Today in Astronomy we were talking about the edge of the universe and other cosmology stuff. Anyway,the Prof said that Poe was the one with the initial idea that the Universe has an edge, and mentioned it in one of his poems.
He seemed pretty uncertaint though about what, exactly, Poe said and where he said it. (And when).
I would look, but honestly, I have no idea where to begin. Poe’s library of poems alone is rather daunting…so, does anybody know what my Prof was referring to?
The work in question is not a poem, it’s a long (running to 105 pages in the Penguin Classics edition of The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe) piece of non-fiction prose called Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, first published in 1848.
I wouldn’t characterise Poe as being the first to suggest that the Universe has an edge; what he did was propose that the solution to something called Olber’s Paradox is that the Universe is finite in time rather than space. A suitable search on “Olbers + Poe”, either here or on Google, will throw up lots more. The standard history and resolution of the controversy about the Paradox, both before and after Poe, is a book called Darkness at Night (Harvard, 1987) by Edward Harrison.
You know, bonzer that’s what I thought it was. I should have just trusted my instinct on that one and not my wacky Astronomy teacher…
Anyway, that’s pretty much what we were discussing (finite in time, not space) but there are several very dense students in the class who just couldn’t get it, and as a result, not much got done today. sigh
Thank you so much. =)