This biography of the astronomer for whom the space telescope is
named offers a fascinating view of how the scientific elite lived
in the period between the world wars. Born in Marshfield, Mo., in
1889, Hubble was an outstanding student and athlete at the
University of Chicago and won a Rhodes scholarship. On his return
home from Oxford, he made a perfunctory pass at the legal career
his late father had urged upon him, but he soon committed himself
to studying astronomy. His scientific career (briefly interrupted
by WW I) went into full swing when he moved to Mt. Wilson
observatory in California and was able to use the 100-inch
telescope, then the finest in the world, to study the galaxies
(which he insisted on calling "nebulae"). He quickly became
recognized as the preeminent astronomer of his time. A dedicated
Anglophile after his Oxford years, he seized every opportunity to
take his wife, Grace, on European junkets, much to the annoyance of
his colleagues at Mt. Wilson. An egotistical snob, according to
science biographer Christianson (History/Appalachian State Univ.;
Writing Lives is the Devil, 1993) the aristocratic-looking Hubble
seems to have cut off relations with his family after his move to
California, preferring to hobnob with the likes of Einstein,
Chaplin, and Aldous Huxley. He feuded with rival astronomers and
had no interest in administrative work. Yet his contributions to
astronomy are without peer: He established not only that our galaxy
is but one of innumerable similar star systems filling the universe
in every observable direction, but that these galaxies are receding
from one another at speeds proportional to their distances - the
famous "red shift." Only Hubble's death in 1953 prevented his
receiving a Nobel Prize in Physics - there being none in astronomy.
A well-researched, well-informed, and revealing study of its
complex, brilliant subject and his times, this is one of the most
impressive scientific biographies of recent years. (Kirkus Reviews)
Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae is both the biography of an
extraordinary human being and the story of the greatest quest in
the history of astronomy since the Copernican revolution. The book
is a revealing portrait of scientific genius, an incisive engaging
history of ideas, and a shimmering evocation of what we see when
gazing at the stars.
Born in 1889 and reared in the village of Marshfield, Missouri,
Edwin Powell Hubble-star athlete, Rhodes Scholar, military officer,
and astronomer- became one of the towering figures in
twentieth-century science. Hubble worked with the great 100-inch
Hooker telescope at California's Mount Wilson Observatory and made
a series of discoveries that revolutionized humanity's vision of
the cosmos. In 1923 he was able to confirm the existence of other
nebulae (now known to be galaxies) beyond our own Milky Way. By the
end of the decade, Hubble had proven that the universe is
expanding, thus laying the very cornerstone of the big bang theory
of creation. It was Hubble who developed the elegant scheme by
which the galaxies are classified as ellipticals and spirals, and
it was Hubble who first provided reliable evidence that the
universe is homogeneous, the same in all directions as far as the
telescope can see.
An incurable Anglophile with a penchant for tweed jackets and
English briars, Hubble, together with his brilliant and witty wife,
Grace Burke, became a fixture in Hollywood society in the 1930s and
40s. They counted among their friends Charlie Chaplin, the Marx
brothers, Anita Loos, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Walt Disney, Helen
Hayes, and William Randolph Hearst. Albert Einstein, a frequent
visitor to Southern California, called Hubble's work "beautiful"
and modified his equations on relativity to account for the
discovery that the cosmos is expanding.
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