introduce myself, because I am not the average literary Poe scholar. I am a chemical engineer, but more important is that my father was a mathematician and a scientist at the Philips Physics Laboratory, with a profound interest in astronomy.[i] He often did experiments at home where I helped him, and we observed the skies at night, so I grew up with stories about the history of mathematics and the sciences of nature, and the great names therein. Since then the history of science always remained a favorite subject to me.

So I was well prepared when an old edition of ‘Eureka’ (London 1899, edited by John Ingram) came into my hands in 1982. I had never heard of it, although I thought that I knew Poe’s work, but I know now that these were only the stories that everyone knows, which are maybe 10-15% of Poe’s work.

But when I started to read ‘Eureka’ I fell from one amazement into the next, because I read many scientific ideas and concepts that did not exist in 1848 when Poe published this masterwork. How was that possible? This question lead to a quest of which the end is still nowhere in sight.

The first part of this lecture is about the influence of ‘Eureka’ on science and philosophy. The second part concerns the four letters Albert Einstein wrote about it, because in my opinion these letters throw an astonishing new light, not only on Poe and the history of science, but also on the immediate scientific future.

The history and contents of ‘Eureka’

For those who have not read it yet: ‘Eureka’ is a cosmogony; a complete description of our universe, of its birth and its history, and of everything in it, material and spiritual. A remarkable thing is that ‘Eureka’ is usually ignored by literary scholars, but that during the past 20-30 years it is gaining ever more respect among scientists who (re)discover it.

It is important to know that the history of ‘Eureka’ was and is very different in the USA and in Europe. In the USA it was neglected and almost forgotten for more than a century after Poe’s death, but in Europe it was widely read and intensely discussed after Charles Baudelaire published a French translation in 1859.

This publication was made in several installments in a popular Swiss international cultural and literary magazine, the ‘Revue Internationale’. Due to this wide and popular introduction of ‘Eureka’ in Europe, it became much better known there than in the USA. And because Poe had no enemies in Europe and was admired, and even worshipped by many, as a visionary and prophetic writer and poet, also ‘Eureka’ was taken very seriously. As a result it was much studied and discussed in Europe during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

I will not discuss and explain again the many revolutionary scientific and spiritual ideas that Poe proposed in ‘Eureka’. That has been done before, also by others,[ii] but to give an idea, I will mention a few of the most revealing examples:

• A theory about a ‘Big Bang’ and a dynamic, ‘cyclic’ universe.
• A ‘multiverse’; the existence of other universes next to ours.
• The mathematical ‘equality’ of matter and energy.
• Time-space continuity.
• Black holes as the dramatic final stage of stars and even galaxies.
• The ‘butterfly effect’ as foundation for a chaotic and unpredictable universe.
•  The velocity of light as the speed limit for electromagnetic phenomena, including a rudimentary concept of relativity.
• The solution of the ‘Olbers paradox’. (Why is the night sky dark, if there is an unlimited number of stars?)
• Evolution of species.

It is clear that such ideas were contrary to all scientific and religious beliefs and convictions of the 19^th century, so it is not surprising that ‘Eureka’ was regarded as a dangerous and objectionable piece by Poe’s American contemporaries. Incidentally this also happened outside of the USA, and in 1871 ‘Eureka’ was even officially forbidden in Russia, although Poe’s other works were very popular and influential there!

I want to make a special remark here on Poe’s ideas about evolution of species, even of the human one, because the two paragraphs in ‘Eureka’ where evolution is mentioned are often overlooked.[iii] More research is needed here, but I think that Poe became convinced of evolution when he studied sea shells and edited ‘The Conchologist’s First Book’ (in 1839). And indeed: there is no better place to see evolution in action than in fossil deposits of sea shells! This study must also have given Poe the brilliant idea that evolution of species is the result of two independent forces. First there is a gradual ‘vital’ development of life into ever more heterogeneous and complex structures. However, this autonomous process is periodically interrupted and set on entirely new courses by cosmic and/or geologic catastrophes (an idea that Poe used in the story ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’, where life on earth is terminated by a near-collision with a comet). It is remarkable that also ‘The Conchologist’s First Book’, probably Poe’s purest scientific work, is ignored by literary Poe scholars, while the famous American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called it ‘Poe’s greatest hit’!

However, the fact remains that Poe wrote about evolution and extinction of species, years before Charles Darwin dared to publish ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859. And since Charles Darwin was primarily a marine biologist, one must wonder if he read ‘The Conchologist’s First Book’ and was perhaps inspired by it!?

The influence of ‘Eureka’ in science

As I have argued in my papers for the Poe conferences in Baltimore (2002) and Philadelphia (2009), Poe had an enormous influence in Europe. Not only in literature, but also in other fields, as in music (Debussy), in philosophy (Nietzsche, Bergson, Valéry) and in science.

In the scientific field, I mentioned the physicists Alexander Friedmann (Russia, 1888-1925) and Georges Lemaître (Belgium, 1894-1966), who independently of each other developed the scientific and mathematical concepts of the dynamic universe (Friedmann, in 1922) and the ‘Big Bang’ (Lemaitre, in 1927). Both used basic ideas from ‘Eureka’, and Poe was even a favorite author of Friedmann, but one must consider the fact that Poe’s ideas were so widely known that they had become ‘memes’, ready to be picked up when their time had come. And the ‘Roaring Twenties’, after the ravages of the Great War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, when the world was desperate for a new heaven and a new earth, and the old ‘certainties’ of science were thrown overboard by the advent of quantum physics and the theory of relativity, certainly was such a time.

Also the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) has recently come to my attention, the scientist who in 1929 proved that the theories of Friedmann and Lemaitre were right, and that the universe is indeed expanding, by measuring the ‘red shift’ of the light of distant galaxies. Hubble was a fanatic collector of original books on astronomy and cosmology, thereby advised and helped by his wife Grace who had studied American literature. So we may safely assume that Edwin and Grace Hubble had an original copy of ‘Eureka’ (which were not difficult to find then). Moreover, Hubble was a trustee of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which has an original ‘Eureka’ since 1916, so he had easy and free access to copy[iv].

In my paper for the Philadelphia conference (2009) I noted that Poe, Friedmann and Lemaitre had similar military backgrounds: all three were experts in explosives and ballistics. So they were trained in the creation and observation of highly dynamic processes, and the idea of an exploding universe was not strange to them. And, to my surprise, I discovered that Edwin Hubble was even one of the world’s greatest experts in explosives and ballistics! During World War I he served with the US Army in France and during World War II he was director of the ballistics research laboratory of the US Army Air Force. In 1946, in an interview, he remarked: ‘There is a curious affinity between ballistics and astronomy!’ How true!

A matter of utmost gravity

Poe’s motivation to design an entirely new universe came from his philosophical rejection of the scientific universe that had arisen from Newton’s celestial mechanics. This so-called ‘clockwork universe’ is totally determined and leaves no room for the human free will. The clearest description of such a ‘closed’ mathematical-mechanical prison is ‘The Pit and he Pendulum’, but there are more Poe-stories in which clocks and/or pendulums are symbols or instruments of physical and spiritual death and destruction (‘The Masque of the Red Death’; ‘A Predicament’; ‘Hop Frog’; ‘The Devil in the Belfry’; ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’).

However, to Poe, this meant that in a ‘new’ universe the force of gravity could not be the fundamental and all-determining force that it is in Newton’s celestial mechanics. So Poe reduces gravity to a secondary and temporary effect that emerges from a really fundamental force, the ‘sympathy’ that acts between fundamental particles (or atoms in Poe’s time).[v] Since this ‘sympathy’ acts instantaneous throughout the universe, so does the gravity effect. This diverging gravity hypothesis of Poe is the real big idea behind ‘Eureka’, and it has a few remarkable consequences.

Many of Poe’s prophetic scientific ideas are the logical results of this gravity hypothesis, so one can say that this hypothesis has amazing predictive powers. In fact, I considered Poe’s gravity hypothesis as so successful, that already in 1986 I held it to be superior. This means, among other things, that ‘gravity events’ (like a collision between two stars or a supernova explosion) are transmitted through space with infinite speed, and that the ‘gravity waves’ that such events are supposed to generate do not exist, at least not in the form in which they are predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. In many of my publications  since 1986[vi], I have pointed out that major international scientific experiments to detect such ‘gravity waves’, like the European GEO 600 and the American LIGO and VIRGO, would either show nothing, or they would tell us something about the present condition of our universe. And therefore such results will be meaningless, because they are incomparable with all other means of observation by (radio)telescopes, which tell us about the universe of millions or even billions of years ago, because that information comes to us with ‘only’ the velocity of light.

And so far these scientific ‘gravity wave’ experiments have shown no results at all…    

The Albert Einstein letters on ‘Eureka’

During the Poe conference in Philadelphia, I heard that two letters by Albert Einstein about ‘Eureka’ were sold in 2002 for $ 10.000. A further search showed that Einstein read ‘Eureka’ twice, in 1933 and in 1940, and that he actually wrote four letters about it.

In 1933, the Poe-collector Richard Gimbel asked Albert Einstein to read and evaluate ‘Eureka’. Einstein had just fled from Germany to the USA and his English was not good, so he answered Gimbel in German. His first letter to Gimbel is as follows (English translation):[vii]

 

13 December 1933.

Dear Sir,

I will gladly read the story by the master and tell you in all modesty what I think about it. I am sorry that I  cannot come to dinner, but I am happy that America does not forget its creative sons.

Sincerely,

1. A.    Einstein.

 

The second letter from Einstein to Gimbel reads as follows (English translation):

 

7 January 1934.

Dear Sir,

I have partly studied ‘Eureka’ but I have no hope to be able to finish this study in the near future. The imaginary letter of a future thinker, at the beginning of the work, in which the two major principles of the modern philosophy of science are critically reviewed, is in my opinion a very beautiful achievement of an unusually independent mind. The attempt of a complete cosmogony, which makes up the remaining part of the work, is a shining example that even such a free mind remains bound to its era, no matter how free it may feel itself of the prejudices of that time.

For an appreciation of the artistic value of this work, I cannot find the courage in the coming time, in spite of the attraction that comes from his wonderful man.

Most sincerely,

1. A.    Einstein.

 

These two letters show a positive attitude from Einstein towards Poe. But he did not read ‘Eureka’ entirely, probably because of lack of time and his still insufficient knowledge of English.[viii] However, his admiration for the first part, the ‘letter from the future’,[ix] is quite remarkable, because that is the part where many readers stop taking Poe seriously because he ridicules several of the greatest scientific minds in human history.

In June 1940, also the Poe-biographer Arthur Quinn asked Einstein to read and evaluate ‘Eureka’.  This time Einstein was on vacation at Saranac Lake (NY) and he could read and write English well.[x]

His first letter to Quinn was as follows:[xi]

 

June 29, 1940.

My dear Dr. Quinn,

I have read the essay of Poe you mentioned in your letter of June 22 some years ago. I do not have the works of the poet at hand here and cannot remember clearly the contents of the essay. My impression was that the article must be valued more from the artistic than from the scientific standpoint. If you would like a more precise answer I would suggest to send me a copy of ‘EUREKA’.

Sincerely Yours,

1. A.    Einstein.

 

Apparently Arthur Quinn sent Einstein the requested copy, and a few weeks later Einstein gave the following verdict:

 

August 6^th, 1940.

My dear Dr. Quinn,

Apparently I was mistaken in my belief that I had read before Poe’s essay ‘Eureka’. Therefore, it was quite new to me. I must confess that on the whole it was a bad disappointment.

The beginning is very witty and remarkable insofar as Poe clearly recognizes that true science is only possible through a combination of systematic experimentation and logical construction. The exemplification of Kepler’s work is lucid – though not sufficient consideration is given to Tycho Brahe’s observational basis. The discussion of the finity-infinity problem is rather weak, even taking into consideration the fact that non-eucledian geometry was not generally accessible to non-mathematicians in those days. It is astonishing f.i. that the simplest example of actual infinity – the system of whole numbers – is not mentioned.

When Poe comes to his own constructions he loses every sense of that critical mood prevailing in the beginning pages and the whole presentation shows a striking resemblance to the scientific crank-letters I receive every day. I cannot help having the impression of a pathological personality being overwhelmed by an idée fixe depriving him of the possibility of critical corrections.

Sincerely yours,

1. A.    Einstein.

 

This complete turnaround of Einstein is amazing. Poe, the master, the creative son of America, that unusually independent mind, that wonderful man, is suddenly a pathological personality?[xii] Why this sudden denial of Poe and ‘Eureka’?

Upon closer reading of the fourth letter, it is clear that Einstein’s remarks are either untrue or beside the point. In my opinion here is only one logical explanation for Einstein’s weird behavior: he was deeply shocked when he realized that Poe had developed ideas that were similar to his own, but already in 1848. Einstein must also have noticed Poe’s superior theory of gravitation, which was a direct threat to his own cherished General Theory of Relativity. And he must have understood that Poe and ‘Eureka’ had inspired Friedmann and Lemaître, with whom he had serious differences of opinion when they published their theories on the dynamic and exploding universe.[xiii] The young Einstein was a firm believer in a ‘static’ and unchangeable universe, so he could not accept the consequences of his own theory of relativity, which indicated that the universe is not static. In order to correct this, he inserted a ‘cosmological constant’ in his General Theory of Relativity; an act that he later regretted as ‘the biggest blunder in my life’.

Einstein was probably the first who fully understood what Poe had done, and he decided that it could better be buried and forgotten forever; understandable from a personal view, but unforgivable from a scientific standpoint. Einstein’s fourth letter about ‘Eureka’ was another big blunder, and, like the first one, it was directly related to Poe’s work.

A new view on gravity

In 2010 the eminent Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde (University of Amsterdam) published an article ‘On the Origin of Gravity and the laws of Newton’[xiv]. In this article Verlinde asserted that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, but a phenomenon that ‘emerges’ from other forces at a fundamental level. This idea (including elegant and surprisingly simple mathematics) hit the scientific world like a bombshell, and many magazines and newspapers paid attention to it.[xv] In this article Verlinde also stated that Einstein’s geometrical formulation of space-time must be given up in order to understand gravity at a deeper level. That same year Verlinde received the Spinoza Award, the Netherlands highest award for excellence in science, primarily for his earlier work, but also for his ‘revolutionary’ new idea on gravity (‘An idea that will alter our understanding of the universe’ as the motivation said).

I informed Erik Verlinde, the University of Amsterdam and the Spinoza Committee about the fact that Poe published an identical idea 162 years earlier. An idea, moreover, about which I had published a few dozen articles in Dutch newspapers and magazines since 1986.

After laborious discussions Verlinde admitted:

“It is remarkable how far [Poe] dared to deviate from the mechanistic approach of Newton, and yet find a logical explanation for the phenomenon of gravity, at least as an idea. The mathematical elaboration is lacking, but Poe’s insight is close to the present opinion of me and other colleagues”.[xvi]

Conclusion

Modern theoretical (astro)physics has apparently reached a point where Poe arrived already in 1848. However, it is a supreme paradox that modern science is also based on ideas from ‘Eureka’ for which Poe never got the credits, while the scientists who used his ideas did not fathom or accept Poe’s ultimate truth that gravity is NOT a fundamental force of nature. This makes matters unnecessarily complicated, and in my opinion it is the main reason why it is impossible to unite the two pillars of modern science, quantum physics and the General Theory of Relativity. Simply because they are separated by a common belief in fundamental gravity.

 

Ladies and gentlemen.

Dear Poe Friends.

I rest my case for the time being, but I am sure that we have not reached the end of ‘Eureka’. More will follow soon.

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