Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines Edgar Allan Poe’s engagements with nineteenth-century thermodynamic theory via his broader literary explorations of a principle of cosmic deterioration. Focusing especially on the untimely apparitions of entropy and universal heat death in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “Mask of the Red Death” (1842), it argues that these apparitions derive from Poe’s creative responses to two primary sources. The first is Epicurean atomism, the most important exposition of which Poe found in Lucretius’s De rerum natura, as mediated by the agonistic interpretations of English natural philosophers Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and John Mason Good (1764–1827). The second is the energetic conception historian of science Stephen Brush calls “the wave theory of heat,” which Poe absorbed from contemporary experimental natural philosophers and popularizers of science, including Dionysius Lardner (1793–1859) and John W. Draper (1811–1882). These sources enabled Poe to conceptualize the universe as a system in which irreversible change occurs due to inevitable loss in the transmission or transformation of energy. Poe gave proleptic, poetic expression to this concept in his writings, leading to their haunting echoes in later formulations of, and responses to, entropy and universal heat death.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".