The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [147]
45 “Cast your eye on this cloudy star”: Herschel (1791), pp. 73, 84.
45 stars or a “shining fluid”—not both: Ibid., p. 71.
46 We were alone in the universe once again … at least for a while: There are some qualifiers to this blunt statement. While others interpreted Herschel as having abandoned the thought of other universes, the great British astronomer did seem to maintain that certain nebulae, ones he had already resolved, were distant star systems. So his sense of the visible universe did extend beyond the Milky Way. (From Robert Smith, personal communication, May 5, 2008.)
46 So big was the telescope tube: Hetherington (1990b), p. 16.
46 “to make a telescope of the largest dimensions possible”: “Report of the Council to the Forty-Ninth General Meeting of the Society,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 29 (February 1869): 124.
46 to devote himself to a newfound career as a gentleman scientist: The Parsons family had a rich engineering legacy. In 1884 Rosse's son Charles invented the first steam turbine that could convert the power of steam directly into electricity, a method adopted by power stations worldwide.
46 a British reporter once caught him working at a vise: Singh (2005), p. 181.
46 “It is scarcely possible to preserve”: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 2 (1844): 8.
47 to resemble one of the ancient round towers of Ireland: Clerke (1886), p. 151.
47 “Sweeping down from the moat towards the lake”: Ball (1895), p. 193.
47 “strange stellar cloudlets”: Proctor (1872), p. 64.
47 “a structure and arrangement more wonderful and inexplicable”: “Report of the Council,” p. 129.
47 “With each successive increase of optical power”: Rosse (1850), p. 504.
48 “existed only in the imagination of the astronomer”: MacPherson (1916), p. 132.
48 “numerous firmaments”: Nichol (1840), p. 10.
48 “It is indeed wholly unlikely that our group…. THIRTY MILLIONS OF YEARS”: Nichol (1846), pp. 17, 36–37.
49 This was a brave estimate. In 1831 British geologist Charles Lyell arrived at an age for Earth of 240 million years based on the fossils of marine mollusks, but it was still highly controversial. In 1836 Charles Darwin took a copy of Lyell's Principles of Geology along with him on his famous voyage on the Beagle, which greatly influenced his developing ideas on evolution.
49 “poised so skilfully …”; “perfectly wretched”: Proctor (1872), pp. 64–67.
51 what they are instead of where they are: Keeler (1897), pp. 746, 749.
51 “coming upon a spring of water”: Huggins (1897), p. 911.
51 “The chemistry of the solar system prevailed”: Whiting (1915), p. 1.
51 “excited suspense … but a luminous gas”: Huggins (1897), pp. 916–17.
52 “The nebular hypothesis made visible!”: Turner (1911), p. 351.
52 “a planetary system at a somewhat advanced”: Huggins and Huggins (1889), p. 60.
52 “a ‘universe of stars,’ like our own ‘galactic cluster’”: Young (1891), p. 509.
52 “What is beyond the stellar system”: Ibid., p. 512.
52 “This strange and beautiful object”: Maunder (1885), p. 321.
52 “a scale of magnitude such as the imagination recoils”: Clerke (1902), p. 403.
53 “[The nova] was in the heart of the Great Nebula”: Frost (1933), p. 45.
53 “[I would deem] it a very great favor to be able to make use of your great harvest of new forms”: LOA, Chamberlin to Keeler, January 30, 1900.
53 “The question whether nebulae are external galaxies” … “misleading”: Clerke (1890), pp. 368, 373.
54 “That the spiral nebulae are star clusters is now raised to a certainty”: Scheiner (1899), p. 150.
54 A further investigation was not undertaken until 1908: Fath (1908).
54 “The hypothesis that the central portion of a nebula”: Ibid., p. 76.
54 perhaps because he was still a lowly graduate student: Osterbrock, Gustafson, and Unruh (1988), p. 188.
55 “stands or falls”: Fath (1908), p. 77.
4. Such Is the Progress of Astronomy in the Wild and Wooly West
56 stockings on the gear of the giant telescope; Mitchell automobile: AIP, interview of Mary Lea Shane by Charles Weiner on July 15, 1967; interview