The REAL Reason Why Space is Dark

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I chanced on this today and a couple things I like about it:

1) concise story why the sky isn't bombarded by the light of every star in the universe (at least in a visible wavelength).
2) Some really interesting history, also I had no idea about Egar Allen Poe's interest in physics and that he himself had no clue that he'd be remembered more for his poetry and literature than his physics.

It's just under 9 minutes so it makes for a good knowledge bite.

Thnx

That is interesting. Both that Poe had a physics insight, and the rest.

Einstein said matter cant go faster than light. But space can expand at any speed it wants to.

It reminds me of how Isaac Newton probably would have assumed he'd be known for his alchemy. Fascinating how many people did other things that don't often get discussed.

Newton also made futurist predictions. One notable one was that man would be able to travel at speeds exceeding 50 miles per hour. He was greatly ridiculed for that one. It was known that any speed above 40 miles per hour would cause internal hemorrages due to vibrations from the rough roads and the minimal suspensions of the wooden-wheeled wagons and carriages.

Thomas Jefferson's tombstone says "here lies TJ. Author of the declaration of Independence, the author of the Virginia statute for freedom of religion, and the founder of the University of Virginia".

I guess that he didnt want a menial job like ...President of the United States...to be on his resume.

Thats probably true. That Newton probably spent more mental energy and time on his passion for "metals"... in the vain quest to transmutate baser metals into gold....then he did ...on figuring out why that apple bounced off of his head. But the later insight (about gravity)...remade the world...made modern astronomy and modern engineering possible.

Newton was both a pioneer of rationality, and ...a backward looking adherent to whacky stuff like alchemy.

Another figure had the same but opposite legacy. In the 1600s a certain Bishop of Ireland took up a career in history..and was a major pioneer in scientific, rational, evidence based, historical scholarship...primary sources...everyone...primary sources.

He applied that approach to the Holy Bible. Was one of the first historians to try to...not just count the "begats" and add them up...but to try to peg events described in the Bible to outside sources. If the Bible says that king so and so of Babylon sacked a particular city...and Babylonian sources say the same thing...and if we know the date that the Babylonians did the sacking...then we got one more piece of a solid outside framework to hang the internal Biblical chronology on. And that was what he went for.

So he came up with a solid improved Bible-as-history. This pioneer scientific historian was Bishop Ussher.

Trouble is that today folks think of Ussher as an enemy of rationality...the dragon slain by Darwin because he came up with the date of 4004 BC for the date of Creation.

But Ussher did not invent the idea that the Earth was only few thousand years old. The Jewish calender had always counted the years from the date of what the ancient rabbis thought was the date of Creation ( only a few decades different than Ussher's date) for at least two thousand years before Bishop Ussher. The whole Judeochristian world had always assumed that the world was only "almost six thousand years old" as a character in Shakespeare said. So Ussher gets a bad rap as an enemy of rationality when in fact he was a innovator towards rationality in his field.