Posted on my Facebook about Olbers paradox and an infinite universe

You might never have heard of “Olber’s paradox”, but it is one of those perennial provacative items that gets served with most introduction to physics and astronophysics classes. For the lecturer to strut their stuff and appear learned.

Olber is Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840) and the link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox

I like to watch the night sky at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH90mZnmgD4 and, as Hubble telescope and James Webb telescope have found, as far back as those can see, there is always something further and deeper and older to see – if your sensor is big and sensitivity enough. So the problem is not that there is not light filling the whole sky from an infinite universe, but rather our eyes only see dimly, and out telescopes only a tiny tiny bit more.

My personal universe has existed for trillions of trillions of years and is truly infinite. I have a model for the “big bang” and it is just a not too big nova explosion of “big bang sized collection of black holes”. That happens when quark gluon material accumulates in a black hole and then pressure forces that liquid to a crystalline solid state, releasing large, but not infinite energy. Re-seeding a region of space to start over again.  Throwing out chunks of black holes and neutron stars and recycled things.

Like life and death, and life after death, I can think anything I want about the events and processes in my visible and accessible world. I don’t have access to super computers to show what I think it happening. And, seriously, I really do not want to fuel generations of half baked newbies arguing “big things” to impress their potential mates. I went to 6 universities and listened carefully at countless seminars, classes and presentations. The behavior of permanent students is different. Me, I had to work for a living.

If there were a much larger universe and time for things to get here, then gravitational detectors might be able to see distant “big bangs” from that larger universe that started long ago. But LIGO won’t even study and document the gravitational data from the solar system. Why would I expect anyone to look beyond? The light might not get here easily, or the gravitational waves, but a big band size event far away might. Gravity signals are attenuated by distance and complexity.