What I've Learned

Years ago, I attended a Halloween party at Boston College. There were spooky decorations and creative costumes.

One fellow had soda can pop tops, empty milk cartons, and wadded up bits of paper all over his clothes. He had come as a bag of garbage.

Another had an orange-colored leaf pinned to the back of his sweatshirt and a screen-door spring taped to the front. He had come as Daylight Savings Time. (Spring ahead, fall back.)

In addition to activities such as bobbing for apples, we sang Pumpkin carols, which were Christmas carols rewritten for the occasion. "Deck the halls with poison ivy, fa la la la la," and so on.

At one point we all settled down on the gymnasium floor around the representation of an old room. In came a fellow dressed as Edgar Allan Poe. He sat in a wooden desk chair and recited, as convincingly as I've ever heard it, the poem, The Raven.

I enjoyed this very much for I have, since childhood, been a fan of Poe. He is the sort of warped, crazy, despairing genius that, for some reason, appeals to me.

Imagine my delight when I learned recently that Poe, using nothing but his mind, had solved Olbers' Paradox in 1848, years before Lord Kevin figured it out in 1901.

Olbers' Paradox says that the night sky should be light, not dark.

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, a German amateur astronomer, reasoned in 1823 that if the universe is infinite and eternal, no matter where in the night sky we look, our line of sight should fix on the bright center of a star, for the light of all stars, no matter how distant, would have reached earth. Therefore, the night sky should be light, not dark.

Olbers was not the first to consider this problem, but he is the one credited with it, and the paradox bears his name. Olbers' Paradox assumes that the universe is static, an idea supported by the Steady State Theory.

Scientists have since become convinced that the universe is dynamic. The Big Bang Theory supports this idea. If all matter, including all the stars and planets and everything in between, was once a single point and an explosion sent everything shooting out in all directions, then the universe had a beginning and there is a finite amount of mass.

Therefore, when we look at the night sky, there are some stars that are almost too faint to see; there are some, because of their direction of travel and speed are red-shifted into obscurity; and some so distant, their light has not even reached us yet, making the night sky dark instead of light.

Before scientists arrived at the Big Bang Theory and other such explanations for the dynamic state of things, Poe wrote this in his long prose poem, Eureka:

"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."

To say, in 1848, that the universe is so big that there are stars whose light hasn't reached us – thus solving Olbers' Paradox – was pretty good, pretty advanced thinking.

When will the earth see another like Edgar Allan?

Nevermore.