Harlow Shapley

Shapley was born November 2, 1885, on a farm outside Nashville, Missouri, and his schooling stalled early enough that he was still working as a crime reporter in Kansas as a young man without ever finishing high school in the ordinary way. He crammed a six-year course into eighteen months of independent study at a Carnegie library in Chanute, graduated valedictorian, and enrolled at the University of Missouri in 1907 planning to study journalism. The journalism school's opening was delayed a year, so he opened the course catalog and worked down the alphabet instead. Archaeology, first in line, he could not pronounce. Astronomy, next, he could, so he registered for that. He spent the rest of his life in the subject he had picked essentially at random.

At Princeton under Henry Norris Russell, Shapley used the period-luminosity relation in Cepheid variable stars, discovered a few years earlier by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, to measure distances to globular clusters around the galaxy. The distances came back enormous, and Shapley concluded the Milky Way was many times larger than assumed and that the Sun sat nowhere near its center, a Copernican demotion delivered a second time. He argued the point publicly in the 1920 Great Debate against Heber Curtis, lost the larger question of whether spiral nebulae were separate galaxies, and was proven wrong within four years by Edwin Hubble. None of it slowed his career: Harvard made him director of its observatory in 1921, a post he held for thirty-one years, during which his staff mapped 76,000 galaxies and identified what is now the Shapley Supercluster.

Shapley spent his career arguing that the Earth, the Sun, and by extension humanity occupied no special place in the universe, and Cold War Washington treated him as if that made him dangerous. Subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in November 1946 over his membership in a liberal arts coalition, he told the committee it was using "Gestapo methods" and should be abolished; the chairman said he had never seen a witness treat Congress with more contempt. Shapley answered by becoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science months later, a move the press read as a rebuke aimed straight back at his accusers. He was, by his own account, not a conventional believer either way. "I never go to church," he told his former student Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. "I am too religious."

Shapley died in a nursing home in Boulder, Colorado, on October 20, 1972, at eighty-six. A lunar crater, an asteroid, and the Shapley Supercluster his Harvard staff helped map in the 1930s all carry his name. His 1953 proposal of a habitable "liquid water belt" around stars, a minor idea at the time, is now standard vocabulary in the search for livable exoplanets. His son Lloyd, a mathematician, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012 for work on stable matching, a second scientific reputation attached to the family name, in a field the father never touched.

Harlow Shapley's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Cepheid-based distances to globular clusters discovery
  Established the true scale of the Milky Way and the Sun's off-center position 1918
• The Great Debate speech
  Argued against Heber Curtis over the nature of spiral nebulae 1920
• Shapley Supercluster discovery
  A large concentration of galaxies in Centaurus, later named for him 1932
• The "liquid water belt" discovery
  Early formulation of what is now called the habitable zone 1953
• Of Stars and Men book 1958

• November 2, 1885 aged 0 Born on a farm outside Nashville, Missouri
• 1907 aged ~22 Enrolls at the University of Missouri and picks astronomy off the course catalog
• April 1914 aged 28 Marries Martha Betz
• 1918 aged ~33 Uses Cepheid variables to establish the true scale of the Milky Way Work completed at Mount Wilson Observatory under George Ellery Hale.
• April 26, 1920 aged 34 Debates Heber Curtis over the scale of the universe
• 1921 aged ~36 Becomes director of the Harvard College Observatory
• November 14, 1946 aged 61 Testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee
• 1953 aged ~68 Proposes the habitable "liquid water belt" around stars
• October 20, 1972 aged 86 Dies in Boulder, Colorado

• Edwin Hubble 1889–1953
  Astronomer whose discovery of expanding galaxies provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory. lost the Great Debate to
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt 1868–1921
  Discovered the Cepheid period-luminosity relation that made measuring cosmic distances possible. built his method on the discovery of
• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. ally in founding the National Science Foundation
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. faced Red Scare scrutiny alongside