The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [135]
After lunch came the opportunity to visit the 100-inch telescope, where Einstein again dutifully posed for Capra, peering through the eyepiece while Walter Adams stiffly spoke, directly to the camera. “This hundred-inch reflector was completed about thirteen years ago and has contributed in three or four notable ways to progress in astronomy,” he droned. All the while Hubble was also in the frame, wearing his sporting plus-fours (golf trousers cut four inches below the knee) and silently puffing away on his ever-present pipe. Away from the camera, Einstein delighted in the telescope's instruments. This was his first view of a large reflecting telescope, and he was quick to grasp the intricacies in its construction and operation. Like a child at play, the fifty-one-year-old physicist scrambled about the framework, to the consternation of his hosts. Nearby was Einstein's wife. Told that the giant reflector was used to determine the universe's shape, Elsa reportedly replied with wifely pride, “Well, my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”
For the cameras Einstein pretends to peer through the 100-inch
telescope during his visit to Mount Wilson. Edwin Hubble (center)
smokes his pipe and observatory director Walter Adams (right) looks on.
(Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology)
After an early dinner the party returned to the 100-inch telescope, when Einstein was at last able to do some real observing, peering at Jupiter, Mars, the asteroid Eros, several spiral nebulae, and the faint companion of the star Sirius. He remained in the dome until after one o'clock, finally retiring under protest and with the stipulation that he be called in time to see the sunrise. Everyone returned to Pasadena at about ten o'clock that same morning.
Five days later, astronomers and theorists gathered in the spacious library of the observatory's Pasadena offices, books lining the walls from floor to ceiling, to hear Einstein's assessment of what he had learned and absorbed from his visit to the mountain. Up to this point, he had been very wary of considering a universe in restless motion, curtly dismissing the models fashioned by both Friedmann and Lemaître. Einstein, by far, preferred a universe that stayed put. But on that day he at last conceded that the secret of the cosmos had undoubtedly been revealed by Hubble's observations. Einstein at last let go of his spherical universe. “A gasp of astonishment swept through the library,” according to an Associated Press reporter in attendance. At a follow-up session a week later, Einstein went further and announced that “the red shift of distant nebulae has smashed my old construction like a hammer blow,” swiftly swinging down his hand to illustrate the point to his audience. Einstein at this stage recognized that he no longer needed his cosmological constant to describe this dynamic universe. His original equations could handle the cosmic expansion just fine, which pleased him immensely. From the start, he had had qualms about the ad hoc addition, believing the constant tarnished the formal beauty of his theory. Tacking on the extra term, he reportedly said, was the “biggest blunder” he ever made in his life. The cocky kid was getting older. If he had trusted his equations from the start, he could have predicted that space-time was in motion years before Hubble and Humason confirmed it, which would have rocketed Einstein's reputation, towering as it was, into the stratosphere.
Einstein with Hubble (second from the left) and others from Caltech
and the observatory outside the dome of the 100-inch telescope during
his visit to Mount Wilson on January 29, 1931 (Courtesy of the
Archives, California Institute of Technology)
Given his role in this turnabout, Hubble was soon revered as the man who “made Einstein change his mind.” Aside from perhaps receiving a Nobel