What is Olbers Paradox and how does modern cosmology resolve it?
Heinrich Olbers (1758-1840) is credited with asking in 1826 why the night sky is dark. But it is very hard to believe that he was the first human to ask this astonishingly simple question. If we live in an infinite universe, which has been around for eternity, then every line of sight in the sky should end on the surface of some distant star. The night sky should be as bright as the surface of the Sun. This “paradox” is resolved in modern cosmology because the amount of space we can observe is not infinite, and stars and galaxies have not been around long enough for all their light to reach Earth. Also, because of the expansion of the universe, the light from the most distant galaxies gets shifted into other parts of the spectrum outside the optical range, in the infrared. (159-60) How is it possible for “nothing” to create a big bang? This is one of those questions that may not ever have a sensible answer because we don’t have theories that are powerful enough to describe the initial
