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competent to discuss the matter with authority.” Hubble obviously had some serious doubts about what it all meant. “It is difficult to believe that the velocities are real—that all matter is actually scattering away from our region of space,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1929. In the very first paragraph of his discovery paper on this subject he referred to the velocities of the galaxies as “apparent.” He maintained this conceit for the rest of his career. As long as various theoretical explanations were under scrutiny, he didn't want to be caught on the wrong side. He was never comfortable in the robe of a theorist and so published his data in such a way that the measurements could remain unsullied, no matter what the interpretation. “Not until the empirical sources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation,” he mused. This attitude rubbed off on his loyal helpmate as well. “I have always been rather happy that… my part in the work was, you might say, fundamental; it can never be changed—no matter what the decision is as to what it means,” said Humason.

Hubble was quite possessive of their legacy and kept close watch on it. When de Sitter in a 1930 review article casually referred to the link between velocity and distance (“It has been remarked by several astronomers that there appears to be a linear correlation”), Hubble immediately picked up his pen and reminded de Sitter who should be getting the lion's share of the credit. “The possibility of a velocity-distance relation among nebulae has been in the air for years—you, I believe, were the first to mention it,” he wrote. “But… I consider the velocity-distance relation, its formulation, testing and confirmation, as a Mount Wilson contribution and I am deeply concerned in its recognition as such.”

Hubble conveniently forgot to tell de Sitter that most of the galaxy velocities he first drew upon in his 1929 paper were actually Slipher's data, which Hubble used without direct citation or acknowledgment, a serious breach of scientific protocol. Hubble partially made up for this nefarious deed by briefly referring in his next big paper on the redshift law, published in 1931, to the “great pioneer work of V. M. Slipher at the Lowell Observatory.” More gracious amends were made in 1953. That year, as Hubble was preparing a talk on the “Law of Red-Shifts” to be given in England (the prestigious George Darwin Lecture of the Royal Astronomical Society), he wrote Slipher asking for some slides of his first 1912 spectrum of the radial velocity of the Andromeda nebula and in this letter at last gave the Lowell Observatory astronomer due credit for his initial breakthrough (albeit more than two decades late). “I regard such first steps as by far the most important of all,” wrote Hubble. “Once the field is opened, others can follow.” In the lecture itself, Hubble professed that his discovery “emerged from a combination of radial velocities measured by Slipher at Flagstaff with distances derived at Mount Wilson… Slipher worked almost alone, and ten years later…had contributed 42 out of the 46 nebular velocities then available.”

Privately, Slipher was bitter that he didn't get more immediate public credit but was too humble and reserved to demand his share of the glory in 1929. He was at least honored by his peers for his contributions. The Royal Astronomical Society presented its highest award, the Gold Medal, to him in 1933, with its president, Frederick Stratton, amusingly announcing that “if cosmogonists to-day have to deal with a Universe that is expanding in fact as well as in fancy, at a rate which offers them special difficulties, a great part of the initial blame must be borne by our medallist.” In many ways, Slipher's accomplishment resembled that of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson several decades later. In 1964 the two Bell Laboratory researchers were calibrating a massive horn-shaped antenna in New Jersey in preparation for some radio astronomy observations and registered an unexpected cosmic radio noise wherever they looked on the sky,