Illustrating Olbers' paradox

I can't believe I never saw this before (it's from Wikipedia's page on Olber's paradox):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Olber's_Paradox_-_All_Points.gif

 

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There photons get distributed over retina area with around 500 Megapixel resolution. This is also very objective, a fact really. This final part of photons journey across the universe helps us realize a white square is brighter than a grey square regardless of their size, that total intensity is not the same thing as brightness.

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Humans do not see with a single atom, they see all the pixels in the retina at once. The paradox completely ignores this, it measures total intensity thinking it's measuring brightness. It fails to account for "per unit projected area", it fails to recognize 10 white dots are actually brighter than 40 grey dots.

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Even if existed and experimentally confirmed, such sensor obviously fails to account for the inverse-square law.

 

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How can it be uniform if there are patches of sky similar to the Hubble Deep Field where there are no stars up to 10 billion light years away which need exposure time of almost a month to accumulate enough light in order to be brightly visible?

It's only due to your imaginary sensor obliviousness to brightness decrease due to inverse-square law that you think every patch of the sky is equally bright.

Let's make stars transparent to light coming from behind off further away stars. No replacing at all, only additive blending. Time exposure required for far away stars to become bright, or even visible at all, would still make it look just like our real world night sky.

 

Yeah, look at all those oranges falling from the sky!

This is how stars look like:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

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Even if your made-up concept of "brightness" were true, it still wouldn't help you: the resulting picture after assembly isn't going to be grey, it is going to be bright white.

Here you are simply looking reality in the face and refusing to accept it. There isn't much we can do to help you if you have no intention of trying to learn and refuse to believe anything that doesn't adhere to your beliefs.

You are confusing Olbers' paradox with reality. Olbers didn't know what reality looked like; he was speculating. It's a thought experiment. He assumed the universe was uniformly and randomly populated by stars.

You're both the pot and the kettle here: you are making this stuff up as you go.

Sorry, I didn't get the memo that you'd changed your mind.

The root of this problem remains that you don't understand how the inverse square law works. You really need to put some effort into learning it.

 

Right: so the brightest picture is the third one, right? Now add an infinite number of more shells....keeps getting brighter every time you add a shell, doesn't it?

 

What's the exposure time used in Olbers' paradox?

Are you sure you know what we were talking about? We were talking about his special detector with arbitrarily high resolving power and parallel (tube) field of view as narrow as a single photon, always smaller than star's angular size, and always points only at photon sized point on the star's surface. This sensor knows not what the inverse-square law is.

post #21
- "So, whichever direction you point the detector, it detects photons at the same rate (the rate each star emits 500 nm photons in a particular direction). Therefore, the sky is uniformly illuminated at 500 nm, at whatever intensity the typical star's spectrum has at that wavelength. This holds for every other wavelength, too; therefore the whole sky is uniformly illuminated with the same spectrum and intensity as the Sun's surface."


post #36
- "Every line of sight ends on a star, and I was dealing with an idealised detector with an extremely narrow (strictly, infinitesimal) field of view. Therefore, the photons it receives comes from an infinitesimal point on some star's surface, and the (infinitesimal) photon reception rate is equal to the (infinitesimal) number emitted per unit time by the star from exactly that point in exactly the Earth's direction. This does not depend on the distance between the detector and the star, it just depends on the total number of photons emitted per unit time per unit surface area by the star."

If Olbers only tried to draw it. So, how do I convince you? Let's draw that image and see what we get, eh?

I passionately disagree. Rrrhh!

If I'm not learning something here, then I blame you for not being able to teach me!! Would it be ok if I post a thread on physicsforums how to disprove Bell's theorem by using billiard balls? It works with real-world and simulated physics billiard balls, it produces the same result, the spooky faster than light action at distance! I'm not sure if disproving it would be considered a good or bad thing by Quantum Mechanics enthusiasts of today. I know Einstein would have liked that. How about you?

 

It's getting darker much, much, much, very much faster, than it is getting brighter. Much!

 

None: he was intending that you view with your eyes. This isn't a trick, humbletelescop, it is nothing more or less than the paradox says: the sky, everywhere, looks like the surface of the sun.

Quite sure. I understand how I've been able to take the pictures I've taken -- why galaxies aren't much dimmer than they appear, despite great distances.

Sensors are not entitled to ignore the inverse square law, no matter how convoluted you make the logic confuse you about how they work.

It's already been done plenty of times, you just refuse to accept the answer given.

Agreed. And that's why you aren't learning: you are letting your passion defend your brain against the entry of logic.

No. Teachers teach, but responsibility for learning is on the student. You can lead a student to knowledge, but you cannot force him to think.

You should reread the rules you agreed to follow when you signed-up there.

I think I already see the flaw.

 

Oy, really?

Ok, let's try again: regardless of if the second shell is dimmer than the first by your made-up definition of "brightness", the sum of the two is "brighter" than either, right?

 

Yes.

How much is the resulting image brighter than the left image?

 

It's your made-up concept of "brightness", so I can't answer that, only you can. But as long as the resulting image when you add two together is "brighter" than the first image, you're still following the paradox as intended.

So we agree that the sum of two images is "brighter" than the first image. Great. Now add a third: is the result still "brighter" than any of the others?

...hopefully you at least recognize that when you say an image is both brighter and dimmer than the previous, that's a self contradiction...

 

He was intending that you view with your eyes, of course! So why is there no resolution of the human eye taken into account?

I'll forgive you only if you're doing this subconsciously. C'mon! You know what I told you is true. You can feel it, your soul knows it, I know it, we all know it! Deep down, you know it too... it's true, it really is. Admit it!!

That doesn't prevent me from blaming you still. Shame on you!

What about scientific scrutiny, constant re-examination and re-evaluation? You are not afraid I might actually be correct, are you?

 

Almost got you there, ehh? The battle of wits. From now on we fight with Jazz!

[video=youtube;LcPbAKhLiv4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcPbAKhLiv4[/video]

Yes.

Never!!

How much more of exposure time we have?

 

Though I'm sure he didn't know what the human eye's resolution is, I am sure he knew it didn't matter since the resulting sky is uniformly bright up to the point where you start seeing sunspots on those distant stars.

Well, see now this explains a lot: you cannot "feel" your way to knowledge.

Of course you are entitled to blame me or anyone else for your failures!

Lol, no. You have to learn what is already known before you can expand what is known. You are a decade of intense study away from that point -- assuming you first learn how to learn.

 

Great, now add a fourth shell: the resulting image is brighter still?

No more: Olbers's paaradox does not involve changes to the detector setup.

 

Yes.

Without knowing how much brighter and without exposure time, how will you know when to stop or when the image is bright "enough"?

Well, the time is passing, you are measuring intensity, that is power per unit solid angle. The time will be the end of you. Maybe you can do without resolution and see with only one pixel eye, but without time, there is nothing. Nothing, I tell ya!! Come to your senses, give it up.

 

Great!....

Hey, now there's an actual good question: how indeed?! Why don't you take a crack at answering it: you are more likely to believe the answer if you figure it out yourself. Some food for thought:
The 50th shell; how many stars are in it? How many pixels are there in your images?

I'm not sure what you think you are talking about, but I'm quite sure I never said there was no time.

Hmm...I'm thinking I may need to start teaching you calculus...

 

I'm afraid that's a checkmate. Now, will you help me write a paper so we can convince the rest of the world? No one will believe me, but with you we might have some chance. And we even share Nobel prize money so you can buy a bigger telescope. How about it?

I seem to be stuck in time, my timer still shows zero time has passed since we started. Maybe if you tell me how much light intensity have you accumulated so far, or how many photons?