olbers’ brightest sky

sound like i do have friends visiting my blog living on the other side of the world. i learn with great pride and honour. this short tale i dedicate now to taichi-san and to all old and new japanese friends.

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Hours were passing by, and I could not sleep because of some recurrent thoughts. Somehow I found myself playing with Olbers paradox.
According to Olbers, supposing universe dimension to be infinite and, as well, number of stars, then the nightsky should be white instead of black. Why? In Olbers’ opinion it would be enough to imagine a hypothetic line from here towards any direction outside, so that sooner or later a star should be waylaid. A very fascinating theory. Say, universe is a huge lamp switched on for humanity.
For some reasons I was pushed back to twenty years ago. It was August 13th, Tsukimi day. Mariko and myself, we spent all night lying in a field, my head against her head, watching the stars above us. The sky was bright and the stars were shining like silver stings. Mariko pointed her finger to each constellation and explained me the history of its name. I felt like a survivor in the sea of her words. My heart went boom, boom, boooom! I was scared it would definitely jump out of my chest oozing red blood like a fountain. We were counting shooting stars. She soon reached ten, but I could count only three, and one was maybe an aircraft. We spent the whole evening laid it the field, head against head, underneath the immense sky. Then, at a certain point Mariko told me she wanted to go back home. Suddenly my heart stopped booming, stopped beating, stopped doing anything. Of course, I said, but I felt so deep blue inside. Did we really see all stars of the sky? Did we really talk about all constellation? All of them? I could not believe. All in all, night breeze started blowing, and the sky was getting cloudy.
We gathered all our stuff and we went back home. Just before jumping off the car, Mariko put a gentle kiss on my cheek and stared at me. Here eyes were deeper than a whole universe, and brighter that one thousand constellation. Brighter than the sky itself, brighter than Olbers brightest sky.
Next week Mariko had a brand new boyfriend. A guy called Alberto attending physics university, third year, fond of science fiction and astronomy. No, it wasn’t me. Myself I was just a rookie at engineering university and about stars, myself… ah, goddamit!
It is true that Olbers paradox was originally formulated by Kepler. I finally fell asleep wondering how many times in a lifetime things that should belong to you finally fall in sombody else’s hands.
And why.