Olber's Paradox/Ignorance (Re: The Big Bang)

Mike Coward (mikec@ilnk.com)
Mon, 03 Nov 1997 22:15:03 -0500


Hi John,
I'm back.

>By the way, if as you say the universe is infinite in all directions and
thus
>is infinitely old and has an infinite number of stars, how do you explain
>Olber's Paradox. Why is the sky dark at night?

How about EMs moving across the spectrum?

>
>Pick any point in the night sky and extend a line from you to that point,
>eventually the line will hit the surface of a star, so the entire sky should
>be as bright as the sun. Put it another way, all the light emitted by an
>infinite number of stars would have nowhere to go,

Stars surrounding us act as shields reflecting the light outside.

>it would accumulate and
>vaporize the earth. Your interstellar gas would be no help because it would
>heat up too.
>
>The Big Bang theory has no trouble with Olber because light from stars more
>than 20 billion light years away has not had time to reach us yet.

So no visible light was out there 20 billion years ago?
If the universe is expanding do you think that space should be filled
with light generated before it got so far a way?
Take two flashlights facing each other and move them apart,
unless they move FTL or stop facing each other
there will be no gap of darkness.

NASA gave me the impression that the more powerful my telescope was
the more galaxies I could see in the emptiest part of the sky.

> >An infinite Universe has nowhere to expand _into_. Right?
>
>
>Wrong, I'm the manager of a hotel that has an infinite number of rooms and
>all are occupied, you walk in and ask for a room. No problem, I just tell
>guest #1 to move to room 2, 2 to move to 3, 3 to move to 4 ect.

If %100 of infinity is occupied
then Jello is going to lose it's room at the end of infinity. :-)

> John K Clark johnkc@well.com