At 10:16 AM 3/26/99 -0500, Mike Lorrey wrote (amid a blizzard of inane
drivel and some interesting but not quite relevant reminders from Billy):
Me:
Stay with me here, Michael. *Space* can obviously expand faster than
light, and can carry along with it any matter and energy embedded locally
in it (so to speak) How do you think the Big Bang could have happened so
fast otherwise?
>> The farthest galaxies will
>> start to be carried away faster than light some 15 billion years hence.
Mike:
>So the Guardian thinks matter can travel faster than light? Whoever wrote
that
>is mistaken.
>> Indeed, I wonder if it has any salience to the traditional explanation for
>> Olber's paradox.
>If the universe were eternal, we would have infinitely bright starscapes. We
>do not, so it is not.
Grrr. Olber's paradox is exactly that we don't see the whole sky as being as bright as the sun (*not* infinitely bright, due to inverse square diminishment), since every bit of it would be filled in by stars between stars beyond stars out to infinity.
Find the paper itself at
http://xxx.lanl.gov/find/astro-ph,gr-qc,hep-ex,hep-ph,hep-th/1/lawrence;krau ss/0/1/0/96,97,98,99/1/0
Damien Broderick