How Hubble burst the bubble of the Milky Way

THIS book tells the story of the life and scientific contribution of Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), the greatest astronomer since Galileo. Hubbles carefully planned and brilliantly executed observations using the hundred inch Mount Wilson telescope in California provide much of the concrete basis for our current understanding of the large scale structure of the universe and for the generally accepted cosmological model - the Big Bang Theory.

Despite the subject matter - plumbing the depths of the universe in order to divine its nature, and consequently the ultimate nature of all there is the book is written in a flat and humdrum style. It is also at least a hundred pages too long. Nevertheless, the story is clearly presented and could be easily understood by the non specialist.

All great scientists have the ability to recognise important problems that are capable of being solved. If politics is the art of the possible, science is the art of the soluble. At every stage in his career Hubble could see the next significant problem and how to solve it. When he began his astronomical researches in 1914, it was not at all clear that there were any other galaxies in the universe apart from our own Milky Way. By 1923 he had shown that numerous galaxies exist by 1930 he had shown that the universe is expanding - that all the galaxies are moving away from each other, and the further apart two galaxies are the faster they are receding from each other. This is a cornerstone concept in the Big Bang Theory. He also showed that the universe is homogeneous - the same in all directions as far as the telescope can see. This homogeneous structure is the complete opposite to the classical picture of the hierarchical organisation of the universe.

As regards Hubble's personality, this book is certainly no "warts and all" presentation. Nevertheless, the picture that comes across is of a calculating, reserved and cold personality who pursued his research and career to the exclusion of most other considerations. It seems doubtful that he ever opened up to anyone, except perhaps to his devoted wife Grace.

It is not uncommon for people who are intellectually gifted to be also talented in many other ways Niels Bohr was a fine soccer player. Hubble was amazingly talented as an athlete, winning many honours at high school and university in basketball, high jump, long jump, shot putt, boxing, rowing, etc.

He spent several years (1910-1913) at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He fell in love with English manners and culture and ever after was an incurable Anglophile. He took this preoccupation to comical lengths, affecting a British accent and speech pattern and displaying a penchant for tweeds, plus fours and briar pipes. It must have been quite wearing on colleagues to have to endure this self conscious posing.

It is common for scientists of high standing in a particular area to feud among themselves over competing theories. Astronomy seems to be particularly prone to this weakness. These feuds are fuelled mainly by undisciplined jealousies and immature emotions. Hubble quarrelled openly with the astronomer Harlow Shapley, and particularly with Adriaan van Maaner.

Hubble became very famous after he published his work showing that the universe is expanding. Visitors flocked to the Mount Wilson Observatory to see the great telescope. Hubble frequently showed visiting dignitaries around the observatory. In 1948 Eamon de Valera visited California and asked to see the telescope; as a gifted mathematician, de Valera had a particular interest in the cosmological implications of Hubble's work. Hubble the Anglophile had grave reservations about meeting Dev; however, he did agree to show him around the observatory and was charmed by the personality of the Irish leader.

Hubble was raised in a strict Baptist tradition. The effects on his spiritual development of peering into the heart of the cosmos might seem a promising area from which the author might knock some sparks, but she fails to do so. Hubble in fact became agnostic, but he did derive some spiritual comfort from peering into the infinite. One day he showed Edith Sitwell plates of "universes in the heavens", millions of light years away. "How terrifying," she remarked, "Only at first, when you are not used to them," he replied. "Afterwards they give one comfort. For then you know there is nothing to worry about nothing at all."