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[belovelife]

could someone please define hubble's paradox for me

 

without laughing please

[Don Blazys]

I never heard of "Hubbles paradox".

 

There is an "Olbers paradox" often accociated with "Hubbles Law".

 

Heres a definition...

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2GPEA_en&defl=en&q=define:Olbers+paradox&sa=X&ei=TNtoTd70IpCctwfVnfHmAg&sqi=2&ved=0CBcQkAE

 

and here's the Wikipedia article on it...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

 

Don.

[LaurieAG]

Hi Don,

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox

 

A paradox in more ways than one.

 

Thus, Olbers' paradox can not decide between a finite (e.g. some variants of the Big Bang model) and an infinite (Steady State theory or static universe) solution.

[CraigD]

Has you question been answered, Belovelife?

 

Good links and comments from Don and Laurie, IMHO. :thumbs_up

 

My brief paraphrasing:

Olber's paradox (certainly not the original idea of Olber around 1823 AD, as people were writing about something like it as early as Copernicus, around 1550) asks why, if there are, as some astronomers proposed over the centuries, an infinite number of start, we see darkness between the stars at night. It's reasoning is that, if there are an infinite number of stars, every possible direction you could look is looking directly at a star, so should be bright.

 

The paradox is more a philosophical thought exercise than a formal scientific problem. It got somewhat resurrected, though, when Wirtz, Hubble, and others made observations in the 1910s and 20s leading to the empirical law that bears Hubble's name, and cosmologists like Gamow put together the theoretical model we now call the Big Bang (the name was actually give to is as a derogatory joke by an opponent, Fred Hoyle, in a 1949 popular science radio broadcast), because some variation of it showed some promise of deciding between the Big Bang and some "steady state" model, but no great breakthroughs have come of it.