Editing Olbers's paradox (section)

== History ==
[[Edward Robert Harrison]]'s ''Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe''<ref name=Harrison1987>{{cite book <!--|authorlink=Edward Robert Harrison--> |first=Edward Robert |last=Harrison |year=1987 |title=Darkness at Night: A Riddle of the Universe |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=9780674192713 }}</ref> (1987) gives an account of the dark night sky paradox, seen as a problem in the history of science. According to Harrison, the first to conceive of anything like the paradox was [[Thomas Digges]], who was also the first to expound the [[Copernican heliocentrism|Copernican system]] in English and also postulated an infinite universe with infinitely many stars.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Scientific Revolution: The Essential Readings|volume=7|series=Blackwell Essential Readings in History|editor-first=Marcus|editor-last=Hellyer|publisher=[[John Wiley & Sons]]|date=2008|isbn=9780470754771|page=63|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1VhC63yV-WgC&pg=PA63|quotation=The Puritan Thomas Digges (1546–1595?) was the earliest Englishman to offer a defense of the Copernican theory. ... Accompanying Digges's account is a diagram of the universe portraying the heliocentric system surrounded by the orb of fixed stars, described by Digges as infinitely extended in all dimensions.}}</ref> [[Johannes Kepler|Kepler]] also posed the problem in 1610, and the paradox took its mature form in the 18th-century work of [[Edmond Halley|Halley]] and [[Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux|Cheseaux]].<ref name="new cosmos">{{cite book|title=The New Cosmos: An Introduction to Astronomy and Astrophysics|series=Physics and astronomy online|first1=Albrecht|last1=Unsöld|first2=Bodo|last2=Baschek|publisher=Springer|date=2001|isbn=9783540678779|page=485|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nNnmR8ljctoC&pg=PA485|quotation=The simple observation that the night sky is dark allows far-reaching conclusions to be drawn about the large-scale structure of the universe. This was already realized by J. Kepler (1610), E. Halley (1720), J.-P. Loy de Chesaux (1744), and H. W. M. Olbers (1826).|bibcode=2001ncia.book.....U}}</ref> The paradox is commonly attributed to the [[Germany|German]] amateur [[astronomer]] [[Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers]], who described it in 1823, but Harrison points out that Olbers was far from the first to pose the problem, nor was his thinking about it particularly valuable. Harrison argues that the first to set out a satisfactory resolution of the paradox was [[Lord Kelvin]], in a little known 1901 paper,<ref name=Harrison1987/>{{rp|227}} and that [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s essay ''[[Eureka: A Prose Poem|Eureka]]'' (1848) curiously anticipated some qualitative aspects of Kelvin's argument:<ref name="NYT-20150803" />
{{Blockquote|Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy – since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.<ref name="eureka">{{cite news|title=Eureka: A Prose Poem|author=Poe, Edgar Allan|date=1848|url=http://books.eserver.org/poetry/poe/eureka.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080426162441/http://books.eserver.org/poetry/poe/eureka.html|archive-date=2008-04-26}}</ref>}}