The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [117]
Van Maanen was obviously panicky once Hubble's findings were officially out. He soon wrote Shapley asking if there was a list somewhere in the literature of every observation of a nova. “I want to compare them with the novae in spirals,” he said. “After Hubble's discovery of Cepheids I have been playing again with my motions and how I look at the measures.” He was clearly baffled. “I cannot find a flaw in [my measurements of] M33, for which I have the best material. They seem to be as consistent as possibly can be.” He understood that there were two sets of observations in circulation—his and Hubble's—that arrived at “radically different conclusions.” He planned to take more plates for a reassessment.
But Shapley by now had completely switched sides and in response at last lowered the boom on his good friend. “I am completely at a loss to know what to believe concerning those angular motions; but there seems to be no way of doubting the Cepheids, providing Hubble's period-luminosity curves are as definite as we hear they are,” he replied. When van Maanen a few years later again tried to defend his spiral work to Shapley, the Harvard Observatory director replied that he didn't “know what to think of your confounded spirals… There is little chance that we can get the universe out of this mess.” He avoided the topic with van Maanen from that point on.
Considering himself a gentleman at heart, Hubble didn't openly argue with van Maanen either, and hardly anyone else in the astronomical community appeared particularly concerned. But behind closed doors, it was another matter altogether. Personally Hubble felt that van Maanen's paradoxical findings lingered as a stubborn stain on his great accomplishment, a blemish that tarnished his otherwise sterling reputation. In her memoirs, Grace Hubble cheerily declared that the van Maanen episode hardly affected her husband at all, but she told others privately that “van Maanen's contradiction disturbed her husband so greatly from the late 1920s into the 1930s that he sometimes came home from the office and lay on his bed until his anguish abated.” Hubble had been aiming a critical eye at van Maanen's findings for quite a while and had begun preparing a series of private manuscripts, even before he announced that the Milky Way was not the only galaxy in the universe. His sole objective: to find out where van Maanen had gone wrong.
For several years, Hubble kept his doubts to himself and his covert manuscripts stashed away in his office drawer. It appeared that the Hubble–van Maanen conflict would just wither away, likely remembered, if at all, as a minor episode in the history of the island-universe debate. That would have been the case, except that van Maanen was perversely unwilling to admit defeat. He began remeasuring some of his spirals and in Mount Wilson's 1931 annual report it was announced he had found in M101 “a decided internal motion in the same direction as was found in his original measures of this nebula.” With this surprising new strike, the battle was reignited. “They asked me to give him time. Well, I gave him time, I gave him ten years,” responded Hubble to the latest assault. Now faced with van Maanen's implicit slap in the face, the former boxer put his gloves back on and rushed headlong into one of Mount Wilson's most fabled tempests. It had already been simmering in regard to telescope use. Van Maanen was sure that Hubble had been heading up a cabal to deny him a fair share of time on the 100-inch. That's when van Maanen slapped his sign on the front