IS THE WORLD A STAGE?
(BENTLEY & OLBER PARADOX)
BENTLEY PARADOX:
In fact, we can say that it emerged from the famous question that the Roman philosopher Lucretius also got caught up in: “The universe is not restricted in any direction, if it were not so it would surely have a limit somewhere, but obviously anything cannot be the limit unless there is something outside that would limit it.
There is no end in the universe in any similar dimension on this or that side, up or down. “
In his letter to priest Richard Bentley Newton in 1692, he asked ourselves a similar question to the clearest question that we should ask and think about: “Since gravity is always attractive and never repulsive, any aggregation of stars will naturally mean piling up on each other.” Bentley argued that if there was only pull in space, instead of the sky being static at night, the stars would be buried together and cause an extinction like fire, and if the universe was infinite, the force acting on any object or star in the universe would be infinite, so stars and matter would break into fireballs.
At first glance, this letter will have surprised and defeated one of the best scientists in the world, Newton, that he could not answer this question in the light of science, and in a letter he wrote to the Bentley, he said, “There is a need for an uninterrupted miracle that will prevent the sun and fixed stars from falling on each other by the effect of gravity.”
WHY IS THE WEATHER DARK AT NIGHT ?
OLBERS PARADOX:
In the Olbers paradox, like the Bentley paradox, at first it may seem deceptively simple, it has enraged many philosophical thinkers and astronomers for generations. “Why is the sky black at night?” It focuses on a very difficult and complicated question. It is based on the observation that in an infinite universe, gravitational forces and beams of light can aggregate to produce infinite and meaningless responses. Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who was the first to introduce the paradox in 1823, gave the first answer to the paradox. “Luckily the earth is not receiving starlight from every point in the sky,” Olbers said! Yet in the face of an unimaginable luminosity and warmth up to 90,000 times the size we currently experience, the supreme god could have easily designed organisms capable of adapting to such extreme conditions. “ He wrote. Olbers argued that for the world to be a habitable place, dust clouds had to absorb intense heat, but unfortunately, the paradox he posed cannot be fully explained by clouds of dust. Dust clouds that absorb the light of infinite stars in infinite time will eventually shine like the surface of a star, so at night the dust clouds must shine in the sky.
But the strangest part of the Olbers paradox is that the first person in history to solve this paradox is not an astronomer but a poet and writer with an interest in astronomy, Edgar Alan Poe. Eureka wrote the following in a paragraph of his philosophical poem, which he called an essay on the material and spiritual realm.
“For them, stars that follow each other are endless. Then we are presented with a uniform light against the background of the sky, and this way the galaxy is displayed. While it is obvious that nothing exists in the background, they cannot explain how the stars came into being. Therefore, from this point of view, we can only grasp the gaps that our telescopes see in countless places. These gaps can be mistaken for the invisible background; These voids, vast and with no light, can still tell us something. “
Poe understood that his words would shed light on science, which he concluded as follows:
“This is the solution to the right answer. The universe is not infinitely old. There was a creation. There is a shortcut with an end to the light that reaches our eyes. The light of the most distant stars has not yet had time to reach us. “
Cosmologist Edward Harrison, who first discovered Poe’s words, said, “I was astounded when I first read Poe’s words, a poet is most likely an amateur scientist to find the correct explanation 140 years ago … while still being taught incorrectly in universities?” The correct answer to the paradox was found in 1901 by the Scottish physicist Lord Kelvin. Kelvin realized that looking at the night sky shows its present state, because the speed of light is still limited (299,792 km per second), and that it takes time for the light of distant stars to reach the earth, albeit enormous by earth’s criteria. Kelvin calculated that for the night sky to be white, the universe would have to expand by trillions of light-years. But since the universe is not trillions of years old, the sky is necessarily dark. At the same time, another answer to why the night sky is dark is the ages of the stars, measured in billions of years.
Nowadays, it has become easier and possible to find or verify the answers to these paradoxes. We will may find what is there beyond the stars.
Perhaps when we go beyond its stars, we will only discover the perfect order of the god, as he pointed out years ago in his Newton, which we will only discover (though sometimes even the god himself has to intervene and tidy up the universe to prevent the everin from collapsing).
Maybe the universe is just like the lines written by Shakespeare in his play How you like it.
“The whole world is a stage,
All men and women are also actors.
Each of them has entry and exit times. “
RESOURCES
MICHIO KAKU — PARALLEL WORLDS (MY SOURCE OF IDEA AND INSPIRATION IN MANY TOPICS)
