The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [22]
To Keeler, the whirling shape seemed to indicate that the object, whatever its nature, was rotating. And like many of his contemporaries, he speculated that the spirals were somehow linked to star formation. “If…the spiral is the form normally assumed by a contracting nebulous mass,” he pondered, “the idea at once suggests itself that the solar system has been evolved from a spiral nebula.” Given this view, each spiral then marked the spot where a new star and its planetary companions were hatching. The idea that our solar system condensed out of a rotating nebula of gas had already been introduced by both Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon de Laplace decades earlier. In a lecture at Stanford University, Keeler made this very point: “The heavens are full of beautiful illustrations of the views of Laplace…[in] photographs of great spiral nebulae in various stages of condensation, taken recently with the Crossley reflector at the Lick Observatory.”
Much as Einstein's relativity inspired numerous works of art and literature since its inception, so too did the nebular theory in the nineteenth century, as seen in this stanza from “The Princess,” by Great Britain's poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1847:
This world was once a fluid haze of light,
Till toward the centre set the starry tides,
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast
The planets …
It's interesting to contemplate how far Keeler might have gone in this line of research. With his phenomenal skill at the telescope, he had a good shot at obtaining spectral data that forced him to consider other explanations for the nature of the spiral nebulae. “Keeler…was a far better trained, more experienced spectroscopist than any [other astronomer of his time]. No doubt he would have reached the conclusion that the spirals were galaxies of stars,” contends Osterbrock, himself a Lick Observatory director seven decades after Keeler. Keeler might have also noticed, far earlier than others, that the spirals were racing away from the Milky Way at high velocities. He had the smarts, and he had the equipment. He had already obtained the velocities of myriad planetary nebulae and had a plan to move on to the spirals. His friend Hale had that impression; he was sure that Keeler intended to “follow up his remarkable beginnings with the Crossley reflector, cataloging the new nebulae, and doing something with their spectra.”
But we will never know, for Keeler died unexpectedly on August 12, 1900, one month shy of his forty-third birthday. Throughout the spring and summer of 1900 Keeler had been suffering from what he called “a hard cold.” An entrenched cigar smoker since his college days, he had already been experiencing heart problems. His doctor also diagnosed pleurisy of the lung, “nothing very serious,” Keeler told friends, but he was likely afflicted with either emphysema or lung cancer. He couldn't manage walking the steep rise from the Crossley reflector back to his home without stopping several times short of breath. With his doctor forbidding him to continue observing, he left the mountain at the end of July for a short rest with his family. He was expecting to return to use a new spectrograph, just completed for the Crossley, and begin examining spiral nebulae. But within weeks Keeler died in San Francisco, after experiencing two strokes. The setback for astronomy, said his friend and colleague Campbell, was “incalculable.” Harvard College Observatory director Edward Pickering wrote that the “loss cannot be overestimated… There was no one who seemed to me to have a more brilliant future … or on whom we could better depend for important advances in work of the highest good.” The journal Science ran a tribute to Keeler on the first page of its September 7, 1900, issue.
On Mount Hamilton, the memory of Keeler became sacrosanct and remains so to this day. He was the ideal director, an astronomer without equal cut down in his prime. But Keeler's acclaimed reputation beyond the Lick Observatory grounds gradually faded. In encyclopedias he is primarily remembered