Sky and Telescope - December 2016 - 31
Edgar Allan Poe spirits to converse upon. Where did he get them? Unlike any astronomers of his day, Poe further proclaims an evolving big-bang universe, with Matter's having been radiated, at its origin, atomically [i.e., as a gas], into a limited sphere of Space, from one, individual, unconditional, irrelative, and absolute Particle Proper. Poe uses an anthropic-principle argument to assert that the universe must be extremely old in order for us to be here observing it. Yet it cannot be so old that it would violate Olbers' paradox; Poe anticipates an essential part of the modern resolution of the paradox when he offers this explanation of why the night sky is dark: lunacy or "a damnable heresy," but Poe considered it his greatest life work. He wrote to his aunt Maria Clemm, "I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more." In fact he wrote little further, nearly died of an opiate overdose, then died the following year of causes unknown. In more ancillary roles, Poe had repeatedly brought the Moon, constellations, and planets into his poems, such as "Evening Star" (1827) and "Ulalume" (1847) - both of which compare and contrast the Moon and Venus - and into many other writings. The cosmos entranced him and excited his deepest mysticism. Although he subtitled Eureka a "prose-poem" rather than an essay on science, Poe was convinced that he had unmasked the plan of God: the universe expands from a point-like beginning in "one instantaneous flash," with stars then "condensing into visibility from invisible nebulosity." Gravity pulls stars and gas into galaxies, while the galaxies separate from each other. The universe evolves through our present state and a future in which stars will "grow grey in giving birth and death to unspeakably numerous and complex variations of vitalic development," eventually achieving an unknown Divine Will, before all finally recollapses into a singular point under Newton's law of gravity, "with a velocity accumulating in the inverse proportion of the squares of the distances at which lay the inevitable End." Reviewers savaged the book, calling it unreadable SEAN SWEENEY, RAVEN GRAPHIC: BIGSTOCKPHOTOS.COM/FOSIN Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy - since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all. STAR-WINDS Edgar Allan Poe again walks the streets of Boston. This statue, created by artist Stefanie Rocknak and unveiled by the Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston in 2014, stands on the edge of the Boston Common near the intersection of Boylston and Charles Streets. Every night Poe's fictional raven, emerging from the restless traveler's suitcase, casts his lamplit shadow on the floor. Sk yandTelescope.com December 2016 31
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.