Edgar Allan Poe, Part-Time Cosmologist/Big-Bang Philosopher

During the waning months of 1847, Edgar Allan Poe sat at his desk with a tortoiseshell cat draped around his shoulders and dreamed the universe into being.

Poe believed the book he wrote in that feline-festooned state to be his best work, and he expected its impact to resonate through the ages. It did not. The book, , was largely ignored at the time, and has been dismissed by most Poe scholars as the ramblings of an armchair cosmologist. Yet in that