Fair point; lots of people probably see themselves as Galileo or Einstein upsetting applecarts, and the temptation is arguably greatest within their field.
I actually doubt it will be that earthshaking, it would be nice if it was but Olber's Paradox, as mentioned, was not very earthshattering in its resolution. I can name a couple dozen other big ones that were resolved as near footnotes. Duality itself, "It's both", doesn't really bug me anyway, it just is, same as opposite particles repelling, and anti-particle annihilating, we know how, why is probably not something we'll get to find out in the foreseeable future.
That is not much as resolutions go; we pretty much knew how particles and waves behaved before anyone determined "light has properties of both because that is what it is." It is an underwhelming scientific breakthrough, much like knowing the formula for universal gravitation (or, more topically, a black holes temperature) without knowing what the symbols mean. It STILL does not make much sense for anything particle-like to have wave-like motion even with no medium through which to propagate one, unless the wave-like properties are just a product of relativistic distortion near c (in which case, why no mass?)
That aside, your history of Olbers Paradox indicates it was rather obscure for most of its existence, which is relevant to its endurance. Recall my frequent observation few big controversies would exist if admitting easy answers; they also would not be big if few people cared or even knew about them. When most of the smartest people hotly debate a question they cannot answer with even the most advanced experimental equipment, it is likely that answer is beyond the smartest people, most advanced equipment or both. Such answers tend to be big unless defying all practical application, because they mean the human race did something previously impossible for it. The longer a question defies answer by the best minds and equipment, the bigger its answer is likely to be if/when finally discovered.
Obviously that will not ALWAYS be the case, but the circumstances of longstanding, widely and well studied, conundrums are conducive to it. By way of analogy, the Moon was neither paradox nor discovery, but if getting there were simple the worlds wealthiest and most advanced nations would not have spent a decade and billions of dollars trying, and the necessary advances had a host of radical lasting impacts wholly unrelated to space travel. There were plenty of breakthroughs most people rarely remember (if even aware of them) because the landing itself so overshadows them.
Unfortunately there are a lot of things in physics that require a lot of math to understand. I try to explain without it when I can, I'll even fudge reality a bit to fit a decent analogy, but there's not an obvious one to me for this that wouldn't be 'too wrong' to offer. From a practical standpoint just assume larger black holes are cooler because they have considerably more volume increase then mass increases, and emit less light because of that, same as a blackbody. Fill two objects, one twice the size of the other, with a cup of boiling water and dump them into the void and the bigger one will give off less background radiation. Same basic concept but the math is different, for instance you've got redshift of light as a huge factor for something outside a black hole's event horizon but still very under its gravitational influence.
Okay, I follow that; thanks. I try to accept my limitations at least until/unless they can be overcome.
Fair enough, though I am leery of equating "unknown" or "undetected" with "exotic," mainly because the Particle Zoos spawned "new particles" almost monthly in the early days before people began to realize many of were just composites and particular interactions of existing particles. SOME Dark Matter consists solely of particles already present in the Standard Model, even if current indications are most does not. Without dredging up our MACHO discussion a while back, "strange matter," despite the misleading name, is still just quarks. It is one thing to say, "observations do not match theoretical predictions, so we are missing something," but quite another to say, "this model requires that 'something' be this particle with these properties." That sounds more like an excuse than a reason.
I'm sorry I'm still not clear what you're trying to say here, as I said any system is almost bound to have a gradient (net direction of force that is non-zero after almost everything cancels out), it doesn't matter for our purposes, it's minimal, and in an infinite universe it just average out anyway but even if it didn't, remember that a particle flying away form us redshifts and gets dimmer, and toward us blue shifts and gets brighter, kinetic energy still contributes to an objects brightness.
Not always positively though, at least not in terms of absolute energy. Red-shifting must lower the amount of energy we receive from an object, because raising wavelengths lowers frequencies and thus energy (I had never thought about it that way, but E=hf means it must be so.) So the brightness might not change, but it could well dip below visible lights threshold, and the energy level could fall until erasing all risk of cooking the universes center (if it had one.)
That was pretty much where I was going, yeah, even if I tried multiple routes to the destination. A photon or anything else striking a very low mass, surface area and density object should transfer a significant portion of its energy into new motion. Such particles can not absorb or emit much energy in the first place, have very little stationary inertia to overcome and there is little nearby to slow them once moving. If a mountain struck a pebble (only) even at very low speed the pebble would take off like a rocket because, hey, what else could it do? Per the Adams reference, our infinitely large onion could have an infinite number of very small (or even very large) particles between its inner and outer layers and the limit of its density would STILL be 0.
In a heat-dead universe all energy is kinetic, its just all random with no pockets of greater or lesser to work with. That's entropy.
Absent potential energy kinetic is the only kind left, yes? And still practically useless for the reason you state. It cannot be random AND uniform, by definition though: If random it is uneven; if non-random, even. Then again, that really depends on space, which depends on gravity, which may not even operate at heat death. I guess the issue is what we specify by "disorder." I take your larger point though, and do not dispute it.
Very Zen. Also kinda meaningless, which is typical of such I suppose. Like I said, I don't know if there are a finite number of questions or if they are all solvable, I've never seen any evidence indicating that was or wasn't so, I know the questions we currently have and I'd like them answered if they can be, some may spawn more questions, some may not, I worry about those if and when they appear because otherwise it amounts, IMO, to a sort of fatalism.
"Zen" and "meaningless" go hand in hand, yes, hence the koans. Finite or not I am unsure we were ever meant to answer every question, else it would tend to fatalist apathy, intellectual Alexanders not so much weeping as shrugging that we had no more worlds to conquer (not that that old legend holds more truth than most.)
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