(Submitted August 15, 1998) I'm a middle school geography
teacher with no formal expertise in, but a lifelong fascination
with, astronomy and space in general. I seem to remember from a
long ago college astronomy course a discussion of Oblers'
Paradox that explains why we don't have perpetual daylight
despite the billions of bright stars that presumably send their
light to all parts of the earth. In trying to explain this
concept to my eight-year old daughter, I get tongue-tied by all
the technical jargon involved. Can you help me put my
explanation in layman's In an infinite universe, which has
existed forever, we shouldn't have night. Imagine a universe
divided into shells, with stars of a single brightness
distributed evenly --- if you look at a shell twice as far, each
star is only a quarter as bright, but there are four times as
many stars, so each shell is equally bright. If you have an
infinite number of shells, you end up with infinite brightness!
The big bang cosmology solves this, mainly by the impl