• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Formerly suspicious of van Maanen's findings, Shapley now came to like that his friend was detecting the spirals rotate, for it strongly backed his own, newly constructed model of the universe. It meant that the spirals had to be close by, merely secondary members of the Milky Way. Our galaxy reigned supreme. “I believe the evidence is quite against the island universe theory of spirals. I should guess the Andromeda nebula to be not further away than 20,000 light-years,” Shapley told Hector MacPherson, a popular British writer on astronomy.

With all his advance notices and public declarations, the thirty-two-year-old Shapley was crowing and, like a little boy, wanted his elders to notice his cleverness at completely renovating the image of the universe. “The observational problems opened up are unlimited; the amount of stupid measuring ahead of me is almost discouraging,” he told Hale. “But I am enjoying it all except for a considerable nervous strain at the last.”

• • •

Shapley released his findings around the same time that the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory dropped the word solar from its name. Shapley most of all was broadening observations from the mountaintop post to questions far beyond the Sun and into the depths of space and time. What Shapley had done was to hugely extend the Copernican rule. Just as Copernicus in the sixteenth century had removed Earth from the center of the solar system, Shapley relocated the solar system from the heart of the Milky Way. “The solar system is off center and consequently man is too, which is a rather nice idea because it means that man is not such a big chicken. He is incidental—my favorite term is ‘peripheral,’” Shapley bluntly wrote in a 1969 memoir. “If man had been found in the center, it would look sort of natural. We could say, ‘Naturally we are in the center because we are God's children.’ But here was an indication that we were perhaps incidental. We did not amount to so much.”

Shapley had carried out a tour de force, and his findings hit the astronomical community like a lightning bolt. Praise for the work, from the most eminent corners of astronomy, was immediate. After reading Shapley's completed papers, Eddington wrote Shapley that “this marks an epoch in the history of astronomy, when the boundary of our knowledge of the universe is rolled back to a hundred times its former limit.” In a Scientific American article, Russell described the results as “simply amazing.” And British theorist James Jeans told Shapley that his newly published papers were “certainly changing our ideas of the universe at a great rate.”

Mount Wilson astronomer Walter Baade later remarked that he “always admired the way in which Shapley finished this whole problem in a very short time, ending up with a picture of the Galaxy that just about smashed up all the old school's ideas about galactic dimensions. It was a very exciting time, for these distances seemed to be fantastically large, and the ‘old boys’ did not take them sitting down.”

While the news spread quickly within the astronomical community, it took longer to reach the general public, likely due to the shadow of the war and its aftermath. Not until May 31, 1921, did the New York Times report on its front page that Shapley had multiplied the universe's size immensely. Our galaxy, noted the Times reporter, was now 300,000 light-years from end to end, a “super–Milky Way… The young astronomer has proved to his satisfaction by various calculations that the sun, the little speck of light around which a tiny shadow called the earth revolves, is 60,000 light years from the centre of the universe.”

“Personally I am glad to see man sink into such physical nothingness, and it is wholesome for human beings to realize of what small importance they are in comparison with the universe,” says Shapley in the article. (If any readers were made queasy by Shapley's news, the story was conveniently set just above a tiny advertisement for Bell-Ans pills, a popular 1920s indigestion remedy.)