The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [139]
Nevertheless this image of Hubble, someone aloof and hesitant to embrace a dynamic universe, slowly faded and was replaced by another portrait entirely. Over time, the story of the expanding universe's discovery evolved. Particularly after Hubble's death, more and more references were made to him as the sole discoverer of the universe's expansion. Poor Humason was shoved off to the shadowy sidelines of popular history, Slipher largely forgotten, and Lemaître's crucial theoretical interpretation diminished. Fine distinctions and the sharing of credit got lost. A rousing narrative is now usually drawn with Hubble as the main protagonist, even though in reality he was not the expanding universe's champion at all. But, as historians Kragh and Smith put it, “a growing community of American astronomers… by the 1960s were concentrating to an unprecedented degree on the study of galaxies [and] fashioned a hero, a founding father and a figure around whom they could drape a single version of the history of the discovery of the expanding universe.” The public seems to yearn for heroes, and thus Hubble—so handsome, so manly, so erudite—easily joined the scientific pantheon, along with Newton and his apple, Galileo and his telescope, Darwin and his finches.
It is the victorious leader who is now best remembered in the public's mind, not his accomplished predecessors or productive partner. Humason became Sancho Panza to Hubble's Don Quixote. Only this time, the twirling windmills are replaced with spiraling nebulae, and the celestial man of la Mancha ends up conquering them all with dazzling success.
Whatever Happened to…
In 1900 Charles Yerkes moved to New York City, driven out of Chicago by anticorruption reformers. He went on to establish London's underground transit system. His fortune reduced, he died in 1905 at the age of sixty-eight, long estranged from his forty-seven-year-old wife, Mary Adelaide, who continued living in their Fifth Avenue mansion. Within a month, she married Wilson Mizner, a raconteur and scoundrel eighteen years younger, who was the basis for the character played by Clark Gable in the movie San Francisco. Mary divorced him a year and a half later.
To this day, the 40-inch telescope at the Yerkes Observatory, in southeast Wisconsin, maintains its status as the largest refractor in the world, although it is no longer used for professional research. Plans are under way to historically preserve the main building and convert it into a regional science center.
Percival Lowell, long a bachelor, at last succumbed to marriage in 1908 at the age of fifty-three. He married Constance Savage Keith, nine years his junior and for many years a neighbor in Boston. At the end of a long honeymoon in Europe, he and his bride took a balloon ride, ascending a mile above London. There he photographed the paths of Hyde Park to see if its linear paths, substitutes for the Martian canals, could be detected from a high altitude. When Lowell died at Mars Hill in 1916 at the age of sixty-one, the observatory spent a decade fighting in court with his widow for control of his estate, the bulk of which he had intended to be used to carry on the observatory's work. Over that time, she squandered half of the $2.3 million. Constance reportedly lived in “opulent squalor” until her death in Massachusetts at the age of ninety in 1954. The following decade, Lowell's exotic imaginings were finally put to rest when a series of Mariner missions launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1965 and 1969 showed Mars to be a completely barren world. When Mariner 9 orbited the red planet in 1971, though, it photographed ancient riverbeds with tributaries and erosion patterns that appeared to have been carved by catastrophic flooding episodes. There were Martian channels after all, but these were forged by water flowing naturally in Mars's distant past rather than constructed by present-day aliens.
Whirlpool