The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [116]
Hubble had even gained enough fame to be joked about. “Professor Edwin Hubble announces that he has found another universe. Some people never seem to know when they have enough,” said the caption of a Nation cartoon.
At lectures Hubble drew record crowds. At one Los Angeles talk, the room was filled to capacity while hundreds more jammed the doorways and windows to listen in. An additional five hundred were turned away. “Astronomy, as a matter of popular interest,” reported the Los Angeles Examiner, “joined rank with football and prize fights” that night. When standing on the balcony of Mount Wilson's observatory laboratory one night with a reporter, the two gazing at the lights of the towns below, Hubble was asked how he carried out his work. “It is like looking at those lights,” he replied, “and from them alone trying to tell what manner of people live there.”
From that point on, the nebulae beyond the Milky Way became the sole subject of Hubble's professional life; he scarcely studied anything else—although he did by chance discover “Comet Hubble” in August 1937 while photographing a spiral nebula. When a friend asked him to name Jupiter's moons one day, he could recall three or four but no more. “I am commuting to a spiral nebula, and I forget the suburban stations,” he responded apologetically.
Astronomers had been proceeding outward into space and time on stepping-stones. The first stops were at the globular clusters, followed by a giant leap to the spiral nebulae. The conventional understanding of the universe was changing and very swiftly. Just a few years after Hubble confirmed the existence of other galaxies, Jeans wrote that “astronomy is a science in which exact truth is ever stranger than fiction, in which the imagination ever labours panting and breathless behind the reality, and about which one could hardly be prosaic if one tried.”
The English poet Edith Sitwell, upon a visit to Hubble's home, was ushered into the study, where she was shown slides depicting the myriad galaxies that cannot be seen with the naked eye, galaxies millions of light-years away. “How terrifying!” exclaimed Sitwell, to which Hubble replied, “Only at first. When you are not used to them. Afterwards, they give one comfort. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about—nothing at all!”
Except, perhaps, what to call them. There was much confusion at first on how to identify the newfound stellar systems. Everyone seemed to have a pet name, including anagalactic nebulae, nongalactic nebulae, star clouds, cosmic nebulae, and island universes. Hubble preferred “extragalactic nebulae,” using it in his lectures and publications rather than the term galaxies, the name regularly employed by Shapley at Harvard. “I want to get away from both the words universe and nebula in reference to these objects, as frequently as possible,” argued Shapley. “Therefore I am adopting…the term galaxy, and from that the term inter-galactic space follows naturally.”
Edwin Hubble in his office with a picture of the Andromeda galaxy
(Hale Observatories, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
But Hubble didn't see any pressing need to abolish the “venerable precedent” of preserving the word galaxy for the Milky Way alone. The term originated from galakt, the Greek word for milk. As a purist, Hubble chose the Oxford English Dictionary as his final arbiter. At the time its pages said the term galaxy was “chiefly