The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [110]
In these days long before computers or handheld calculators, Hubble's computations for assessing the magnitudes of his Cepheids and determining their periods were scribbled on pieces of flimsy yellow paper or heavy graph paper—hundreds of pages now filed away in an archive. Points were carefully plotted on a graph to indicate a Cepheid's changing luminosity. As if playing connect the dots, Hubble then drew a crude line through the points, which displayed across the page the steady rising and falling of the Cepheid's light.
Hubble was not the best astronomer when it came to equipment. Anxious to see his results, he sometimes cut corners in the darkroom, not always using fresh developer or trimming the time for fixing and washing. The photographs and spectra he handled himself were often scratched up and required retouching before publication. But as a celestial accountant he was superb. Hubble patiently carried out his computations for variable after variable. Novae, as well, were studied and tabulated. It's the very core of astronomical work, the endeavor that is never glorified, carried out as the astronomer is hunched over a desk far away from the telescope. It was there in his quiet, book-lined office on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena—a spacious but spartanly furnished room once occupied by Hale—that Hubble truly discovered the universe. As Caltech astronomer Jesse Greenstein once said, astronomical observing “is one lump of beauty mixed with lots of incredible boredom and discomfort…. A single fact involves a tedious, incredibly long, difficult process.”
Edwin Hubble developing a photograph in the darkroom
(Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California)
And yet, despite his myriad pages of data—proof upon proof of a universe beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way—Hubble still did not publish. Given the relentless reconstruction he performed on his personal life story over the decades, it is obvious that Hubble's ego was fragile. But these boastful embellishments were attached to his life, never to his scientific achievements. Highly conservative when it came to celestial speculation, Hubble never stuck his neck out in the arena of science, unlike Shapley, who readily (and loudly) broadcast his conjectures. Hubble's legal training might well have taught him to restrain his musings until the facts were firmly in hand, or perhaps he couldn't stand the thought of the disgrace if he had to retract his discovery, one that was going to remake the universe.
It was easier for Hubble at this stage to discuss his new findings informally. In July, he wrote Vesto Slipher on routine astronomy committee matters and at the very end of his letter casually mentioned his latest work: “You…may be interested to hear that variable stars are now being found in the outer regions of Messier 31. Already a half dozen are definitely established and several others are under suspicion… You can realize how eager I am to get curves for the others, and how bashful to discuss prematurely the Period-Luminosity relations.” Hubble didn't know that Slipher had already heard about the intriguing finds. The news was rapidly spreading on the astronomical grapevine. Curtis became aware of Hubble's discovery the previous March; Shapley, of course, even earlier. And Princeton's Henry Norris Russell first heard it from James Jeans in England! The tendrils of the grapevine had a long and convoluted reach.
Besides Hubble, no one had more at stake on the outcome than Adriaan van Maanen. If Hubble's discovery held up, it meant he was wrong about his rotating spirals. So, van Maanen made sure to keep tabs on this new development at his observatory and glean all the latest gossip. “What do you think of Hubble's Cepheids,” he wrote Shapley.
Shapley, meanwhile, was receiving updates from Hubble, hearing about the latest