Eureka!

I've been reading a long work by Edgar Allan Poe that I had never even heard of (despite having a Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe since roughly the age of ten) for several days now. I came across it in another Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, this one called Edgar Allan Poe, Complete and Unabridged Fiction and Poetry and published by Barnes & Noble in China. It's an interesting work, to say the least. It is also very difficult reading. Poe is a very interesting character who has been reduced in public conception to some one-sided raving drinking maniac who only wrote over-the-top gothic poetry and fiction. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Though Poe considered Eureka a prose-poem, it is actually something of a quasiphilosophical-scientific proposition on the nature of the Universe, how it came to be, and how and why it will end, as well as our place in it. Sound ambitious? It is. He wrote it a year before he died and was more proud of it than anything else he had ever written. People scratched their heads and mocked him for it. There were several people bent on defamation of his character. One of these wrote his obituary. They had plenty to say about Eureka and they are part of the reason why we think of Poe the way we do these days. In the beginning of Eureka, Poe inserts a fictional construct—a letter from one friend to another from a thousand years in the future in awe and derision of humans of the previous millenia who had crawled toward truth laboring under the misapprehension that there were only two valid paths to knowledge: inductive and deductive reasoning, the ways posited forth by ancient men named Aries Tottle (Aristotle) and Hog (Francis Bacon). This part is humorous. There is a lot of humor in Poe's work, but the more humorous stories are not canonized. His sense of humor is so odd that we miss it sometimes. Poe argues that blinding leaps in intuition, which he describes as incalculable processes of deductive and inductive reasoning that have occurred unconsciously, are even more valid ways of finding Truth. The theory for the formation of the universe he puts forth in Eureka—a theory that comes from his intuition—sounds astonishingly like the Big Bang Theory (as named by its opponents). The funny thing is Eureka was published eighty years before the Big Bang Theory. People deride Poe for his hyperbolic enthusiasm, his bold and bald ambition, his Romantic grasping, and his complete disregard (which he acknowledges) for the empirical process, but amongst Eureka's fans were Einstein, a man who made many important scientific discoveries by intuitive leaps.  More on this as I plod through it.