November 20
HUBBLE DAY
Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri on this day in 1889. We’re talking about the Rhodes Scholar Hubble who studied Roman and English Law at Queens College, Oxford and then practiced law for a year in Louisville, Kentucky.
This is the same Hubble who said, “...[I] chucked the law for astronomy, and I knew that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered...” and then returned to his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Chicago, for postgraduate work leading to his doctoral degree in astronomy.
Hubble worked at the Mount Wilson (California) Observatory where he proved the need for a telescope larger than the 100-inch reflector they were using at the time and assisted in the design of the 200-inch Hale telescope. “With the 200-inch,” he said in a BBC broadcast in London, “we may grasp what now we can scarcely brush with our fingertips.”
“What do you expect to find with the 200-inch?” he was asked. Hubble’s reply, “We hope to find something we hadn’t expected.”
Edwin Hubble’s discovery and development of the concept of an expanding universe has been described as the “most spectacular astronomical discovery of the twentieth century.” As a tribute to him, the Hubble Space Telescope bears his name. That telescope, with its 240-centimeter mirror, has allowed us to see farther into space than ever before.
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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