If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!Ĭampbell believed, which he told Asimov, that in fact this wouldn't be the case, and that men would go mad, because these men wouldn't know of the universe, and it would the knowledge of the universe that breaks them.

The book itself it based on a quote of Ralph Waldo Emmerson, given to Asimov by his editor John Campbell. And this isn't one star, it is thousands upon thousands of stars. Even had they put all 30,000 dots, that would have done nothing, because the point of the star is the knowledge that it is a star, the same as one of your six suns, but a distance away so incomprehensible that the star has the appearance of a single point. My understanding was always that it wasn't the stars themselves which caused the problem, it was the knowledge of just how large the universe was. So yes, the author explains why the experiment failed, but never makes it clear if the psychologist might have correctly guessed it. Thirty thousand mighty suns shown down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frightening in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world. Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye - Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Whereas at the end of the story we find out there are far more visible stars than in Earth's night sky: Say that there were a lot of suns that far off a dozen or two, maybe.

The astronomers are imagining a relative few stars being visible: So part of the problem is that their illusion was not convincing enough, but we don't ever actually find out if the psychologist, Sheerin 501, had the right idea. It was just a roof with holes in it, and that's just what it looked like. The caps fell away and the roof glittered all over with little dots of light-' In the story Faro 24 and Yimot 70, who constructed the makeshift planetarium, say that when they opened the holes in the roof, what they saw was just a dimly lit roof:

Isaac asimov's nightfall