The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [24]
Yet most found such enormity difficult to grasp and horrifying to ponder. A character in Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century novel Two on a Tower, an astronomer named Swithin St. Cleeve, gave splendid voice to this apprehension: “There is a size at which dignity begins; further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror?”
Even as late as the eighteenth century, most celestial observers still backed away from questions of the universe's true size and nature, for professional astronomers at this time were primarily mathematicians who used Newton's laws to predict the motions of the Moon, planets, and comets. Stars themselves, as distinct celestial objects, were not yet as interesting or provocative to them as determining with utmost precision their coordinates (in essence, their heavenly latitude and longitude) for celestial atlases. As a result, cosmological conjectures on the universe's size, shape, and destiny were largely thrashed out by those on the fringe, such as Thomas Wright, a dilettante and schemer who clawed his way up the social ladder from a rather modest background as a carpenter's son. After serving as a watchmaker's apprentice, seaman, and then teacher of mathematics and navigation, he went on to make a comfortable living in England giving private lessons on architecture and science to noble families. He tutored Lord Cornwallis's daughters (sisters of the Revolutionary War general), hunted with the Earl of Halifax, and dined regularly for a time with the Duke and Duchess of Kent.
With the backing of his wealthy benefactors, Wright published a lavish book in 1750 titled An Original Theory; or, New Hypothesis of the Universe, which attempted to explain the structure of the Milky Way. Then thirty-nine years old, the Englishman applied his self-taught expertise in surveying and geometry to the question he had been pondering, off and on, for many years: Why does the Milky Way appear as a misty streak that stretches across the celestial sphere? Galileo with his telescope had revealed that this cloudlike band was composed of innumerable stars, but why should the stars arrange themselves in such a streamlike fashion?
Thomas Wright of Durham
(From Thomas Wright's An Original Theory; or,
New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750)
Limited in formal education, Wright filled his book with arcane theological digressions, as was the style of his time, but in the midst of his ramblings he introduced the startling idea, now deemed obvious, that our position in space affects how we perceive our celestial environment. He proposed that the Milky Way could be “no other than a certain Effect arising from the Observer's Situation, I think you must of course grant such a Solution at least rational, if not the Truth; and this is what I propose by my new Theory.” Hedging his bets, he offered a couple of explanations for the Milky Way's appearance. One model pictured the stars moving in a vast ring, much like the rings of Saturn, around a central point. But, strongly guided by his religious views, he preferred to think of the Milky Way as a thin spherical shell of stars—essentially