Troy H

So...you don't know then?

CNVRTfromBMW

I thought it was a joke, but no, sadly, I don't :-)

Troy H

BTW, I just finished a class in cosmology & relativity, so bear with me.

When we consider the universe, there is a characteristic distance, determined by the area of the sky and the apparent diameter of stars, that describes the average distance we should have to look in any direction to see a star.

Think of it this way, in a forest of X trees per square mile, each with a diameter of Y, there is a formula to calculate the average distance an arrow would fly, fired in any random direction, before hitting a tree.

With two simple assumptions, we can determine then that the night sky should be bright with starlight, since at each point in the sky our sightlines would intercept a star. Because we DON'T see this, one (or both) assumptions must be wrong.

The two assumptions are 1) The universe is infinitely large & 2) The universe is infinitely old. The first is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, but the second, through various studies (mostly that of the CMBR) has allowed us to determine that the universe is most certainly not infinitely old. Therefore, there are stars that are too far away for their light to have reached us yet.

THE MEROVINGIAN

I had to cheat a bit and use wikipedia<ul><li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers_paradox">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers_paradox</a</li></ul>

CNVRTfromBMW

...that is out there. That is some wicked thinking you got going on there, Troy H.

And they say automobile forums are just about brainless guys only wanting to talk about going fast and faster...

Troy H

Si, señor!

Troy H

we transitioned from cosmology to relativity. Now THAT stuff takes some wicked thinking. One of the questions on the final involved the difference in travel time between a photon and a neutrino from a source 10000 LY away from earth. The first part was, "What is the difference in arrival time between the photon and neutrino, in the observer's reference frame?" Turned out to be (iirc) 3 ms or so. The second part was "How long does the trip take in the neutrino's reference frame?" The answer was 3.5 days. Now, try wrapping your head around something happening in 3.5 days for one person while taking 10,000 years for another.

IAS5

...because he thinks our lights are blue, should we try to explain this to him, or will this give him reasonable suspicion to search our car for the funny stuff?