Eureka Video 3

Eureka - Text w/ annotations

https://www.belladeflor.com/s/Eureka-Video-3-Annotations-Bella-DeFlor.pdf

EUREKA Video Script

The Soul of the Universe

Eureka: Video 3 — A Deconstruction by Bella DeFlor

Hi there, I’m back. It’s been three months since my last Eureka video.

Eureka is Edgar Allan Poe’s final published work, and in it, he uncovers what he calls the metaphysical truths of our reality.

What if I told you that Edgar Allan Poe revealed the Big Bang long before the Big Bang was ever a theory—and yet he almost never gets recognition for it?

In this video, we’re focusing on Poe’s view of gravity.
Even today, science still can’t explain where gravity comes from. We can measure it. We can calculate its effects. But its ultimate origin remains a mystery.

And in the world of science and mathematics, when we can’t trace something back to its origin—it’s almost as if, in a scientific sense, it doesn’t fully exist.

Think about that for a moment. In our world, we expect anything that exists to be explainable. Yet gravity—the very thing that holds everything together—is still unexplained.

So yes, we live by the pull of gravity. But we don’t know its cause. And Poe had something to say about that.

Introduction to the Series

If you’re new here, my name is Bella DeFlor.
I’m building this channel to explore literature, language, spirituality, and universal truths.
You can follow me across all platforms at @IsabelEthereal.

It’s been three months since the last installment, but I promise to be more consistent in bringing you this kind of content.

This is the third video in my Eureka series. I’m breaking Poe’s book down section by section, in chronological order, so you don’t get lost in the difficulty of his text.

I’ve also posted the section we’re discussing today on my website, with my annotations for easier reading. You can find the link in the comments.

So let’s get back into it.

Video 1: The Foundation of Unity

In Video 1, we began with Poe’s idea of Original Unity.
In the beginning, everything was one. No separation, no stars, no atoms, no complexity—just a single, indivisible whole.
From that One, creation unfolded. The One became the many: suns, stars, worlds, and particles.

Video 2: The Finite and the Infinite

In Video 2, we explored Poe’s understanding of the finite and the infinite.
Infinity, he says, is not endless extension but endless possibility.
The finite universe is measurable. And because it’s finite, it cannot expand forever.
It must one day return to its source.

Poe insists the universe isn’t drifting into nothingness—it’s held in a cycle of expansion and reunion.

Video 3: The Language of Science

Now, in this third video, we take that vision into the language of science.
Poe turns to Newton’s law of gravity—the idea that every particle of matter attracts every other.
It’s the law that explains apples falling, moons orbiting, and planets staying in their paths.

Most of us think of this as settled, as ultimate truth.
But Poe asks us to look deeper.

He honors Newton but insists that gravity is not merely a mechanical force.
It is a sign—a symbol of something greater.

For Poe, gravity is the soul of the universe expressed in matter—the universal call of all things to return to their Source, to become one again.

One quick note before we dive in: Poe was raising these questions about Newton almost seventy years before Albert Einstein reframed gravity as the curvature of spacetime—what we now call the theory of relativity.

Attraction and Repulsion: The Twin Principles

Poe begins this section of Eureka by discarding the words we’re used to hearing—“gravitation” and “electricity.”
He says they’re too narrow, too misleading.

Instead, he gives us something more primal: attraction and repulsion.
Attraction, he calls body—the principle of drawing together.
Repulsion, he calls soul—the principle of pushing apart.

Notice what he’s done. These aren’t just physical forces anymore.
He’s elevated them into metaphysical truths—the twin principles of existence itself.

The Limits of Proof

Newton told us that every particle attracts every other particle, proportional to mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
And that law works. It explains apples, moons, and planets.

To us, it feels like ultimate truth.
But Poe asks: does this law actually explain why? Or does it simply describe what we see?

For him, Newton’s law is powerful but incomplete.
It shows attraction body to body—but it doesn’t reveal the universal return of all matter to its Source.
It looks like diffusion, not reunion.

Here Poe takes aim at the very idea of proof.
Newton demonstrated consistency. His law matched appearances.
But appearances alone don’t reveal ultimate truth.

Poe says truth must be suggested. It must be perceived intuitively.

Every Atom in Relation

And so he pauses in awe.
He asks us to stop and marvel: every atom attracts every other atom. Everywhere. Forever.

Think of a cannonball—its atoms outnumbering the stars in the sky, each one reaching out to every other.
Or think of a speck of dust drifting in a sunbeam.
Move it a billionth of an inch, and you shake the moon in her path.
You alter the sun. You shift the destiny of the stars.

This is not just science. This is reverie.
The mystical vision of Unity hidden in every relation.

Here, Poe foreshadows what we now call the butterfly effect—the idea that the smallest action ripples outward, changing the whole.

Beyond the Center

But then he makes a correction.
Attraction, he says, is not really a “tendency to a center.”
That’s only how it appears to us.
The center is just an effect of the deeper truth: each atom tending to each atom.

The law is not local. Not geographical.
Its essence is Unity-seeking, not center-seeking.

This is where Poe begins to alter Newton’s law—not everything is being pulled toward a center, but toward the Source.

And whether Poe starts from intuition and simplicity, or whether he starts from Newton’s facts, both paths bring him to the same conclusion: Original Unity is the source.

The Certainty of Unity

He even admits he may prove nothing to the schools, but he says with conviction:
He is more certain of Unity than of tomorrow’s sunrise.

In his own words, he is less sure of his heartbeat, his soul, even the rising of the sun—than he is of the fact that all things once sprang from the primordial One.

The Divine Volition Behind Gravity

From here, Poe draws on Dr. Nichol, who admitted that Newton’s law cannot be ultimate—it lacks the simplicity of geometric axioms.

Poe agrees but pushes further.
The only true ultimate law, he says, is the volition of God—Unity itself.
Because mathematics alone cannot grasp metaphysical truth.

Then Poe makes his boldest declaration.
He says the true mode of gravity is simple if you see it from the right perspective.

Matter was once irradiated outward from Unity, scattered into diffusion.
And now, in its return, it follows the same law in reverse.

Think of light: at twice the distance, it spreads over four surfaces.
At three times, nine. At four times, sixteen.
That’s the inverse-square law of diffusion.

And if matter once spread outward by this law, then in its return it must contract by the same law.
Gravitation is simply irradiation reversed.

The Triad of Existence

This gives us Poe’s triad:
Unity — the primordial One.
Diffusion — the scattering of atoms into complexity.
Irradiation — the geometric law that governs both scattering and return.

So gravity is not mystery.
It is symmetry.
The law of return mirrors the law of expansion.

The Clues in the Stars

Finally, Poe points us upward.
Look at the stars—broadly uniform, globular in form, equidistant, and yet infinitely irregular and varied.

Exactly what we would expect if atoms once diffused from Unity.
Even the roughness, the unevenness—these aren’t flaws but clues.

Poe says it is in these oddities that Reason finds the way back to truth.

The Meaning Behind the Law

In this section of Eureka, Poe takes us from Newton’s gravity to his own metaphysical law.
Gravity is not just a downward pull, not just a fall to centers.
It is the great cosmic longing of all things to return to the One.

He ties it to the geometry of light, to the symmetry of expansion and contraction, to the stars themselves as they glitter above us.

And this is why Eureka matters.
Because Poe refuses to let us stop at description.
He demands we seek meaning.
That we see the metaphysical behind the mathematical—the soul within the science.

Closing Reflection

In the next video, we’ll keep following Poe as he unfolds the destiny of the universe—the cycle of expansion and return, and the mystery of creation as an act of Unity diffusing itself into multiplicity.

Thank you for watching this third video of my Eureka series.
After three months away, I am back, and I’ll be posting more content.

If you enjoyed this exploration, give this video a like and stay tuned for what’s next.

— Bella DeFlor