The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [81]
Even a full decade after general relativity was introduced, many scientists were still resisting Einstein's new view of the universe. At the National Academy of Sciences meeting in Washington in 1925, physicist Dayton Miller of the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland announced he had seen evidence of an “ether drag,” the speed of light changing with the motion of Earth. According to one conference attendee, this report was a “bombshell…which quite blew up the meeting of the Academy and got more applause than anything that happened…[disturbing] the relativists in general.”
Einstein supporters were enraged that doubts over relativity still lingered at all. “I am really getting pretty tired of the fundamentalist's attitude of the opponents of relativity,” said Henry Norris Russell in response to Miller's bolt from the blue. “Their psychology seems to me to be exactly similar to that of the most conservative theologians.” In time, though, Miller's experiments proved faulty, and astronomers would eventually have to face up to the new cosmic order.
Go at Each Other “Hammer and Tongs”
The year 1920 was one of achievements—illustrious, infamous, resourceful, and humorous. American women got the vote, Joan of Arc was canonized by Pope Benedict XV, prohibition was initiated throughout the United States, an employee at the Johnson & Johnson company invented the Band-Aid, and the U.S. Post Office ruled that children may not be sent by parcel post. Moreover, astronomers didn't yet know exactly how the Sun generated its tremendous power or that the solar orb was largely composed of hydrogen, even though Einstein's newly introduced theory relating mass to energy, nicely summarized as E = mc2, was offering a fresh clue.
What 1920 is best remembered for in the annals of astronomy is Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis meeting in Washington, D.C., before members of the National Academy of Sciences to argue the arrangement of the universe. The sides were now clearly drawn, and it was time for a showdown. Shapley had, of course, recently pronounced that the Milky Way was far bigger than previously assumed, easily imagining the spirals as minor players hovering on the edge of our vast system of stars. Curtis, on the other hand, thought otherwise. This epochal encounter is commonly known as the “Great Debate,” al though in truth that's hardly an apt description at all. More like two lectures back to back, the event wasn't covered by even the science-oriented press. In astronomy circles, the venerable legend that surrounds that April session—the memory of it as the mighty clash of cosmic titans, astronomy's version of High Noon —developed gradually over time, the embroidery added so profusely over the years that it was eventually described as a “homeric fight,” two opposing sides battling it out in the highest court of scientific opinion.
This odyssey, though, began quite simply. George Ellery Hale had suggested at a council meeting of the academy that the 1920 Hale lecture on a topic of interest to scientists, an annual event established in honor of his father in 1914, be held during the academy's upcoming spring conference. He himself was leaning toward a discussion of Einstein's general theory of relativity, the trendiest scientific topic of the era. But the academy's home secretary, solar physicist Charles Greeley Abbot, feared that the revolutionary new view of gravity would already be “done to death” by the time of the meeting. The triumphant British solar-eclipse expedition was the science story of the year, still garnering headlines around the world. More than that, Abbot was wary of relativity's radical and difficult-to-comprehend concepts: “I pray to God that the progress of science will send relativity to some region of space beyond the fourth dimension, from whence it may never return to plague us,” he declared. Abbot wondered whether the “cause of glacial periods, or some zoological or biological subject” might