The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [133]
What seemed to disturb Hubble most were the enormous velocities. The farther he and Humason extended their searches into space, the faster and faster the galaxies were retreating. Near the absolute limit of Humason's spectrograph, he recorded velocities of about 25,000 miles per second, “around the earth in a second, out to the moon in 10 seconds, out to the sun in just over an hour…the notion is rather startling,” noted Hubble.
As late as 1950, responding to a Kansas professor's written inquiry about redshifts, Hubble asserted that they “represent either actual recession (expanding universe) or some hitherto unknown principle of nature. I believe that the choice of these alternatives will be determined with the 200-inch [telescope on California's Palomar Mountain] within a few years.” Maintaining his lawyerly ways, Hubble covered all the bases when making a public statement.
Others, such as Eddington, were confounded by such equivocation. “I just don't understand this eagerness to find some other theory than the expanding universe,” he wrote in a letter to a colleague. “It arose out of difficulties … in Einstein's theory. If you do away with it, you throw back relativity theory into the infantile diseases of 25 years ago. And why the fact that the solution then found has received remarkable confirmation by observation should lead people to seek desperately for ways to avoid it, I cannot imagine.”
While Hubble remained overly cautious, Shapley came to embrace the idea of an expansion lock, stock, and cosmic barrel. It's as if the two astronomers were magnets with the same polarity, always repulsing each other to opposite sides of a question. The ultimate imprimatur, though, was provided when Einstein arrived in Pasadena in 1931 in order to consult with the high priests of cosmology at both Caltech and Mount Wilson.
Started Off with a Bang
On November 30, 1930, Einstein, his wife, Elsa, his secretary, and a scientific assistant left Berlin for Antwerp, where they embarked on the steamer Belgenland. It was Einstein's second visit to the United States but his first journey to America's West Coast. Before leaving, Frau Einstein made a last-minute shopping trip to purchase a raincoat for the father of relativity. “Would it not be more practical to have the herr professor come here so we can give him an exact fit?” said the clothing store salesman. “If you knew how hard it was even to persuade my husband he needed a new coat, you wouldn't expect me to fetch him here. I wish you had my worries,” she replied. It was teasingly said that Einstein was going to Pasadena to hunt for the sole twelve men in the world who could understand him.
The revered physicist arrived in New York on December 11, where he and Elsa were greeted by a barrage of journalists, photographers, and newsreel men, a chaotic scene that greatly discomfited Einstein. “This reminds me of a Punch and Judy show, all of you standing there watching us so intently,” he remarked in German. The press described him that day as small, bright-eyed, his almost white hair trained back in a bushy pompadour, and “his face … as smooth as a girl's except for the tiny wrinkles about his eyes.” Out on the deck, a cold damp wind soon blew through his locks, swiftly turning the carefully groomed pompadour into his well-known disheveled hairstyle. After a four-day stay in New York, he and his party continued their voyage on the Belgenland for California, by way of the Panama Canal.
Arthur Fleming, a member of the California Institute of Technology's executive council, first extended the invitation to visit, extolling his town's summery climate and rich scientific atmosphere. Einstein, then looking for a good rest among men who spoke the language of mathematics, eagerly accepted. For one, it was an opportunity for him to meet Albert A. Michelson, the physicist whose inexplicable failure to measure a predicted change in the speed of light due to Earth's motion through an “ether” permeating space was at last explained by Einstein's special theory