The Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Author:Marcia Bartusiak [BARTUSIAK, MARCIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780375424298
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Adonis

From the mile-high summit of Mount Wilson, you can look a dozen miles to the southwest, across a wide valley, and catch sight of Hollywood and its lower-lying hills. The movie studios situated there in the 1920s were rapidly growing in allure and generating their mythic aura. This enchanted atmosphere must have somehow wafted over to the San Gabriel Mountains, for the man who eventually solved the mystery of the spiral nebulae looked as if he had come straight out of central casting.

In the eyes of his friends Edwin Hubble was an “Adonis,” a tall and robust figure with compelling hazel eyes, a cleft chin, and wavy brown hair that glinted of reddish gold. Pronounced cheekbones cast attractive shadows in his photographs, lending his face a movie-star look. A woman screenwriter considered him too handsome for his occupation, comparing him to box-office idol Clark Gable. “Had we been casting [the role of a scientist] at M.G.M., Edwin Hubble would have been turned down as ‘unrealistic,’” said Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Raised in a solid middle-class household, Hubble somewhere along the line acquired a profound yearning to be singular and distinct. Fiercely determined to rise in the ranks, he reinvented himself upon reaching adulthood—adopting a British accent, dressing like a dandy, and adding dubious credentials to his curriculum vitae. The young man was seemingly intent on burying the most boring aspects of his midwestern family heritage and over time crafted a persona as big as the silver screen. By marrying into a wealthy southern California family, Hubble attained many of his lofty social and financial goals, and his wife, Grace, became his accomplice. She idolized her husband and, long after his death, propagated the legend he established, of which numerous details were highly edited or demonstrably wrong. She put him on a pedestal. And the longer time went on, said astronomer Nicholas Mayall, who had once worked with Hubble, the higher the pedestal got. Hubble's discovering the modern universe didn't seem to be glory enough.

Born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri, Hubble was the third of seven surviving children and christened Edwin Powell, although he generally avoided using his middle name or initial. His father, John, who grew up in Missouri, was trained in the law but earned a living working in his family's insurance business. When not traveling, he ruled his domestic realm with a firm puritanical hand, a strictness that was balanced by the more forgiving and accessible mother, Virginia Lee (“Jennie”) James, daughter of a local physician.

It was in Missouri, the “Show Me” state, that Hubble began his love affair with the heavens. His maternal grandfather, William James (a distant relation to the famous outlaw Jesse James), had built a telescope, and as a present on his eighth birthday young Edwin was permitted to stay up past his bedtime and use it to peruse the pinpoints of light, sparkling like brilliant gems, in the nighttime sky. The impression made on him that pitch-black winter evening, the starry wonders he beheld, lasted a lifetime.

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