Edwin Hubble, The Man Behind the Telescope
Edwin Powell Hubble (20 November 1889 – 28 September 1953) He was sentenced to follow in the footsteps of his father in his legal career. He studied law as the obedient son of a traditional Midwestern family. But according to his biography, Gale E. Christianson’s Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (University of Chicago Press, 1996), his passion was the sky; When he was eight years old, he was looking for the first time through a telescope made by his maternal grandfather, and he spoke with his paternal grandfather about the Mars channels described by Percival Lowell.
FROM EXAMINING THE LAW TO THE HUBBLE LAW
Hubble’s career change In 1913 came. With the death of his father, he returned home from Oxford, where he studied law. Four years later he received his doctorate in astronomy. Of course, maybe his father would have been satisfied knowing that, ironically, his son who dropped out of legal education made history thanks to something called the Hubble Law.
Until Hubble’s time, the most widely accepted idea by astronomers was that everything observable in the sky, including “spiral nebulae” at that time, belonged to the Milky Way. However, at the Lowell Observatory, founded by the champion of Mars channels, an astronomer named Vesto Slipher discovered that the light from most of these nebulae shifted towards red, indicating that they were moving away at great speed.
HubbleHe combined Slipher’s data from the California Observatory at Mount Wilson, where he was working until his death in 1953, with measurements of the distance to some of these nebulae and concluded that they were too far to belong to the Path. Milky: they were independent galaxies. The relationship between distances and redshifts was almost linear over a range of distances; today Hubble’s Law This is what is known as.
AN EXPLANATION FOR BIG BANG
Hubble’s finding was instrumental in understanding the expansion of the universe and in developing the cosmological model of the Big Bang. For this reason, the astronomer is today referred to as the “man who discovered the cosmos”. To the Large Space Telescope or the Great Space Telescope it was deemed worthy to name it. Hubble did not receive the Nobel prize because its statutes did not include astronomy among the disciplines of the Physics category, which would change shortly after his death.
For all these reasons, Hubble is sometimes portrayed as the man who discovered the expansion of the universe. Yet the truth is that Hubble did not believe in this phenomenon. In his fundamental work, published in the journal PNAS in 1929, he established the relationship between velocities and galactic distances, but still wrote in 1942 that the redshift could be due to “some hitherto unrecognized natural principles.”
In fact, Hubble remained skeptical when he learned that a Belgian astronomer and priest named Georges Lemaître had reached the same conclusion and suggested the expansion of the universe. Lemaître was based on a solution proposed by the Russian Alexander Friedmann to Einstein’s equations of general relativity. But the expansion contradicted Einstein’s vision, who believed in a static universe. In the end, Lemaître was right, and Einstein had to correct it. The Belgian idea of a “cosmic egg” would derive from what we now know as the Big Bang.
Charged with condemning LEMAITRE
However, Lemaître published his research in a Belgian magazine in 1927, two years before Hubble. In 2011, astronomer Sidney van from Bergh found Lemaitre’s English translation of the original work, published in Monthly Alerts of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1931, turned out to be missing; The paragraphs in which the Belgian described his version of the Hubble Law and the corresponding fixed paragraphs were missing.
It was the subject of bizarre negligence, heated debates, it is said that Hubble himself proposed conspiracy to censor the translation. Finally, astrophysicist Mario Livio discovered in a letter from Lemaître that it was the demonstration that Hubble was himself a priestess who arranged his manuscript for the English version, eliminating the tentative calculations that had already refined at that time. “Lemaître was not at all obsessed with prioritizing his original discovery,” Livio wrote.
Hubble’s memory was successful. The incident, however, served to emphasize that the valuation of his contribution should not overshadow others. The American must share historical honors with a humble Belgian priest who, unlike himself, never hired an advertising agent to promote his Nobel nomination.
