The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [142]
Milton Humason, who had barely finished the eighth grade before dropping out of school to work at Mount Wilson, received an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Lund University in 1950 for his historic contributions to the discovery of the expanding universe, becoming that rare individual who went from elementary school directly to a PhD. By the end of his career, Humason had taken the spectra of more than six hundred galaxies. At his retirement, his son offered to buy him a small telescope to continue viewing the sky. “My God, Bill,” he replied, “I've looked in an eyepiece all my life, I don't want to look in any more eyepieces.” He went salmon fishing instead.
The Carnegie Institution of Washington continues to own and operate the Mount Wilson Observatory, although now in partnership with the Mount Wilson Institute, a nonprofit corporation established in 1985. The 100-inch Hooker Telescope was temporarily shut down in 1986 as a cost-cutting measure but brought back into operation in 1992. With the use of advanced technology instruments to analyze the light gathered by its mirror, the Hooker continues to carry out valuable research, such as searching for extrasolar planets and monitoring sunspot cycles on other stars.
The years that Harlow Shapley spent at Mount Wilson, proving our true place within the Milky Way, turned out to be the “high noon of his scientific life.” After World War II, he sharply curtailed his astronomical research efforts and devoted more of his time to national and international affairs. An unabashed liberal, he played a leading role in the formation of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. His activities on behalf of world peace and his continuing contacts with Russian scientists brought him under investigation in 1946 by the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities. Senator Joseph McCarthy later accused him—wrongly—of being a Communist. After Shapley retired as director in 1952, the Harvard Observatory continued to be his academic home for yet another twenty years, until his death in 1972 at the age of eighty-six. He was buried in Sharon, New Hampshire, where he had lived for many years after his retirement. His grave is marked by a solid granite rock upon which is inscribed, “And We by His Triumph Are Lifted Level with the Skies,” a quotation from the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius.
Shapley's former boss and harshest critic, Walter Adams, succeeded Hale as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1923 and remained at that post until his retirement in 1946. He continued to work at the Hale Solar Laboratory in Pasadena until his death ten years later. Staff astronomers on Mount Wilson noticed that Adams was more at ease once Shapley left the observatory, and the two actually reconciled a few years later. For Adams, Shapley was easier to take once he was firmly ensconced at Harvard. It is interesting to note, however, that when Adams wrote a thirty-nine-page memoir of his early days at Mount Wilson, published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1947, he made no mention of Shapley whatsoever.
Adriaan van Maanen was on staff at the Mount Wilson Observatory for thirty-four years. For a while, he hoped that his flawed spiral measures would still have value by at least demonstrating a spiral's direction of rotation. But in the early 1940s Hubble proved once and for all that van Maanen had been wrong about that as well; as others had seen earlier, a spiral's arms are trailing as they rotate, not leading. Van Maanen died of a heart attack in 1946. Just weeks before his death he finished the measurement of his five hundredth parallax field at the observatory's Pasadena headquarters.