In the process, he humiliated his archrival Harlow Shapley, another prickly self-made Missourian, who didn’t believe that nebulae were galaxies and, given the chance to discover it, had wiped the crucial ink marks off the photo plate.įive years later, Hubble had begun to fill in the larger picture of island universes, strewn like dust as far through space as the rapidly enlarging eyes of mankind could see, rushing enigmatically and majestically away from each other. Within four years, Hubble had supplied the definitive proof that one, the Andromeda nebula, was in fact a huge conglomeration of stars as large as the Milky Way and vastly far away. The nature of the mysterious clouds known as nebulae that pocked the sky was the burning astronomical issue of the time. with nebulae in his eyes, arrived in 1919, coincidental with the opening of the 100-inch Hooker telescope, the world’s largest. Many of the most colorful of these characters were hanging around Mt.
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Along the way there is a suitably Runyonesque cast of supporting characters, from Milton Humason, mule driver and dropout who rose to become a tobacco-chewing wise-cracking astronomer, to Nicholas Copernicus, the faithful cat. In “Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae,” Gale Christianson has dug through previously inaccessible archives, interviews with Hubble’s sisters, friends, relatives, and colleagues, and Grace’s eloquent and suspect journals to piece together a riveting portrait of a great scientist and a haunted man, and the best look we are likely to have of the real Hubble.Ĭhristianson glides gracefully between the personal and the cosmic as he moves from Hubble’s rock-ribbed American boyhood on the plains of Missouri to his journeys among the stars of both the celestial and earthly variety. As this fascinating and heroically researched biography makes clear, however, most of those tales were made up of whole cloth.
All that remains are her own idolatrous journals in which she recorded the exploits he recounted. He produced no memoir.Īfter his death his wife, Grace, destroyed his personal papers. In this expanding universe of publicity, it is something of a scandal that Hubble’s own story has not been adequately told until now. Cosmologists today travel the planet like rock stars, and when they want to have a meeting they have to hire a convention hall. More books than are good for your sanity or your eyesight have been written about the big bang and the mysteries of its putative past and future. He was photographed with Albert Einstein.
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Movie stars made pilgrimages to the telescope to see him Hitler allegedly sent a U-boat to kill him.
By the 1940s, Hubble was the second most famous scientist in the world.
It was there that he described the first revolutionary hints of what we now call the expanding universe. The junior Hubble’s horses were giant domed clockworks of steel and glass perched on the rugged, precarious heights of Mt. Seemingly without breaking a sweat, Hubble rode into history in the 1920s the way his patriarchal grandfather had ridden on a sorrel horse with white feet and a mane that touched its knees into Springfield, Mo., in 1856. He interacted with others, an awed young astronomer once said, as might a god. Champion athlete, war hero, lawyer, hero of the Wild West, he had it all. If ever a man looked and acted in accordance with the part that history had assigned him, astronomer Edwin Hubble was that man: tall and Hollywood handsome with a dimpled chin and the pipe-smoking gaze of an English gentleman.
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