Edwin Hubble

From Wikipedia:

"Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an
American astronomer who played a crucial role in establishing the
field of extragalactic astronomy and is generally regarded as one the
most important observational cosmologists of the 20th century. Hubble
is generally mistakenly known for Lemaître's law or "Hubble's law",
which was discovered by [Jesuit priest] Georges Lemaître. He is also
mistakenly credited with the discovery of the existence of galaxies
other than the Milky Way and his galactic red shift discovery that the
loss in frequency—the redshift—observed in the spectra of light from
other galaxies increased in proportion to a particular galaxy's
distance from Earth. This relationship became known as Lemaître's law
or "Hubble's law". These findings fundamentally changed the
scientific view of the universe. The existence of other galaxies and
red shift was actually first discovered by the American astronomer
Vesto Slipher. Using the data collected by Vesto Slipher and his
(Hubble's) assistant Milton Humason (a former mule-driver and
janitor), Hubble and Humason found a direct relationship between a
galaxy's distance and its relative speed away from the solar system.

"Hubble supported the Doppler shift interpretation of the observed
redshift that had been proposed earlier by Vesto Slipher, and that led
to the theory of the metric expansion of space. He tended to believe
the frequency of any beam of light could, by some so far unknown
means, be diminished ever stronger, the longer the beam travels
through space."

Hubble's great tenacity toward getting to the truth, the reality, of
his and other's observations cannot and should not be in any way
diminished or disparaged. Yet, I am not able to reconcile the way
Slipher, Lemaître and Hubble interpreted those observations. Lemaître,
the Catholic priest who was the first to propose that the Universe is
expanding, the first who closed his eyes and envisioned what that
would mean if one imaginatively stopped time and rolled it backward.
An expanding Universe means that, if time were reversed, the Universe
would contract and contract until, at some point in the past, the
entire Universe must have been contained in a tiny, point-like thing,
which Lemaître called a "primeval atom". Hubble, perhaps
independently, drew the same conclusion. And the idea that the
Universe expanded from a primeval point-state, an idea that came to be
called the "Big Bang hypothesis of the development of the early
Universe", steadily gained more and more scientific credibility.

More and more astronomers began to give this "Big Bang" idea some
thought. Then along came yet another great scientist, George Gamow,
who had been trained as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Gamow
introduced the idea of "big bang nucleosynthesis" (BBN)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis

His student, Ralph Alpher, and Alpher's associate, Robert Herman, then
predicted the "cosmic microwave background radiation" (CMB)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB

....but *that's* another story in the continuing epic saga of that
great science, awesome astronomy!

--
Indelibly yours,
Paine @ http://astronomy.painellsworth.net/
"Science, all science, is either physics or stamp collecting."