Hubble did not discover the expansion of the Universe!!

[madbadgalaxyman]

Here is a historical article by Sidney van den Bergh, showing that others before Edwin Hubble were aware of the distance-velocity relation for galaxies :

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Incidentally, Dr van den Bergh, now in his mid-80s, is old enough to have personally known some of the great astronomers of the early-to-mid 20th Century.

Note that Wikipedia states that he is 'retired'. While this is strictly true in terms of the fact that he is an emeritus, I know that he was still writing papers at least until last year. A lot of people who write wikipedia entries do not understand basic concepts such as the fact that an officially retired astronomer can still be extremely scientifically active and useful.

While the wiki is slavishly copied from other sources, it in no way summarizes his gigantic contributions to extragalactic astronomy, some of which he contributed in old age; I do not intend to correct the wiki because I feel that knowledge without attribution is entirely valueless.

[astroron]

Interesting reading Robert.
Thanks for your research :thanx:
Cheers:thumbsup:

[madbadgalaxyman]

The wiki entry about Sidney van den Bergh illustrates the danger of a person transcribing information that he does not fully understand; the infamous use of the word 'retired' to describe the status of an elderly but brilliant extragalactic astronomer (such as Sidney van den Bergh, Professor Kenneth C. Freeman, or the recently deceased Alan Sandage), has to be regarded as an actual insult
; these types of brilliant astronomers usually work on astronomy 'literally till they drop'. For instance, our own local Australian powerhouse of extragalactic astronomy, Dr Kenneth C. Freeman is nearing his 'official retirement age' in that he may no longer be on the payroll; however it is unlikely that he will stop doing research. In fact, he seems to be more scientifically productive than ever, now that he is in his 70s.

As anyone with any background in science knows, "Professor Emeritus" is the usual way to refer to an active elderly scientist who is not actually being paid to do his ongoing valuable research.

I must say though that my most recent astronomical correspondence with Dr van den Bergh (on a topic of mutual strong interest) was not as successful as the previous correspondence I had with him; so I hope that he is still alright!

[wasyoungonce]

And I though it was Vesto Slipher working as Hubble's assistant who actually made the discovery of these "currently unknown nebula"...later determined to be external galaxies.:shrug:

[madbadgalaxyman]

Vesto Slipher is definitely very underrated. He discovered that M31 is approaching our own Galaxy (its light is blueshifted), and he did discover that many galaxies (which would probably have been called spiral nebulae, at that time, as their true nature was in dispute!) are receding from our own Galaxy at high velocities.

However, I was under the impression that, while Slipher had considerable evidence for the general recession of the 'spiral nebulae', he did not discover what is generally known as the Hubble Law or Hubble's Law, which is the proportionality between galaxy distance and galaxy velocity. Hubble had more recession velocities to hand, and he had to make a lot of assumptions about the distances of the galaxies, in order to figure out that the more distant is the galaxy, the higher is its recession velocity. (if we graph the galaxy velocity vs galaxy distance for a sufficiently large number of galaxies, the graph is a straight line, as long as we take into account the individual velocities of the various galaxies)

I don't think Slipher interpreted his ground-breaking data as being due to the expansion of the universe.

A summary of Slipher's work, plus some of his papers, can be found here:
http://www.roe.ac.uk/~jap/slipher/

The early discoveries of Slipher, Lemaitre, Lundmark, Hubble, etc., regarding the expansion of the universe are of the highest importance, and it is obvious that too much of the credit has gone to Hubble. However, Hubble did have enough galaxy redshifts and galaxy distances to conclusively prove that galaxy velocity is proportional to galaxy distance.

[AstralTraveller]

I read many years ago in Scientific American (and I'm not sure if I still have the source at home) that, when Hubble first published, he did not have enough velocity-distance determinations to statistically support his 'discovery'. Possibly he jumped the gun to make sure he was the first to publish but I don't know how it got past the referees (choose poor statisticians?). In any case, within a year or so he had enough data to support his discovery and the rest is history.

[madbadgalaxyman]

Hi David,
thanks for your accurate comment about the rough and ready data that Hubble used to make his graph of Velocity vs Distance for galaxies. I reproduce the graph from his 1929 paper, below.

I do not know if this was his first published velocity-distance graph.

People can obviously disagree about whether or not some scattered points on a graph constitute a specific trend......

Given that today's best available distance estimates for various individual galaxies have a nominal accuracy of about 10 percent (or possibly somewhat worse, if we include baseline errors), the errors on the distance axis of Hubble's graph must have been very very very large!!

Edwin Hubble's result that Galaxy Distance is proportional to Galaxy Recession Velocity (after each galaxy velocity has been corrected for the motion of our Sun) was published in (1929), Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 15, 168

In other words, he found that Galaxy Velocity =
A Constant multiplied by the Galaxy Distance
(which is usually called Hubble's Law)
(we now call the constant in this equation the Hubble Constant)

Here is the velocity-distance graph for the "extra-galactic nebulae"(note the interesting terminology!) from E.P. Hubble (1929) : : :

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Rough as guts!! Indeed, it is quite possible to fit these data points with something other than a straight-line trend.
But Hubble was right, as we now know;
for instance, the points on the graph of distance vs velocity for Type 1a Supernovae out to a redshift of z = 1 , do closely follow a straight line......

( There were people who strongly suspected that this linear relationship existed, well before Hubble published...... indeed these people already talked about what we now call the value of the Hubble Constant.
Hubble, whether fairly or unfairly lauded for this, clinched the case in the eyes of his peers.....his attitude to his competitors and his hogging of the credit, is a matter for the historians.)

[allan gould]

Robert
I read somewhere that most of the data ~80% presented in Hubbles graph is actually Sliphers data to which Hubble added some of the more distant determinations. Hubble did not fully say that he had used Slipher's data or attribute it precisely.
Unfortunately I dont hold Hubbard in high esteem as a scientist, due mainly due to his affectations and lack of consideration and promotion of Humanson's contributions. see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_L._Humason
Allan

[madbadgalaxyman]

Allan,

Thanks Allan and others, for your contributions. This thread is getting ever more interesting, and you are spurring me look deeper into the issue of Hubble's true role in the discovery of the expanding universe.

Allan, I think that while your view is highly controversial, given Hubble's very high standing in both professional and amateur astronomical communities, your points should be given careful consideration by historians of science and by the astronomical community.

Perhaps we should find out what Shapley said about Hubble, as Shapley was very much the other first-magnitude star of extragalactic astronomy in the first 50 years of the 20th century.

If Hubble essentially stole Slipher's data, without attributing the data to Slipher, that is a very serious allegation.
(the use of data without attribution still occurs today in science, but computerized search tools have made it much rarer)

Personalities vary enormously amongst professional astronomers;
some of them are friendly and mild-mannered and very helpful gentlemen (and gentlewomen) who are hesitant to claim full credit even for first-rate work they have done themselves, while others of them are out-and-out psychopaths who wish to claim all credit for themselves and to treat the other competing astronomers as 'the enemy'

However, one must distinguish between regard for a person's personality and regard for a person's scientific work.

In my view, a lot of good science has been done by people with deeply defective personalities, e.g. Isaac Newton was a particularly nasty piece of work.

Hard as it is to admit this, the fact remains that some of the great scientists were not at all nice people.....

Best regards,
Robert Lang

P.S.
I will read the Humason wiki ( though many of the science entries in wikipedia are often misleading or wrong in parts.)

Historians will argue forever about attribution of work, especially in controversial cases;
what about Schmidt's recent Nobel Prize, for supernova cosmology research that involved a lot of other people?

[Merlin66]

A good read is "Man Discovers the Galaxies", by Berendzen, Hart & Seeley.
They discuss at some length (p 194 onwards) the "Expanding Universe"

[madbadgalaxyman]

The question of how much respect we should give to someone who has major achievements in some area of science or technology, who nonetheless did great evil, or who took all credit for work that substantially involved someone else, or who (hypothetically) was something of a sleazebag , or (hypothetically) engaged in some form of behaviour that was hurtful or injurious to those around him/her, is an important one.

In my view, looking overall at the entire history of science and technology, there are plenty of cases of 'bad' or even 'very bad' or even 'evil' characters, who actually achieved a lot.

The poster boy for this type of person is arguably Wernher von Braun, who aside from helping the Nazis develop the V1 and V2 weapons, knowingly used forced labour to help build these weapons;
and it was not just the 'you will do this!' type of forced labor; they systematically fed the working prisoners less than they should have, knowing that each prisoner would inevitably die of starvation and overwork after a certain specified period of time. (thus using a human being as an expendable machine)

On the other side of the ledger, as we all know, von Braun was a brilliant engineer, leader of men, inspiration for space exploration, and a superb popularizer and explainer of science and technology.

cheers
Robert

The question of what exactly Hubble did or did not discover, is, I think, a very serious one; given that we have named a space telescope after him, named a physical constant after him, and we even talk of the expansion of the universe as being 'The Hubble Flow'

[sjastro]

A person who comes to mind is William Shockley who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the transistor.

Despite the intellect Shockley was a bit of a white supremacist. He advocated eugenics or the voluntary sterilization of individuals with IQs less than 100, in particular African Americans whom he claimed were less intelligent and bred more profusely than whites.
He was a contributor to the "Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_for_Germinal_Choice)" in an effort to raise the intelligence of the human race.

Regards

Steven

[bigjoe]

Hi all.It seems some, many have admired so much, are deeply flawed.Affectations as Hubble had ignoring others contributions as did the devious Sir Isaac, possibly destroying much of Robert Hookes work and records, even his portraits dissapeared when ol Isaac was in charge at the Royal Society.He never gave credit to Wren, Barrow,Leibnitz,Hooke and others concerning the inverse sq law of gravity,or calculus.
Oppenheimer ,Edison etcs are others we know who had issues.So I Idolize very few of them, as they seem to want nothing but personal glory for their achievementsJust my 2 cents. Cheers