Wednesday 3 February 2016

17)” “Olber’s Paradox” states that if there were billions of stars which are suns the night sky would be filled completely with light. As Edgar Allen Poe said, “Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, since there could exist absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star.” In fact Olber’s “Paradox” is no more a paradox than George Airy’s experiment was a “failure.” Both are actually excellent refutations of the heliocentric spinning ball model.

At last, here is one that’s genuinely scientifically interesting. But it has already been solved, and doesn’t do anything to challenge the scientific truth about a spherical Earth.

First, notice that Dubay quotes a little bit of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing on the topic – carefully stopping before Poe gave an explanation, and so giving the dishonest impression that Poe thought this was right. Poe was not even discussing the idea of a flat or round earth, but whether there are an infinite number of stars.

I won’t try to reproduce the whole of the very good solutions to the supposed paradox. Briefly, Olber’s paradox is one piece of evidence that the universe is expanding, and this expansion is “outrunning” the light from very distant stars.  To find out for yourself, start from here:


or here:

Or here:


Or get any good book on astronomy and cosmology.

No comments:

Post a Comment

(Please make your comment reasoned and based on evidence . Abusive comments will be totally ignored.)