The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [155]
129 “You may have been completely prepared for the result”: Ibid.
129 “While I cannot pretend to have anticipated the view of the stellar system”: HUA, Eddington to Shapley, February 25, 1918.
129 “May I impose upon your time for a little while”: HP, Shapley to Hale, January 19, 1918.
129 “Start a messenger on a light-wave down the main highway from the center”: Ibid.
130 “the nearby spirals to either side much as the prow of a moving boat cuts through the waves”: Shapley (1920), p. 100.
130 “I believe the evidence is quite against the island universe theory of spirals”: HUA, Shapley to MacPherson, May 6, 1919.
130 “The observational problems opened up are unlimited”: HP, Shapley to Hale, January 19, 1918.
131 “The solar system is off center and consequently man is too”: Shapley (1969), pp. 59–60.
131 “this marks an epoch in the history of astronomy”: HUA, Eddington to Shapley, October 24, 1918.
131 “simply amazing”: Russell (1918), p. 412.
131 “certainly changing our ideas of the universe at a great rate”: HUA, Jeans to Shapley, April 6, 1919.
131 “always admired the way in which Shapley finished this whole problem”: Baade (1963), p. 9.
131 “super–Milky Way”: “Universe Multiplied a Thousand Times by Harvard Astronomer's Calculations,” New York Times, May 31, 1921, p. 1.
132 “Personally I am glad to see man sink into such physical nothingness”: Ibid.
132 says Shapley in the article: Shapley wrote Henry Norris Russell two weeks later that the Times' interview with him was actually a “fake … evidently a rehash of last year's news about the Hale lecture [Great Debate]. It was served up new because of my shift East, of which they had just heard.” HUA, Shapley to Russell, June 16, 1921.
132 Earth, proclaimed the headline, was now a “Rube”: Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1921, p. 1.
132 “You have struck a trail of great promise…. I think you are right in making daring hypotheses”: HP, Hale to Shapley, March 14, 1918.
132 Though not possessing a good telescope, he organized a massive effort to measure the positions of hundreds of thousands of stars on plates taken at other observatories, partially with the help of state prisoners: Hetherington (1990b), p. 28.
132 roughly 30,000 light-years wide and 4,000 light-years thick: The full dimensions in Kapteyn's 1920 model were officially 60,000 light-years wide and 7,800 lightyears thick, but the stellar distributions out in those more distant regions were extremely low, making a precise border difficult to define. See Paul (1993), p. 155. Many references cite the 30,000-light-year width.
133 difficult for Kapteyn and his colleagues: Smith (1982), p. 69.
133 “building from above, while we are up from below”: Gingerich (2000), p. 201.
133 “carnival barker's certainty of truth”: Sandage (2004), p. 288.
133 quick to jump to conclusions based on meager observations: AIP, interview of Harry Plaskett by David DeVorkin on March 29, 1978.
133 “two different breeds of cats”: Smith (1982), p. 124.
133 “has never given the credit where it belongs”: MWDF, Adams to Hale, December 10, 1917.
133 “I have never seen a quicker mind”: Whitney (1971), p. 218.
134 Once Lindblad worked out the theory, Oort rounded up the evidence: Smith (1982), p. 157.
134 “With the plan of the sidereal system here outlined”: Shapley (1918d), p. 53.
134 “We may compare our galactic system to a continent”: MacPherson (1919), p. 334.
9. He Surely Looks Like the Fourth Dimension!
135 “the discovery of a universal formal principle”: Schilpp (1949), p. 53.
136 “It does not seem that something like that can exist!”: Fölsing (1997), p. 46.
136 “Newton, forgive me”: Schilpp (1949), p. 31.
137 “In all my life I have labored not nearly as hard”: Pais (1982), p. 216.
137 “I was beside myself with ecstasy for days