[HN Gopher] The Weird Science of Edgar Allan Poe
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       The Weird Science of Edgar Allan Poe
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2021-06-11 10:29 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
        
       | taylorfinley wrote:
       | I'm glad this aspect of Poe is becoming more well-known! I for
       | one was shocked when I learned that he anticipated spacetime in
       | Eureka, where he wrote "space and duration are one." In the same
       | work he says "because Nothing was, therefore All Things are,"
       | which is strikingly like e.g. Russell Standish's The Theory of
       | Nothing, a very interesting take on modern cosmology.
       | 
       | edit: Russell Standish's book is available free for personal use,
       | it's one of my favorites and definitely worth reading if you're
       | in to the idea of an information theory cosmology:
       | https://www.hpcoders.com.au/theory-of-nothing.pdf
        
       | unixhero wrote:
       | Goth or emo?
        
       | FartyMcFarter wrote:
       | Quoth the server, 404.
        
       | sqqqqrly wrote:
       | I should read more Poe.
        
         | tejtm wrote:
         | "Eureka" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka:_A_Prose_Poem It
         | a good place to see how unexpected his work could be.
         | 
         | I would fairly say I had some sort of shallow Hollywood
         | stereotype pigonhole I lumped poets into to my determent.
        
       | hirundo wrote:
       | > Poe also provoked his readers with disquisitions on the
       | technological basis for his literary work, laying out how he
       | would take a poem "step by step, to its completion, with the
       | precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."
       | 
       | So he composed poetry like many of us write code. I wonder if
       | poetry in general shares a form of mental athletics with
       | programming. I'd expect a compiler for poetry to be close to
       | impossible. Though maybe a poetry linter could be useful.
       | 
       | In the end code is strictly constrained by reality and poetry
       | only by imagination, making them fundamentally different. Except
       | maybe for oddities like Poe.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | There are many ways to do "art" and two I know of are the
         | "spontaneous" method that makes it look easy - but there's also
         | the methodical method.
         | 
         | The end results can be very similar even though the paths
         | diverge.
        
         | leephillips wrote:
         | Nabokov spoke of the precision of poetry and the passion of
         | science. Both a poet and a scientist (and a chess problem
         | composer), he had experience.
         | 
         | When David Hilbert heard that a young mathematician had left
         | mathematics for literature, he remarked that it was a good
         | choice, as the man had not sufficient imagination for
         | mathematics.
        
         | throwanem wrote:
         | Imagine what you may, in earth and under heaven -
         | there's nothing in the way of being really *that* unreal,
         | /* poetlint-ignore-next-line no-inflected-rhyme */         but
         | only what we do and say, imagination-leaven'd.         /*
         | poetlint-ignore-next-line no-rain-pain-style-rhyme */
         | The world constrains us all no less, for all we so reveal.
         | // TODO "but are we so constrained", et cetera, et ceter
         | // TODO "when worlds we make at will," and so on in same meter
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://archive.is/CarAf
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-12 23:01 UTC)