![]() ![]() The Rhodes scholarĪ tall, powerfully built young man, Hubble loved basketball and boxing, and the combination of athletic prowess and academic ability earned him a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He finally obtained a degree in Mathematics and Astronomy in 1910. He paid his expenses by tutoring, working in the summer and, in his junior year, by obtaining a scholarship in physics and working as a laboratory assistant. This high school scholarship was also awarded to another student by mistake, so the money had to be halved and Edwin had to supply the rest. At his high school graduation in 1906, the principal said: "Edwin Hubble, I have watched you for four years and I have never seen you study for ten minutes." He paused, leaving young Edwin on tenterhooks a moment longer, before continuing: "Here is a scholarship for the University of Chicago." A promising studentĮdwin Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889, the son of an insurance executive, and moved to Chicago nine years later. When scientists decided to name the Space Telescope after the founder of modern cosmology the choice could not have been more appropriate. A man who eventually broke the promise made to his father and followed the path dictated by his passion.Īs a result of Hubble's work, our perception of mankind's place in the Universe has changed forever: humans have once again been set aside from the centre of the Universe. This sentence, written by Edwin Hubble recalling his youth, tells us a lot about the man. "I knew that even if I were second or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered." (accessed 25 September 2004).Edwin Powell Hubble - The man who discovered the cosmos He returned to Mount Wilson after the war and was instrumental in establishing the bigger telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory. In 1942 Hubble left the Mount Wilson Observatory to offer his services as a scientist in the war against Nazi Germany. Einstein visited Hubble in 1931 to acknowledge that Hubble's work had helped him to rectify his error. Hubble's observations caused Einstein to retract his invention of a "cosmological constant" he had introduced to make the universe static and immobile. Modern astronomy has rectified this, and Hubble's discoveries form the basis of modern cosmology. His initial calculation of the constant was in error and made the Milky Way appear larger than all other galaxies. In 1929 he refined this finding by showing that the universe was expanding in such a way that the ratio of the speed of the galaxies to their distance is a constant, now called Hubble's constant. Hubble then concentrated on the determination of distances of galaxies and observed in 1927 that all galaxies were receding from the Milky Way. The announcement of this finding in 1924 led to a revision of astronomical theory. This allowed him to show that these galaxies were not part of the Milky Way, as was believed at the time, but several hundred thousand light-years away. He discovered that some nebulae contained pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, for which the correlation between the period of pulsation and absolute magnitude of luminosity was already established. ![]() After return from duty during World War I he worked at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena in California, studying the properties of galaxies. ![]() in 1912 and returned to the USA to establish a legal practice in Kentucky.įinding himself bored with law, Hubble returned to university to study astronomy at the University of Chicago. The young Hubble excelled in athletics, boxing and basketball but was academically good enough to receive a Rhodes scholarship for Oxford University, where he studied law. 28 September 1953 (San Marino, Ca.).Įdwin Hubble's family moved from Missouri, where Edwin was born, to Chicago when Edwin was nine years old. 20 November 1889 (Marshfield, Mo, USA), d. Science, civilization and society Edwin Powell HubbleĪstronomer b. ![]()
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