Unlike the earlier thinkers, who thought that the light from distant objects might grow tired or that the ether might block it, Poe proposed that the universe was not old enough to give light sufficient time to get to the earth from the most remote regions of the vast night sky.17 And if it was not old enough, that meant it was not of infinite age. In Poe’s view, if our present universe had existed for an infinitely long time, then the light would have had plenty of time to reach observers on earth, even if it traveled at a finite velocity across a great distance. But if our universe had only
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