Essay Questions

What is Olbers' Paradox, and how was it solved?

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers was a German astronomer who lived in the early/mid-nineteenth century. In 1826, he formally posed the following question: why is the night sky dark? For a little background to this question, astronomers had surmised that there were nearly countless stars, and physicists had determined that atmospheric dust would not obscure more than half of the light coming through the atmosphere. So the question arose: why wasn't the night sky blazing with the light of millions of stars?

Interestingly, American writer Edgar Allan Poe was the first to propose the correct solution, although he had no evidence and his theories were ridiculed at the time he published them. He theorized that the answer lies in the age of the universe: light can only travel so fast, so the darkness of the night means that the stars are so far away that their light hasn't arrived yet. These theories were ridiculed for nearly a hundred years before Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, discovered that this was in fact the case by determining that the universe had a fixed point of beginning, and that everything in the universe was moving away from each other as a result. This realization solved Olbers' Paradox and revealed a fundamental fact about the nature of the universe at the same time.

Explain the unusual structure of this essay collection.

Dewdney structures this collection of short essays in an aesthetically pleasing, meaning, and compact form. He divides the prose into fourteen chapters, each chapter containing several smaller essays. Chapters One and Fourteen consist of the introduction and the conclusion, respectively, while Chapters Two through Thirteen each deal with a specific aspect of night in relation to a certain hour of night between 6 PM and 5 AM. For example, Chapter 2 is entitled “THE GARDENS OF THE HESPERIDES: SUNSET —6 P.M.” This chapter includes several smaller essays within it, including "Sunset Spectacular," "The Sundowners," "The Physics of Sunset," and others. There are twelve of these chapters, one for each hour between 6 and 5. This structure is perhaps an overcompensated attempt to string together a series of completely unrelated essays, but it has the added effect, in tandem with the regular epigraphs, of giving the book a sense of regular, soothing rhythm that evokes a sense of an arcadian rhythm. Arcadian rhythms actually have their own section in the book, so that works nicely, intentional or not.