Edwin
Powell Hubble
was born in the small town of
Marshfield, Missouri, USA, on November 29th, 1889. In 1898, His
family moved to Chicago, where he attended high school. Young
Edwin Hubble had been fascinated by science and mysterious new worlds
from an early age, having spent his childhood reading the works of Jules
Verne (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon), and
Henry Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines), Edwin Hubble was a fine student and an even better athlete, having
broken the Illinois State high jump record. When
he attended University, Hubble continued to excel in sports such as
basketball and boxing, but he also found time to study and earn an undergraduate degree in mathematics and astronomy.
Edwin Hubble went to Oxford University
on a Rhodes scholarship, where he did not continue his studies in
astronomy, but instead studied law. At this point in his life, he had
not yet made up his mind about pursuing a scientific career.
In 1913, Hubble returned from England
and was admitted to the bar, setting up a small practice in Louisville
Kentucky; but it didn't
take long for Hubble to realize he wasn't happy as a lawyer, and that
his real passion was astronomy, so he studied at the Yerkes Observatory,
and in 1917, received a doctorate in astronomy from the University
of Chicago.
Following a tour of duty in the first
World War, Hubble took a job at the Mount Wilson Observatory in
California, where took many photographs of Cepheid variables through 100
inch reflecting Hooker telescope, proving they were outside our galaxy,
and determining the existence of several other galaxies such as our own
milky way, which had until then been believed to be the universe.
Hubble had also devised a classification
system for the various galaxies he observed, sorting them by
content, distance, shape, and brightness; it was then he noticed
redshifts in the emission of light from the galaxies, seeing saw that
they were moving away from each other at a rate constant to the distance between them.
From these observation, he was able to formulate Hubble's Law in
1929, helping astronomers determine the age of the universe, and proving
that the universe was expanding.
It is interesting to note that In 1917,
Albert Einstein had already introduced his general theory of relativity,
and produced a model of space based on that theory, claiming that space
was curved by gravity, therefore that it must be able to expand or
contract; but he found this assumption so far fetched, that he revised
his theory, stating that the universe was static and immobile.
Following Hubble's discoveries, he is quoted as having said that second
guessing his original findings was the biggest blunder of
his life, and he even visited Hubble to thank him in 1931.
