Edgar Allan Poe is renowned as a writer of horror stories, but he's not so well known as a prophet of science. His extended poem 'Eureka' contains the original concepts of the Big Bang, the big crunch and black holes. In his short story 'The Fall of the House of Usher', written in the first half of the 19th century, the following paragraph can be found. One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, though feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interuption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other source of light was discernable; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. When I first read this, I laughed to myself. Do we have here the early blueprints for the Large Hadron Collider? Will the rays of the LHC be as ghastly as Poe's prophecy predicts?
Yes, I agree. But the rest is uncannily accurate. Literary critics have interpreted this passage in 'House of Usher' as Poe's vision of hell..for reasons I fail to understand.
it's an ironicly buried ivory tower... somewhere cold, deep underground.. It's like a warped pregnancy of mother earth.. deep inside her warm bits is a coldspot, awaiting its speeding proton sperm.
Not being a phsyicist I don't have any degree of understanding but from the way I picture stuff I don't understand how what is going to be created can be called a particle. The pronoun 'it' seems quite dubious also to describe a black hole which apparently can only be 'seen' by the way light curves as it(light waves) passes by. I don't get it; is this 'thing' going to just drop to the floor and sit there like a lump of grey goo? If "it's" a black hole which is generated by the collision of speedy protons inside cold circular vagina does evaporation occur the same as rain water in sunshine? Is the speedy proton semen gonna fertilize in the cold hole giving birth to a baby black hole?
