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spending months trying to discover its source. Just as Slipher revealed a remarkable phenomenon that took others time to fully interpret, so too did Penzias and Wilson need fellow astronomers to tell them what they had found, that they had been listening to the faint reverberation of the Big Bang all along. But there any resemblance between the two cases ends. While Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize for their serendipitous discovery, firming their rank among the scientific elite, Slipher as the years passed was reduced in the public's eye to a secondary role in the momentous saga of the fleeing galaxies.

Your Calculations Are Correct,

but Your Physical Insight Is Abominable

Fifty-four years after its founding in 1820, the Royal Astronomical Society began to hold its monthly meetings at new headquarters in the west wing of Burlington House, a former private Palladian mansion that houses a number of British learned societies off Piccadilly in the heart of London. At the society's gathering on January 10, 1930, after a report on the current performance of two clocks at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the chairman called upon Willem de Sitter, then visiting England, to give an account of his latest research. De Sitter rose and spoke that evening about his own attempts to link the velocity of a galaxy to its distance. Just as Hubble had demonstrated the previous year, de Sitter too graphed a straight line through his points, making use of data obtained by Hubble, Lundmark, and Shapley. But could he explain this orderly recession of the galaxies? “I am not sure that I can,” de Sitter told his audience. The Dutch astronomer was coming to appreciate that his cosmological model was inadequate, not a good approximation of the observed universe at all. His solution depended on the cosmos being empty, but the universe was undoubtedly chock-full of matter.

In the ensuing discussion, Arthur Eddington casually wondered aloud why only two cosmological models—Einstein's and de Sitter's—had so far come out of general relativity to describe the universe. Were other solutions possible, ready for plucking within Einstein's equations? A number of respected mathematicians had been sporadically tinkering with the models, offering up modifications, but none generated wide interest. Was that the end of the road?

Einstein and de Sitter had each started with different simplifying assumptions and so arrived at different solutions. But they did have one thing in common: Both took for granted that the overall structure of space-time was static—fixed and rigid. “I suppose the trouble is that people look [only] for static solutions,” noted Eddington at the meeting. From one perspective, de Sitter's solution could be viewed as nonstatic, if you considered any matter in it as immediately flying off, “but as there isn't any matter in it that does not matter,” argued Eddington.

Much more was at stake in Eddington's question. It was easy to imagine a massive object like a star indenting space-time in a very local and specific location, but could the entire fabric of the cosmos, across the span of the universe, be changing as the eons passed? Could the universe itself be dynamic? It seemed more realistic and plausible to imagine the galaxies traveling through space rather than space-time itself varying, so everyone insisted on a cosmic space that did not move. “From the point of view of cosmologists in the 1920s,” writes science historian Helge Kragh, a dynamic universe “was a concept outside their mental framework, something not to be considered, or, if it was considered, to be resisted.” But, just in case, Eddington already had a research assistant looking into such a formulation.

What Eddington forgot was that this additional cosmological model had already been conceived and presented to him. This solution had been around for years and meshed nicely with Hubble's observations. It wasn't Einstein's universe, and it wasn't de Sitter's. Like Goldilocks and her chairs, this new cosmic model was something in between—and just right.

The