Edwin Hubble

Sport came first. He took seven first places and a third in one high-school track meet in 1906 and captained the University of Chicago basketball team to the school's first Big Ten title in 1907. Astronomy came third, behind his father, who wanted a lawyer. Hubble kept that promise, read jurisprudence at The Queen's College, Oxford, on a Rhodes scholarship, added literature and Spanish, and came home to Kentucky in 1913 after his father died to look after his mother, two sisters and a brother. Then he declined to practice. He taught Spanish, physics and mathematics at New Albany High School in Indiana and coached the boys' basketball team for a year before going back to Chicago to photograph faint nebulae at Yerkes.

Mount Wilson hired him in 1919, just as the 100-inch Hooker telescope came online, and the prevailing view was that the Milky Way was the whole of it. Hubble found Cepheid variables — the standard candle Henrietta Swan Leavitt had calibrated — in the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae, and his 1924 measurements put them far outside our galaxy. The universe acquired other galaxies. He broke the news in The New York Times on November 23, 1924, and to the astronomers on January 1, 1925. In 1926 he sorted galaxies into the tuning-fork scheme still called the Hubble sequence. In 1929 he plotted 46 of them, distance against redshift, and found the farther ones running away faster.

He never accepted what his own graph appeared to mean. Hubble called the recession velocities apparent, wrote to Willem de Sitter that interpretation should be left to the few competent to discuss it, and told the AAAS in December 1941 that six years of survey work did not support an expanding universe. He held that to the end. His distances were also badly short, by as much as a factor of seven, which put the age of everything at roughly two billion years — younger than the rocks under the telescope. And Georges Lemaître had derived the relation from general relativity and published observational support for it in 1927. Whether Hubble helped strip that from the 1931 English translation was argued for 80 years, until Mario Livio found the letter in 2011 showing Lemaître had cut it himself.

The prize he wanted was closed to him, because the Nobel in physics did not then cover astronomy. He spent his last years lobbying to have the boundary redrawn, and the committee redrew it shortly after he died, which was too late — the prize is not awarded posthumously. A heart attack came in 1949 in Colorado, and a clot in the brain on September 28, 1953, at home in San Marino. His wife Grace held no funeral and never told anyone where she put him. The name went everywhere anyway: a highway, a stamp, a crater, and the telescope launched in 1990. In October 2018 the International Astronomical Union voted to call the relation the Hubble-Lemaître law.

Edwin Hubble's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Cepheids in the Andromeda Nebula discovery
  The measurement that put other galaxies outside the Milky Way 1924
• The Hubble sequence discovery
  The tuning-fork classification of galaxies, still in use 1926
• A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae article
  Forty-six galaxies plotted, and the proportionality that carries his name 1929
• Asteroid 1373 Cincinnati discovery
  Found on August 30, 1935 1935
• The Realm of the Nebulae book
  His account of extragalactic astronomy for a general reader 1936
• The Observational Approach to Cosmology book
  The Oxford lectures, and his case against reading redshift as motion 1937

• 1906 aged ~17 Wins seven events in a single high-school track meet
• 1913 aged ~24 Comes home from Oxford after his father dies and refuses to practice law He taught high school Spanish, physics and mathematics instead, and coached basketball.
• 1917 aged ~28 Rushes his dissertation on faint nebulae to enlist He served in the 343rd Infantry, made major, and saw no combat.
• 1919 aged ~30 George Ellery Hale hires him at Mount Wilson He stayed on the staff for 34 years, until his death.
• November 23, 1924 aged 35 The New York Times prints the news that other galaxies exist He presented it to the American Astronomical Society on January 1, 1925.
• 1929 aged ~40 Publishes the distance-velocity relation His value for the constant was 500, about seven times too high.
• 1931 aged ~42 Einstein visits Mount Wilson and says the visit changed his mind He had added the cosmological constant to avoid an expanding universe.
• December 1941 aged 52 Tells the AAAS his survey does not support the expanding universe
• September 28, 1953 aged 63 Dies at San Marino with no funeral and no marked grave

• Henrietta Swan Leavitt 1868–1921
  Discovered the Cepheid period-luminosity relation that made measuring cosmic distances possible. used her standard candle
• Harlow Shapley 1885–1972
  Determined the size of the Milky Way and displaced the Sun from its center. proved wrong about the Milky Way
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. changed his mind at Mount Wilson
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. carried the cosmology to the public
• Neil deGrasse Tyson b. 1958
  Astrophysicist and science communicator who has made cosmology accessible to millions through television. later custodian of the telescope's audience