Day We Found the Universe
by Marcia Bartusiak · 6 Apr 2009 · 412pp · 122,952 words
before. In the 1910s Lick astronomer Heber Curtis followed up on Keeler's findings and gathered additional evidence to suggest that these many spiraling nebulae were nothing less than separate galaxies. At the same time, a few hundred miles south at Mount Wilson, near Los Angeles, Harlow Shapley resized the Milky Way, measuring
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Lick graduate fellowship, took over the Crossley reflector in 1910 and continued the groundbreaking work of both Keeler and Fath. And in doing so, Heber Curtis challenged the conventional wisdom with single-minded determination. With great industry and zeal, he took on the problem of the spiral nebulae and made it
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for the annual Fourth of July tournament. Those wanting to go into town often hitched a ride with one of the lucky few, such as Heber Curtis, who owned a car. The astronomer would load people into his Mitchell automobile, nicknamed Elizabeth, making sure to stash a bag of flaxseed in
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battleship. This telescope remains in operation, now searching for extrasolar planets. It's possibly the oldest reflecting telescope still in use for professional research. Heber Curtis standing by the renovated Crossley telescope (Mary Lea Shane Archives of the Lick Observatory, University Library, University of California-Santa Cruz) When Curtis rekindled
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by sight alone if the spiral were considerably larger and at the same time pushed far off into space. An edge-on galaxy photographed by Heber Curtis in 1914, showing the dark lanes of dust and gas within the disk (Copyright UC Regents/Lick Observatory) Even earlier Curtis started reporting that
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unnecessarily complex one—unless forced to do otherwise. One type of nova was far more preferable than two. Arrows point to the novae discovered by Heber Curtis in photos of NGC-4321 taken in 1901 and 1914. (Copyright UC Regents/Lick Observatory) Despite the lack of support for his creative hypothesis,
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not. Despite these loose ends, by the time of the 1917 American Philosophical Society meeting, the island-universe theory was rousing from its slumber. Heber Curtis had begun to publish his findings on the spiral nebulae in the major journals, and his cogent arguments in support of distant galaxies were already
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on it. Soon after Pickering's death, Leavitt at last divulged her most cherished interest to the observatory's new director, Harlow Shapley. Once he arrived at Harvard in 1920, she lost no time in asking his advice on advancing her research on the stars in the Magellanic Clouds. By then Shapley
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And yet, in this time of devastating upheaval, astronomy experienced some of its greatest discoveries. Vesto Slipher was measuring the fleeing spirals, Heber Curtis was ferreting out new ones, and Harlow Shapley was gearing up to move our Sun from its hallowed position at the center of the known universe. While the landscape of
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When he heard about a PhD student from Princeton who was impressing everyone, he arranged to meet the young man in New York City. Harlow Shapley showed up fully prepped to discuss all the latest astronomical discoveries. Instead, the two men ended up talking about the operas Shapley had time to
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had hoped for: “Please come to Mount Wilson.” The Solar System Is Off Center and Consequently Man Is Too Upon arriving at Mount Wilson, Harlow Shapley had no immediate investigative plans, only a developing interest in variable stars. He had told his Princeton mentor, Henry Norris Russell, that he would
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s special area of interest. Such work was immensely valuable in confirming the wide range of stellar types, including the existence of giant stars. Young Harlow Shapley (Photo by Bachrach, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives) It was an odd pairing of adviser and advisee: Russell, with his stiff and
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“This is a peculiar universe” was Shapley's reaction to this new cosmic landscape. So what did this mean for the spiral nebulae, which Heber Curtis and V. M. Slipher were now enthusiastically hawking as separate galaxies? Around this time Shapley's Mount Wilson buddy van Maanen was claiming to see
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either bad weather or the ongoing war. The results of a fourth effort, an American endeavor led by Lick astronomers W. W. Campbell and Heber Curtis, were plagued by data comparison problems and so were never published. That was a fortunate turn of events for Einstein. The shaky American results went
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refraction effect in the Sun's atmosphere or perhaps was due to a physical distortion of the photographic plate from imaging the hot solar corona. Heber Curtis, who met Einstein during his first visit to the United States, was certainly no fan of relativity. “We met in quick succession Their Eminences
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newly introduced theory relating mass to energy, nicely summarized as E = mc2, was offering a fresh clue. What 1920 is best remembered for in the annals of astronomy is Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis meeting in Washington, D.C., before members of the National Academy of Sciences to argue the arrangement of the universe
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along Washington's national mall directly across from the Smithsonian “castle.” In a news report the day before, the Washington Post announced that “Dr. Harlow Shapley, of the Mount Wilson solar observatory, will discuss evidence which seems to indicate the scale of the [Milky Way] to be many times greater than
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Netherlands. It became the conventional wisdom among astronomers. And why not? It fit the general opinion of the time. Only a few, such as Heber Curtis, openly disagreed. Curtis, with his wealth of spiral nebulae photographs at Lick, had earlier attempted to measure a change in the spirals over the years
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with an instrument and chided him for turning into a toolmaker. “You play golf don't you? Well, this is my golf,” he responded. Harlow Shapley at his wheel-like desk at the Harvard Observatory (Harvard College Observatory, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives) Despite their differences in cosmic outlooks
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, until someone gets the right clue,” ventured Russell. The dawn of the 1920s seemed the right time to break the impasse. With the war over, pent-up energies were fueling a plethora of inventions and clever ideas. Heber Curtis, now settled at the Allegheny Observatory, was particularly enamored of a newfangled entertainment
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giant star on Orion's right shoulder were placed inside our solar system, it would engulf the planets out to Jupiter. And, of course, Harlow Shapley at this time was also on the mountain resizing the Milky Way. Hubble's and Shapley's employment at Mount Wilson overlapped for about a
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avoid the galactic plane. At this point, Hubble's publications no longer contained grand references to island universes or other galaxies, as those of Heber Curtis and Vesto Slipher were doing. Hubble started to keep his words fairly neutral, adopting the guarded language that came to be a trademark of his
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his guard and figuratively clicked his heels at this moment of discovery. Hubble couldn't help but notify his nemesis. On February 19 he wrote Harlow Shapley about his efforts over the previous months. Hubble didn't open with polite niceties or inquiries of health. He got straight to the point.
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convoluted reasoning, such as Heber Curtis was forced to use. The Cepheid provided a direct and indisputable yardstick out to the nebula. Andromeda was indeed an island universe. Edwin Hubble's graph of the periodicity of Variable No. 1 in Andromeda, included in his letter to Harlow Shapley that destroyed Shapley's universe
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20 million light-years. It seemed inevitable that the only astronomer to voice immediate doubts about Hubble's new law was his long-standing adversary, Harlow Shapley, who was concerned that distances could only be certain for the nearest galaxies. He was perhaps envious, “in part regretting a lost opportunity to
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professional astronomical community sit up and take notice of celestial objects other than planets and stars. Reigniting up the cause after Keeler's death, Heber Curtis generated even more momentum. The arsenal of data he gathered throughout the 1910s with the Crossley supported a very strong case that the spirals were
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mission as a private, nonprofit education and research organization, carrying out studies on the solar system, comets, extrasolar planets, solar activity, and stars. If Heber Curtis had stayed at the Lick Observatory, he might have had a chance of gathering the decisive proof that the spirals were island universes. But it
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expanding. He was uncomfortable with Einstein's theory and participated in solar-eclipse tests hoping to prove general relativity wrong. In the 1930s he told Harlow Shapley that he wasn't keen on where the research on spiral nebulae was going: “I have so little confidence in the theories of Lemaître,
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mirror, the Hooker continues to carry out valuable research, such as searching for extrasolar planets and monitoring sunspot cycles on other stars. The years that Harlow Shapley spent at Mount Wilson, proving our true place within the Milky Way, turned out to be the “high noon of his scientific life.” After
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spiral”: Ibid. 65 “must be regarded as having a very definite bearing”: Curtis (1917b), p. 182. 65 “Such is the progress of Astronomy”: HUA, Harlow Shapley to Henry Norris Russell, September 3, 1917, HUG 4773.10, Box 23C. 65 show off the plate: AIP, interview of C. Donald Shane by Helen
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“partly because of the strong influence of Dr. Hale's remarkable personality”: HL, Walter Adams Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.15, “Autobiographical Notes.” 113 Harlow Shapley showed up fully prepped … “Please come to Mount Wilson”: Shapley (1969), pp. 44–45. 8. The Solar System Is Off Center and Consequently Man Is
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Lawrence Lowell, March 29, 1920. 115 “keep the rhythm going”: Shapley (1969), p. 11. 115 “The St. Louis Globe-Democrat was our chief contact”: Ibid., p. 5. 115 refused admission … had always desired: Ibid., p. 12. On May 3, 1963, the town of Carthage, Missouri, celebrated “Harlow Shapley Day,” in honor of its
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, then another $100 for the round-trip railroad ticket: LOA, Curtis Papers, Curtis to Campbell, April 8, 1920. 152 When the train broke down … to collect a few native ants: AIP, interview of Harlow Shapley by Charles Weiner and Helen Wright on August 8, 1966. 152 “growth and development” … in weather forecasting:
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NAS, Program of Scientific Sessions, Annual Meeting, April 26, 27, 28, 1920. 153 “Dr. Harlow Shapley, of the Mount Wilson solar observatory”: “Scientists Gather for 1920 Conclave” (1920), p. 38. 153 two friends of Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell … were in the audience to size him up
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Cepheid stars: Baade (1952). 259 Those who desired nature to be uniform breathed a huge sigh of relief: The astronomical community was aghast when Harlow Shapley went to the press and attempted to claim that he, not Baade, had first discovered the correction to Hubble's distance scale. What he actually
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. 265 He had hopes for erecting a big reflector for Michigan's use: J. Stebbins (1950). A 36-inch reflecting telescope, dedicated as the Heber Curtis Memorial Telescope, was erected in 1950 on Peach Mountain, northwest of Ann Arbor. It was devoted to the study of galactic and extragalactic structure. In
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at the Mount Wilson Observatory, and Tony Misch at Lick Observatory, who also provided copies of historic photographs taken by both James Keeler and Heber Curtis. And throughout this long venture, I was fortunate to receive continual encouragement from my colleagues in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing—Rob
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Washington Post, January 1, p. 1. Bohlin, K. 1909. Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens handlingar 43:10. Bok, B. J. 1974. “Harlow Shapley.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 15: 53-57. ——. 1978. “Harlow Shapley.” Biographical Memoirs, vol. 49. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences. Bowler, P. J., and I. R. Morus. 2005.
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. Frost, E. B. 1933. An Astronomer's Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gamow, G. 1970. My World Line. New York: Viking Press. Gingerich, O. 1975. “Harlow Shapley.” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 12. New York: Scribner's. ——. 1978. “James Lick's Observatory.” Pacific Discovery 31: 1-10. ——. 1987. “The Mysterious Nebulae,
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S. Adams and the Imposed Settlement between Edwin Hubble and Adriaan van Maanen.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 23: 53-56. Hoagland, H. 1965. “Harlow Shapley—Some Recollections.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 77: 422-30. Hoffmann, B. 1972. Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel. New York: Viking
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. ——. 1989. The Invented Universe: The Einstein-de Sitter Controversy (1916-17) and the Rise of Relativistic Cosmology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kopal, Z. 1972. “Dr. Harlow Shapley.” Nature 240: 429-30. Kostinsky, S. 1916. “Probable Motions in the Spiral Nebula Messier 51 (Canes Venatici) Found with the Stereo-Comparator.” Monthly Notices of
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
by Dava Sobel · 6 Dec 2016 · 442pp · 110,704 words
variables in her third of the sky and concluded her many years of work on the North Polar Sequence, the Cepheids were beckoning new followers. Harlow Shapley, a young American astronomer completing graduate studies under Henry Norris Russell at Princeton, visited Harvard in March 1914. Pickering welcomed him in typical fashion,
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, Wisconsin, and been entertained by Percival Lowell’s staff in Flagstaff. In the Pasadena office and workshop of the Mount Wilson Observatory, she had met Harlow Shapley. “I was having a good time talking variables with Mr. Shapley that first afternoon,” Miss Harwood reported, “when his telephone rang and he answered
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. The War Department welcomed his model of the “Harvard Polaris Attachment,” and informed him of its plans to produce the instrument. At Mount Wilson, Harlow Shapley announced his plans to enlist in the coast artillery, but Director George Ellery Hale advised him not to, on the grounds that he would likely
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accepted the $500 stipend. • • • THE FIRST TWO PARTS of the revised and expanded Henry Draper Catalogue, published as Annals volumes 91 and 92, made Harlow Shapley impatient for the third. “Can you predict when 93 will be distributed?” he inquired of Miss Cannon from his post at Mount Wilson on May
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himself, at age sixty-five, the right person to lead the observatory into the future. He pictured a younger man taking charge, someone like Harlow Shapley of Mount Wilson—or better yet Shapley’s mentor, Henry Norris Russell of Princeton, only forty-two years old and widely regarded as a brilliant
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members heard in Turner’s words an echo of “Professor Pickering’s international spirit,” and promised to search overseas for the next Pickering Fellow. • • • HARLOW SHAPLEY’S “BIG GALAXY,” as he described it in 1918, filled the known universe. It was so immense that it subsumed everything else: globular clusters rimmed
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they think the Fellowship was a residential one!” • • • MISS CANNON HAD KNOWN all along how things would turn out. The very first time she met Harlow Shapley, during his 1914 visit to Cambridge as a Princeton graduate student, she told him, “Young man, I know what you’re going to do. You
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Agassiz should forget he ever doubted Shapley’s competence to direct the Harvard College Observatory. CHAPTER TWELVE Miss Payne’s Thesis ONE MIGHT HAVE EXPECTED HARLOW SHAPLEY to regret leaving the giant telescopes and ideal viewing conditions of Mount Wilson for life in a cloudy East Coast metropolis. Once settled in Cambridge
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problem of absolute magnitudes.” By May a Harvard Circular reported the “Distances of Two Hundred and Thirty-three Southern Stars,” under the joint authorship of Harlow Shapley and Adelaide Ames. With this new form of acknowledgment, Shapley out-Pickeringed Pickering. The late director had written virtually all the circulars himself, always
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s long unused observatory, and with its small telescope began to explore the sky. In 1922 a classmate took Miss Payne to London to hear Harlow Shapley address the Royal Astronomical Society. She already knew Shapley’s name from papers he had written at Mount Wilson about globular clusters, but in
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“I have been playing again with my motions and how I look at the measures.” He continued to believe in them, though others ceased believing. Heber Curtis, Shapley’s former “debate” opponent, reveled in the proven reality of the island universes. Writing in Scientia in 1924, Curtis thrilled at the implications
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Miss Cannon occupied a room in the observatory residence as the special guest of Arthur Stanley Eddington and his sister, Winifred. During the IAU assembly, Harlow Shapley presented an illustrated talk about Miss Cannon’s progress on the Henry Draper Extension. She went next to stay with her friends Herbert and Daisy
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supreme. • • • “YOUR KIND OFFER OF THE Agassiz Research Fellowship made me very happy and I accept it with both hands,” Bart Bok wrote to Harlow Shapley on April 22, 1929. “Priscilla was delighted when she heard about the chance at Harvard. When it hadn’t come, she had promised to come
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astronomer. He had studied in Bulgaria and Berlin, and written a doctoral dissertation about eclipsing binary stars, in which he cited papers by both Harlow Shapley and Cecilia Payne. Just recently he had lost his job at the Babelsberg Observatory for political reasons. Gaposchkin was under suspicion in Germany of being
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happened that the current president and first vice president of the society were men particularly important to the winner’s career, Henry Norris Russell and Harlow Shapley. The interest earned on Miss Cannon’s $1,000 principal amounted to an inaugural prize of only $50. However, she had located an able
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of nuclear fusion by which stars generate their heat and light. In addition to Edward Pickering, Harvard College Observatory winners of the Bruce Medal include Harlow Shapley, Bart Bok, and Fred Whipple, who propounded the “dirty snowball” model of comet construction. To date, only four women have received the Bruce Medal.
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acknowledge astronomers for lifelong accomplishments. Those researchers who have won both the Draper and the Bruce include Edward Pickering, George Ellery Hale, Arthur Stanley Eddington, Harlow Shapley, and Hans Bethe. No women have ever taken both prizes. In the years since Miss Cannon was awarded the Draper Medal, only one other
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greater, impact on progress in astronomy. Once calibrated and applied to the problem of measuring distances across space, Miss Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation allowed Harlow Shapley to extend the boundaries of the Milky Way. The same Cepheid stars, subjected to the same analytical techniques, enabled Edwin Hubble to appreciate the
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’s colleges. His treatment of women, widely perceived as more than fair, invited fellowship funding that further advanced women’s participation in astronomy. When Harlow Shapley came to Harvard, he was able to redirect the fellowship money into a program of graduate education that initially—and necessarily—favored women over men
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a plate, then call out each number and also her judgment of its spectral type to a recorder who wrote down her pronouncements. Soon after Harlow Shapley took over as director of the observatory, Annie Cannon accompanied Solon and Ruth Bailey to Peru, where she often walked (or rode) for hours
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she did not mind climbing up and down ladders to operate the 13-inch Boyden telescope and take her own plates of the southern stars. Harlow Shapley enjoyed the flexibility of the unique revolving desk-and-bookcase combination devised by his predecessor, Edward Pickering. Cecilia Payne traveled to the Harvard Observatory
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in Pasadena and published their comments in the Astrophysical Journal under the heading “Correspondence Concerning the Classification of Stellar Spectra.” CHAPTER TEN: The Pickering Fellows Harlow Shapley reminisced about his life experiences in a breezy memoir called Through Rugged Ways to the Stars, published in 1969. He dedicated the book “To
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the memory of Henry Norris Russell.” Margaret Harwood’s letters to Annie Jump Cannon, Edward Pickering, and Harlow Shapley are preserved in the Harvard University Archives along with other materials pertaining to the observatory, but most of her private papers and photographs are held
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astronomy career when she spoke at a commemorative symposium held August 25–29, 1986, in Cambridge. The proceedings were later published as a book, The Harlow Shapley Symposium on Globular Cluster Systems in Galaxies, edited by Jonathan E. Grindlay and A. G. Davis Philip. The proceedings of another symposium, organized in
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in the Annals, beginning with vol. 91. 1919 Edward Pickering dies. Solon Bailey serves as interim director. 1920 Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis debate the scale of the universe. 1921 Harlow Shapley is named fifth director. Henrietta Leavitt dies Harlow Shapley and Annie Cannon explore the relation between spectral type and magnitude. 1922 International Astronomical Union adopts Harvard’s
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arrives from England as Harvard’s second graduate student in astronomy Harvard Reprints series initiated to disseminate staff members’ published articles in professional journals. 1924 Harlow Shapley issues the first in a series of papers detailing the distance, size, and structure of the Magellanic Clouds. Ninth volume of the Henry Draper
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Memorial is published in the Annals, vol. 99. 1925 Harlow Shapley introduces a new publication series of books, the Harvard Monographs, beginning with Cecilia Payne’s doctoral dissertation, Stellar Atmospheres. 1926 Harvard Bulletin switches to monthly
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publication, each issue containing several items of interest. Harlow Shapley introduces Harvard Announcement Cards for news (of comets, novae, asteroids) between issues of the Bulletin. 1927 Number of known variable stars reaches five thousand, more
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than four thousand of which are Harvard discoveries, found on the glass plates. Harlow Shapley and Helen Sawyer complete new catalogue of globular clusters, their number increased to 95 Boyden Station moves from South America to South Africa. 1929 Priscilla
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telescopes move to rural site at Oak Ridge. 1934 Cecilia Payne and Sergei Gaposchkin elope. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin wins the Annie Jump Cannon Prize. 1935 Harlow Shapley inaugurates graduate summer program in astronomy and astrophysics. 1939 Annie Cannon finds Harvard’s ten thousandth variable star. 1941 Annie Cannon dies. 1943 Antonia Maury
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Annie J. Cannon Memorial Volume in the Annals, vol. 112. 1950 Helen Sawyer Hogg wins the Annie Jump Cannon Prize. 1952 Antonia Maury dies. Harlow Shapley retires Donald Menzel becomes acting director. 1954 Donald Menzel officially named sixth director of the observatory. 1955 Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory moves from Washington, D.C
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a Vassar alumna, was the observatory’s first graduate student in astronomy, earning her master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1924. She worked with Director Harlow Shapley to catalogue galaxies. Solon Irving Bailey (December 29, 1854–June 5, 1931) extended the reach of the observatory by reconnoitering good locations for high-
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Russell (October 25, 1877–February 18, 1957) of Princeton University, regarded as the dean of American astronomers during his lifetime, supervised the graduate work of Harlow Shapley and Donald Menzel. Industrious and influential, he studied stellar composition and evolution, the relationship of magnitude to classification, and the distinctions between giant and dwarf
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stars. Helen B. Sawyer (later Hogg) (August 1, 1905–January 28, 1993) took up the study of globular clusters with Harlow Shapley. After completing her doctoral work at Harvard, she moved with her husband, Frank, to Canada, becoming the first woman to observe with large telescopes in
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column and other writing. Arthur Searle (October 21, 1837–October 23, 1920) served at the observatory for fifty-two years, including a period as acting director after Joseph Winlock died. He assisted Pickering in photometry, and taught astronomy classes at Radcliffe. Harlow Shapley (November 2, 1885–October 20, 1972), the fifth director, from
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, 1963) joined the staff following her 1906 graduation from Radcliffe. In addition to work on variable stars and light curves of novae, she served as Harlow Shapley’s secretary and a trusted adviser to the younger women at the observatory. Margaret Walton (later Mayall) (January 27, 1902–December 6, 1995) cooperated
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entity given the same name by modern astronomers, who believe dark matter is what holds galaxies together. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Miss Cannon’s Prize After Harlow Shapley announced the wedding of Cecilia Payne and Sergei Gaposchkin, Miss Cannon made a note on the appropriate page in her diary. This particular diary was
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Glass, I. S. Revolutionaries of the Cosmos: The Astro-Physicists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Grindlay, Jonathan E., and A. G. Davis Philip, eds. The Harlow Shapley Symposium on Globular Cluster Systems in Galaxies. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988. Hale, George Ellery. The New Heavens. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. Hall
From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll · 15 Jan 2010 · 634pp · 185,116 words
Pynchon (1984), 88. 3. THE BEGINNING AND END OF TIME 34 In fact there was a literal debate—the “Great Debate” between astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis was held in 1920 at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Shapley defended the position that the Milky Way was the entirety of the universe, while Curtis
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
, and so could be explained away as the sputtering of a Laplacian protosun. But then, in 1917, George Ritchey, an optician at Mount Wilson, and Heber Curtis, an astronomer at Lick, announced that they had found several novae in old file photographs of spirals. Other astronomers started ransacking their plate files, and
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funds for ever larger telescopes and recruiting some of the world’s leading astronomers to Mount Wilson. One of the cleverest of his recruits was Harlow Shapley. Shapley had studied at Princeton Observatory under Henry Norris Russell, where he specialized in Eclipsing Binaries. These are double stars, so close together in the
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etymology, from bugge, meaning “important.” Those who disagreed preferred to emphasize the word’s Latin etymology, from buccae, for “puffed up.” Among the dissidents was Heber Curtis of Lick Observatory, an advocate of the “island universe” theory. Shapley reacted to Curtis’s arguments with the abhorrence of a patient contemplating surgery: Curtis
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began training the big telescopes at Mount Wilson on the spiral nebulae, but he worked fast: Only five years later he was able to write Harlow Shapley that he had found Cepheid variable stars in the spirals, establishing that they are galaxies and making it possible to estimate their distances. Five years
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spheres; his work lays the foundation for his later assertion that gravitational contraction cannot be the mechanism that powers the stars. Time: 1917 Noteworthy Events: Heber Curtis and George Ritchey announce that they have found novae (stars that have suddenly increased tremendously in brightness) in the Andromeda spiral. Opinions differ on whether
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in the spectra of spirals, later found to be due to the motion of the spiral galaxies in the expanding universe. Time: 1918 Noteworthy Events: Harlow Shapley determines, by studying the distances of globular clusters, that the sun lies toward one edge of a galaxy of stars. Noteworthy Events: The 100-inch
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’s prediction that space, in a gravitational field, is strongly curved. Time: 1920 Noteworthy Events: The controversy over whether spiral nebulae are gaseous clouds or “island universes”—i.e., galaxies—comes to a head in a debate between Heber Curtis and Harlow Shapley. Time: 1922 Noteworthy Events: Ernst Öpik deduces, from rotation velocities and the
Big Bang
by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words
. LEON BRUNSCHVICG Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. CHARLES BABBAGE Theories crumble, but good observations never fade. HARLOW SHAPLEY First, get the facts, then you can distort them at your leisure. MARK TWAIN Heaven wheels above you displaying to you her eternal glories and
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astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory, and they sent an ambitious young astronomer, Harlow Shapley, to argue on their behalf. The opposing view, that the nebulae are galaxies in their own right, was popular at the Lick Observatory, who sent Heber Curtis to defend their position. By chance, the two rival astronomers ended up
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studied and collected for many years. Figure 39 The two main protagonists in the Great Debate: young Harlow Shapley (left), who believed that the nebulae lay within the Milky Way galaxy; and the more senior Heber Curtis, who put forward the case that the nebulae were independent galaxies far beyond the Milky Way., When
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. The decisive observations that made this possible and thereby calibrated the Cepheid distance scale were achieved thanks to a team effort by astronomers who included Harlow Shapley and Denmark’s Ejnar Hertzsprung. Together they used a combination of techniques, including parallax, to measure the distance to one Cepheid variable, which then transformed
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Mount Wilson was dominated by astronomers who believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy and that the nebulae lay within it. In particular, Harlow Shapley, who had defended the single galaxy theory in Washington, took great exception to the new boy, to his views and his demeanour. Shapley’s own
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto · 10 Oct 2011 · 692pp · 127,032 words
all Cepheid variables. These blinking stars became “standard candles” for measuring distance throughout the heavens. This was an immense discovery, and in 1915 American astronomer Harlow Shapley, a liberal Democrat, used it and Mount Wilson’s sixty-inch telescope to map the Milky Way in three dimensions. Shapley’s measurements expanded the
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the Milky Way, rather than entire “island universes”—galaxies—of their own, as fellow astronomer Heber Curtis posited. He debated this point with Curtis at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in April of 1920, in an event famously called the Great Debate. The debate ended in a draw because there
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, a negative value—in showing personality or telling engaging stories about their work intended to inspire the public. Hubris, after all, is what had ruined Harlow Shapley’s career; it was the gateway to the rosy path of a priori principles. From a pure science viewpoint, human spaceflight was wasteful. But from
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in science. It was simply a grand circle, or an endless regression. But Kuhn’s theory, while dramatic and captivating, was incorrect. Individual scientists, like Harlow Shapley, may fall off track and become overly invested in a priori, Cartesian first principles and thus become blind to observational evidence, but overall scientific progress
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just too complex to be the result of evolution and thus must be evidence of “intelligent design,” a more recent version of creationism.6 Like Harlow Shapley, Behe has made the mistake of clinging to an a priori first principle rather than building his understanding with observational evidence, and so his conclusions
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what was in its time the greatest scientific laboratory on Earth—without having any idea of what it might find. Using the Mount Wilson Observatory, Harlow Shapley showed that the sun was not at the center of the Milky Way. Using it, Edwin Hubble showed that there were thousands of other galaxies
The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy
by Moiya McTier · 14 Aug 2022 · 194pp · 63,798 words
somewhere near the middle. Will you humans ever miss an opportunity to try to put yourselves at the center of everything? A young rebel named Harlow Shapley had been using Cepheid variables (thanks to Henrietta Leavitt) to map globular clusters in my halo. Globular clusters are just what your astronomers call collections
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of me, because in his head, I was far too large for there to be anything outside of my bounds. A more established astronomer named Heber Curtis disagreed with most of what Shapley said, especially the part about my being big enough to encompass the nebulae, which he believed were their own
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black hole’s event horizon. This supported an early hypothesis from the 1970s about the formation of jets, which were first observed in 1918 by Heber Curtis of Great Debate fame. Roger Blandford and Roman Znajek were working at Cambridge University when they speculated—without a shred of evidence and probably over