The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [119]
It was a moment when Hubble's discretion and judgment completely failed him. Although all the facts were assuredly in his favor, his obstinate manner in this episode deeply hurt his relations at the observatory. “The attitude of van Maanen in the matter was much superior to that of Hubble,” concluded Adams. “Hubble, who had much the better of the general weight of evidence, showed a distinctly ungenerous and almost vindictive spirit.” Hubble had become the big man in astronomy and could tolerate no lesser colleagues. He had begun to blithely ignore his duties on international committees when the chores didn't suit his schedule and was also less willing to join cooperative projects at the observatory, acting more as an individual driven by personal ambition than as a member of a larger staff. Adams lamented that he “recognized this curious ‘blind spot’ in almost every important dealing” he had with Hubble.
Hubble's increasing worldwide fame was inflating his ego, already outsized as it was. Never great pals with his astronomical colleagues, he widened the breach with his boorish behavior. He broke promises, ignored vital correspondence, took more travel than the norm (with pay), and failed to show up at meetings that he said he would attend. Adams's remarks were a reflection of the growing irritation at Mount Wilson with this loutish conduct, but it was hard to rein in the observatory's most famous staff member. Hubble was, after all, the discoverer of the modern universe. Hubble's family, too, was deeply affected by his self-centered concerns. When his mother died in 1934, Hubble did not try to return from England, where he was then traveling, once he was cabled the news. By then he hardly interacted with his family or helped them much financially. Never once did Grace meet her in-laws. “Great men have to go their own way,” his youngest sister, Betsy, said with resigned acceptance many years later. “There is bound to be some trampling. We never minded… With Edwin, it was out of sight, out of mind. When he was with you, you were the only person in the world, but if you were away, he would forget you. His head was in the stars.”
In the end, Hubble and van Maanen grudgingly arrived at a gentleman's agreement. After much discussion with Adams (and a lot of arm-twisting), Hubble at last consented to publish a brief statement on his own, which was to be accompanied by a paper by van Maanen in which he acknowledged the existence of possible errors in his research. Hubble's brief note came out in the May 1935 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. It was a mere four paragraphs plus a table, summarizing his measurements of M81, M51, M33, and M101. All arrived at the same conclusion: no “rotations of the order expected.” In an orchestrated move, the Astrophysical Journal had van Maanen's paper immediately follow. After including new plates taken with the 100-inch telescope in his reevaluation, van Maanen conceded that his measured motions were now smaller. “[My] results, together with the measures of Hubble, Baade, and Nicholson…make it desirable to view the motions with reserve,” he stated. Van Maanen promised a “most searching investigation in the future,” but as the years progressed he never followed up.
The one nagging discrepancy keeping Hubble from his full triumph—the unquestioned discovery that the spiral nebulae were truly separate galaxies—was at last resolved. In print, the two adversaries symbolically shook hands and went their separate ways. But, from that point on, whenever the two passed each other in the observatory hallways, they exchanged not a word.
Using the 100-Inch Telescope
the Way It Should Be Used
While it appeared that Hubble had clinched astronomy's brass ring, solving the mystery of the spiral nebulae once and for all, a nagging problem remained: how to explain the galaxies' astounding velocities, first spotted by Vesto Slipher in the 1910s. Why were the spiraling disks speeding away from us? They “shun us like