From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Nov 04 1997 - 06:50:27 MST
Greg Butler <gsb1997@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> While I have no idea on whether the universe is infinitely large or not,
> an answer to this "paradox" seems a bit obvious. Imagine you have a star,
> and a senser right next to it. You would be reading a great deal of energy
> from the sensor. Now, move the sensor several light years away. You would
> read a great deal less energy, since most of the energy from the star would
> be radiating away from the sensor. Basically, all that energy from an
> infinite amount of stars would be radiating away into an infinte amount of
> space. That's why our skies would be dark in an infinite universe.
No. The amount of radiation you get from a star decreases with the
square of the distance. But the number of stars grows with the square
of the distance, so the total radiation from a given distance is
approximately constant. This means that in an infinite universe the
radiation diverges.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:45:05 MST