Edgar Allan Poe had a theory very similar to the Big Bang 80 years before it was scientifically formulated!

Eureka was published in 1848 and is a long non-fiction work by Edgar Allan Poe (best known for his poem The Raven). He subtitled it “A Prose Poem” though it has also been subtitled as “An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe.” The work explains Poe’s intuitive idea of the nature of the universe but provides no scientific evidence to support this idea.

While Eureka has been considered to not have any scientific worth or merit, it essentially describes the Big Bang. Poe hypothesized that the universe began from a single originating particle which divided into all the particles of the universe. He did think however, that God set this all into motion. He also described black holes and expressed a theory shockingly similar to the Big Crunch theory.