Ancient Discussions On Temporal Finitism and Anticipations in Philosophy and Literature
In medieval philosophy, there was much debate over whether the universe had a finite or infinite past (see Temporal finitism). The philosophy of Aristotle held that the universe had an infinite past, which caused problems for medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers who were unable to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of the eternal with the Abrahamic view of creation. As a result, a variety of logical arguments for the universe having a finite past were developed by John Philoponus, Al-Kindi, Saadia Gaon, Al-Ghazali and Immanuel Kant, among others.
In 1610, Johannes Kepler used the dark night sky to argue for a finite universe. Seventy-seven years later, Isaac Newton described large-scale motion throughout the universe.
The description of a universe that expanded and contracted in a cyclic manner was first put forward in a poem published in 1791 by Erasmus Darwin. Edgar Allan Poe presented a similar cyclic system in his 1848 essay titled Eureka: A Prose Poem; it is obviously not a scientific work, but Poe, while starting from metaphysical principles, tried to explain the universe using contemporary physical and astronomical knowledge. Ignored by the scientific community and often misunderstood by literary critics, its scientific implications have been reevaluated in recent times.
According to Poe, the initial state of matter was a single "Primordial Particle". "Divine Volition", manifesting itself as a repulsive force, fragmented the Primordial Particle into atoms. Atoms spread evenly throughout space, until the repulsive force stops, and attraction appears as a reaction: then matter begins to clump together forming stars and star systems, while the material universe is drawn back together by gravity, finally collapsing and ending eventually returning to the Primordial Particle stage in order to begin the process of repulsion and attraction once again. This part of Eureka describes a Newtonian evolving universe which shares a number of properties with relativistic models, and for this reason Poe anticipates some themes of modern cosmology
Read more about this topic: History Of The Big Bang Theory
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