it seems that Edgar Allen Poe ‘prediscovered’ (horrible word) what we now understand as the Big Bang in 1848, and published his thoughts as a prose poem called Eureka.
“From the one particle, as a center,” he wrote, “let us suppose to be irradiated spherically ? in all directions ? to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space ? a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.”
The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into “previously vacant space”), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn’t find mainstream approval until the 1960′s.
This wasn’t Poe’s only uncanny display of prescience. He also came up with the idea that the universe was expanding (and might eventually collapse), a notion that the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann ferreted out of Einstein’s equations in 1922. Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn’t widely accepted until the 1930′s, after Edwin Hubble gleaned some hard data from the velocities of far-flung galaxies..
This ‘prediscovery’ is one of numerous such cases discussed in “Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time” by Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, reviewed in the NYT. Did Friedmann read “Eureka?” No one seems to know. Nevertheless, Mr. Siegfried speculates, it’s quite possible “that Friedmann was conditioned by Poe’s imagination to see the true meaning of Einstein’s equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not.”
(via FMH)
There’s a long essay by David Grantz on Poe’s cosmological speculations, concentrating on Eureka here and another one, by Juan Lartigue, here