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
Swiss astronomy
Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux
1718 – 1751
Astronomer of Lausanne, best remembered for his observations of the great comet of 1743. In an appendix to that work he gave the first genuinely quantitative treatment of the dark-sky problem, computing how far one must look before stars tile the whole sky, and proposed — as Olbers would independently, eighty years later — that a tenuous absorbing medium swallows the missing light.