Edgar Allen Poe's 150-page hallucinatory prose-poem, Eureka, about the origins of the universe, was just speculation, fevered imaginings. But now, the NYT reports, modern cosmology suggests that Poe was, in the whole, correct!
"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.
(via /.)
