REM%IMSSS@SU-AI.ARPA (Robert Elton Maas) (03/02/86)
M> Date: Fri, 14 Feb 86 09:53:56 PST
M> From: mcgeer%ji@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Rick McGeer)
M> Of course, THE solution to the above paradox is that the universe
*** (key word, emphasized by REM later)
M> expands, and hence the light from the furthest galaxies is redshifted,
M> asymptotically to invisibility, and hence the total illumination of
M> the sky is finite.
REM> Not quite correct, "A" (not "the") solution.
REM> Here's another, not needing redshift, ... It's been a finite time
REM> since the Universe started, ...
BH> Date: 26 Feb 86 19:55:07 GMT
BH> From: hplabs!amdahl!drivax!holloway@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Bruce Holloway)
BH> Subject: Re: Olber's paradox
BH> Another solution (maybe): All stellar objects tend to "clump" into
BH> solar systems, galaxies, clusters, ad infinitum. So instead of spreading
BH> evenly throughout the sky, we just see light from these collections, the
BH> scope of said clumps depending on how far away the object(s) is/are.
Of course! (As Dr. McCoy said when he had put on the thinking-cap
containing all the medical and other knowledge of the ancient
civilization and realized how trivial it was to do brain surgery when
you know so much.) I should have thought of that myself, having workd
with Mandelbrot and Gosper and Farmwald and Moravec on fractal stuff
at SU-AI... Indeed, if the large-scale clumping of the Universe has
sufficiently small fractal dimension, then even in a static and
infinite-time Universe you see only a finite amount of light from any
point due to inverse-square diminuation and less than square
accumulation of stars. It sounds paradoxial, after all with infinite
time the density of light should increase linearily, exceeding any
given level, but actually in fractal universe with increasingly large
voids as you go out further you get an effect similar to a single
local cluster with emptiness beyond: most of the light that is emitted
goes out to fill the infinite void beyond, with the part that stays
local being buonded in intensity.
Here's another idea: if the Universe has sufficiently strong negative
curvature, then even with fractal fadeout exactly matching curvature
fadeout so that number of stars within R radius is R**2, the
defocusing caused by curvature causes light intensity to fade out more
rapidly than 1/R**2 so that the integral can again be bounded.
Clearly I was more right than I imagined when I said there was more
than one obvious (after the fact) solution to Olber's paradox. This
shows how narrow-minded even scientists can be when they think they
know everything there is to be known about some topic and there is
exactly one obvious solution so it must be correct. No wonder ignorant
masses believe EST or any number of other fads is "the only way". I
like this shared brainstorming on topics that we thought we already
knew! (Inflationary Universe, quantum strings and rings,
11-dimensional Universe, blackbody radiation from black holes,
Bayesian cosmology, ...; and the great questions now of Proton decay
and solar neutrinos)