The Day We Found the Universe

ALSO BY MARCIA BARTUSIAK

Thursday's Universe

Through a Universe Darkly

Einstein's Unfinished Symphony

Archives of the Universe

To Steve

The center of my universe, who shared
every lightyear along the way

Preface

January 1, 1925

T
he twenties were not just roaring, they were blazing.

Moviegoers were flocking to the cinema to watch in amazement as Moses parted the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille's silent film epic
The Ten Commandments
, Greece overthrew its monarchy and proclaimed itself a republic, the first dinosaur eggs were discovered in Mongolia's Gobi Desert, and crossword puzzles became all the rage. It was the height of the Jazz Age, when Victorian ideals came tumbling down in a frenzy of flappers, Freudian analysis, and abstract art. While majestic ocean liners crossed the Atlantic in under five days, Clarence Birdseye introduced the public to the novelty of frozen food and a failed artist named Adolf Hitler published
Mein Kampf
. It was a world, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his classic novel
The Great Gatsby
, “redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.”

It was also an era of immense scientific fervor. On December 30, 1924, some four thousand scientists descended upon Washington, D.C., to attend the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Taking advantage of the three-day gathering, the American Astronomical Society held its meeting in the capital at the same time, with nearly eighty astronomers attending from across the United States. They lodged at the Powhatan, a plush eight-story hotel located on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where a room with private bath cost $2.50 a night and weary travelers could relax in its rooftop garden. Two blocks away Calvin Coolidge opened the doors of the White House to the visiting AAAS members. While notorious for being a man of few words, the thirtieth president of the United States was uncharacteristically chatty the day of the reception. “It has taken endless ages to create in men the courage that will accept the truth simply because it is the truth,” Coolidge told his guests. “We have advanced so far that we do not fear the results of that process. We ask no recantations from honesty and candor… Those of us who represent social organization and political institutions look upon you with a feeling that includes much of awe and something of fear as we ask ourselves to what revolution you will next require us to adapt our scheme of human relations.” Six months later high school biology teacher John Scopes would go on trial in Tennessee for illegally teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The astronomers, though, were scarcely aware that Washington was host to the largest number of scientists ever assembled for an AAAS meeting. Their interest was intently focused on the astronomy program, which included talks on the atmosphere of Mars, how fast celestial objects could move, the temperature of Mercury, and the latest computed orbit of the eclipsing double-star system Algol.

On Wednesday, the second day of the meeting, the astronomers were taken by glass-topped buses to the U.S. Naval Observatory, in the northwest sector of the town, for a tour of the facility and a buffet luncheon in its stately main hall. Later that evening, New Year's Eve, “occurred an event which was marked on the program and celebrated by a number of the faithful,”
Popular Astronomy
recounted. As the clock struck twelve, astronomers happily changed to civil reckoning for determining the start of a day. No longer would the astronomical day begin at high noon, a tradition launched in the days of Ptolemy that often led to great bookkeeping confusion. Instead, it now began at midnight, just as it did for everyone else. “It will probably be remembered and noted long after other astronomical happenings of the current year are forgotten,” stated the magazine.

But a presentation made on Thursday, New Year's Day, ultimately overshadowed all other events at the meeting. Looking out their hotel windows that inaugural morning of 1925, convention-goers discovered a blanket of snow covering the city, enough to give holiday sleds a good tryout, reported the
Washington Post
. Despite the ongoing snowstorm, however, the astronomers kept to their schedule and walked the short distance to the newly constructed Corcoran Hall, on the nearby campus of George Washington University, for a joint session with the mathematicians and physicists of the AAAS. They first heard a talk on stellar evolution, followed by a lecture posing the question “Is the Universe Infinite?” which led to a lively discussion among the conferees. Then right before the noon break, a paper modestly titled “Cepheids in Spiral Nebulae” was presented to the assembled audience. Those not familiar with astronomy likely imagined it was a minor technical work, of interest only to a specialist. But the astronomers in the room immediately grasped its significance. For them, it was electrifying news. Despite its lackluster title, this paper was no less than the culmination of a centuries-long quest to understand the true nature and extent of the cosmos. January 1, 1925, was the day that astronomers were officially informed of the universe's discovery.

The author of the paper was thirty-five-year-old Edwin Hubble, a staff astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory, in southern California. Hubble had aimed Mount Wilson's 100-inch reflector, the largest telescope in its day, toward a pair of celestial clouds known as Andromeda and Triangulum, the only spiral nebulae in the nighttime sky that can be seen with the naked eye. By having access to significant telescopic power, Hubble was at last able to resolve individual stars in the outer regions of the two mistlike clouds, and to his surprise and delight some turned out to be Cepheids, special stars that methodically dim and brighten as if they were slow-blinking cosmic stoplights.

The signals revealed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was not alone. The Cepheids were telling Hubble that the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae were very distant, situated far beyond our galactic borders. Our celestial home was suddenly humbled, becoming just one of a multitude of galaxies residing in the vast gulfs of space. In one fell swoop, the visible universe was enlarged by an inconceivable factor, eventually trillions of times over. In more familiar terms, it's as if we had been confined to one square yard of Earth's surface, only to suddenly realize that there were now vast oceans and continents, cities and villages, mountains and deserts, previously unexplored and unanticipated beyond that single plug of sod. Hubble directed our eyes to billions of other galaxies—other Milky Ways formerly unknown—scattered like separate atoms through space and time, as far outward as telescopes could peer. Indications of the Milky Way's true place in the universe had been cropping up for years, but the evidence was indirect, conflicting, and controversial. Hubble stepped into the fray and finally provided the decisive proof. He confirmed an idea to everyone's satisfaction that beforehand had been on far shakier ground.

It was the astronomical news of the century and yet Hubble, astonishingly, was not present—at this, his moment of triumph. Instead, the staid and respected Princeton University astronomer Henry Norris Russell stood in for Hubble that morning and relayed his findings to the conferees. From all accounts, Hubble was neither sick nor detained by family matters. He might have been put off by the long and wearying cross-country train ride, but the reason for his absence was possibly more idiosyncratic. Hubble, a former legal scholar trained in weighing evidence, was concerned that by the time of the astronomy meeting he hadn't countered every feasible argument against his finding. At his own observatory, in fact, a colleague had gathered the strongest ammunition against his conclusion, evidence Hubble couldn't yet refute. This loose end bothered him immensely. What Hubble craved was an airtight case—no stone unturned, no question left unanswered—before stepping up to the podium himself. Being caught in a scientific error was Hubble's greatest nightmare. Back in California the young astronomer was fretfully asking himself, Could I possibly be wrong?

With the stunning pictures of our resplendent cosmos now so widely circulated, such a part of the routine imagery that surrounds us daily, it's difficult to remember that less than a hundred years ago astronomers' conception of the universe was very different than it is today. There were no quasars, no distant galaxies, no exotic black holes or wildly spinning neutron stars. No one even knew for sure how the Sun could keep generating its tremendous energies over billions of years. What was called “the universe” consisted of a single, disk-shaped collection of stars that cuts a magnificent swath across the celestial sky. With Earth located within this great stellar assembly, we peer outward through the disk and perceive it as a band (much the way a plate looks viewed from its side). Known since ancient times as the Milky Way because of its ghostly white visage, our galaxy a century ago was not just the sole inhabitant of the cosmos. It
was
the cosmos—a lone, star-filled oasis surrounded by a darkness of unknown depth.

A few voices of dissent could be heard, arguing against this perspective. A growing number of small spiraling clouds were being sighted in the heavens; these faint celestial objects were lurking wherever a telescope gazed away from the Milky Way into deep space. Were these spiral nebulae close to us or were they farther off? No one knew, because at the turn of the twentieth century astronomers didn't yet have the means to determine their distance with assured accuracy. The only thing they could do was speculate. Some looked at these nebulae, shaped like springs unwinding, and thought, “Ah, nearby solar systems in the making.” Others observed the same tiny clouds and imagined them as a host of sister Milky Ways so distant that their stars melded into faint and misty whiteness. That would mean the Milky Way was not special at all but merely one island of stars caught in the midst of a far larger archipelago. But the majority of astronomers rejected this strange—even frightening—concept. That other galaxies existed seemed inconceivable, and so they fiercely clung to what they perceived to be their pivotal place in the cosmos. Nicolaus Copernicus may have moved Earth and its inhabitants from the hub of the solar system in the sixteenth century, but humanity remained comforted by the notion that it retained a privileged position in the very heart of the Milky Way, the sole galaxy. They rested easy knowing they resided in the very center of the universe. There was no hard-and-fast evidence to suggest otherwise.

The Milky Way over the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona
(Photo by Michael R. Cole, UrbanImager)

That contentment was shattered, though, as astronomy underwent a spectacular transformation, starting in the waning years of the nineteenth century. “This was an era of extraordinary change in every phase of human life on this planet,” recalled Edwin Frost, an astronomer who had personally witnessed the transition at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. “[It] was truly a Victorian age drawn to a close with the end of the century.” When Frost was growing up in the 1880s, Europe was the touchstone in matters of literature, painting, and science. “Even steel rails for the trunk-lines were imported from Britain as late as my college days,” he said. “Then Andrew Carnegie and others found that rails could be made better and cheaper in America… The child was rapidly getting out of its infancy.” Discoveries and inventions were on the rise. Seemingly overnight, there were electric lights, heating by coal, hot-air furnaces, indoor bathrooms, and automobiles smoothly traveling down asphalt-paved roads.

Astronomy blossomed within this atmosphere of teeming innovation. Cameras became standard equipment on telescopes, enabling observers to gather light over an entire night and so generate images of faint stars and nebulae never before seen. And spectroscopes, devices that separate starlight into its component colors, allowed astronomers to figure out what the stars and other celestial objects were truly made of. Suddenly the very chemistry of the heavens was in their grasp. Meanwhile, prominent industrialists, enriched by the bounty of the Gilded Age, provided the money that allowed big dreamers to construct the large telescopes they had so long desired.

Given the swift emergence of these technological improvements, dry textbook accounts, reduced to a discovery's most essential elements, make it appear as if Hubble's historic achievement had taken place overnight. He goes to the world's largest and best-equipped telescope and, voilà, he reveals a cosmos populated with myriad galaxies spread over space as far as the telescopic eye could see. The Milky Way suddenly becomes a minor player in a much larger drama, and Hubble is anointed cosmology's “prime architect” for making this astounding breakthrough. But that is not the case at all. In reality, Hubble stood on the shoulders of a series of astronomers farsighted enough to tackle a problem others had been ignoring. Answers did not arrive in one eureka moment, but only after years of contentious debates over conjectures and measurements that were fiercely disputed. The avenue of science is more often filled with twists, turns, and detours than unobstructed straightaways.