Abstract
Edwin Hubble was born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri. Pictures of him both as a young man in his early twenties and as an elderly, honored astronomer reveal that rangy, midwestern look. Hubble was tall and lanky, with a plain, all-American face and an air of quiet confidence. While still a child he and his family moved to Chicago. There he attended high school and received a scholarship to the University of Chicago. Hubble studied mathematics and astronomy, inspired and encouraged in part by Robert Millikan and George Ellery Hale. A brash young astronomer and teacher, Hale was the driving force behind the construction of the Hooker and Hale telescopes in California. Millikan was a physicist and educator who taught at the University of Chicago from 1896 to 1921 and later at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he was director of Cal Tech’s Norman Bridge Physics Laboratory. In 1923 Millikan received the Nobel Prize in physics for his measurement of the charge of the electron and his exploration of the photoelectric effect. Millikan was mentor and inspiration to a whole generation of physicists and astronomers, and Hubble must surely rank as one of the most famous of his students.
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, …
—William Wordsworth Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
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Notes
Actually, the nonexistant centrifugal force is not really a “force” like gravity or magnetism but rather an artifact of our perception. It seems to us that one body orbiting another is held in orbit by a balance of an inward-pulling “centripetal force” and an outward-pulling “centrifugal force.” In fact, only one force is in action, the centripetal force we know as gravity.
This quote appears in English translation in Pannekoek’s A History of Astronomy,272. Its original publication is in Christiaan Huygens’s Traité de la Lumière, et Discours de la Cause de la Pensanteur (Leipzig, 1885), 119.
In Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World ( London: Cambridge University Press, 1932 ), 85.
The kelvin is the SI (Système international d’unités,or metric system) symbol for thermodynamic temperature. A kelvin is the same as a degree Celsius, the more commonly known metric system temperature measurement. However, degrees Celsius start from the freezing/ melting point of water and go up and down from there. The kelvin temperature range begins at absolute zero, which is defined as —273.15 degrees Celsius. Before 1967 scientists expressed a kelvin temperature as “degrees kelvin” (with the symbol °K). Since then, by international agreement, it is simply expressed as “kelvins” or with the symbol K. For more information on the SI, see the appendix.
For a detailed exploration of antimatter, the history of its discovery, its role in science fiction novels, and its possible use in our future, see Robert L. Forward and Joel Davis, Mirror Matter: Pioneering Antimatter Physics ( New York: Wiley, 1988 ).
The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English Language,3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
Much of this information on the genesis of the COBE project came via e-mail from Dr. Charles Bennett, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and from John C. Mather and John Boslough, The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe ( New York: Basic Books, 1996 ).
This part of the COBE story is strongly colored by individual perceptions, personality clashes, and some very disturbing activities. George Smoot’s version of the story is recounted in his book Wrinkles in Time. However, Mather, the COBE Project Scientist and leader of the entire scientific endeavor for COBE, has a somewhat different story to tell in Mather and Boslough’s The Very First Light. E-mail from Charles Bennett and Edward Cheng about this part of the story, which was forwarded to the author, supports Mather ‘s recollections. Those readers who wish to get the details of the unfortunate actions of a member of the COBE team are urged to read Mather and Boslaugh’s book.
This quote is reported by Charles Bennett, e-mail, March 25, 1997.
Preliminary reports on the MaCHO discoveries appeared in the sci.astro newsgroup of the Usenet, as carried on the Internet, on September 21, 1993.
Charles Bennett, e-mail, March 25, 1997.
The quotes come from the Reuters news article as it appeared under the headline “Religion and the Big Bang Discovery,” Seattle PostIntelligencer,April 25, 1992, B6.
This quote originally appeared in J. C. Mather, “Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE): Report to the Space Science Board” (NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, 1977 ), 3.
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© 1997 Joel Davis
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Davis, J. (1997). Ripples of Light. In: Alternate Realities. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3440-6_3
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