Olbers' Paradox
If the universe is infinite and full of stars, every line of sight should end on one. So why is the night sky dark?
1610 (Kepler), 1744 (de Chéseaux), 1823 (Olbers)17 min read
American letters
Edgar Allan Poe
1809 – 1849
Poet, critic and inventor of the detective story. In his last major work, Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), he set out a speculative cosmology and, in a single celebrated passage, gave the correct shape of the answer to the dark night sky: the void between the stars exists because light from the most distant of them has not yet had time to reach us. He offered it as intuition rather than physics, and it was ignored for a century.