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Hubble

Content below is from #185 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend Netflix’s The Killer starring Michael Fassbender
    • Solitary, cold, methodical and unencumbered by scruples or regrets, a killer waits in the shadows, watching for his next target. Yet, the longer he waits, the more he thinks he’s losing his mind, if not his cool.
  • I watched a show and movie critic I find amusing on YouTube, the Critical Drinker analyze this movie and I think he had a great point… it ain’t what you’d expect.
    • I knew from the trailer, that The Killer would be about an assassin. So I expected James Bond type stuff with high tech gadgets, slick martial arts, cool fast-paced writing, and for the main guy to get the girl… right?
    • Nope, The Killer is about a practical, seemingly unfeeling contract killer doing his job in the most efficient way possible.
      • He dresses like a dweeb, uses low-tech tools that get the job done, and as the first line of the movie suggests, does a lot of waiting.
        • “It’s amazing how physically exhausting it can be to do nothing. If you are unable to endure boredom, this work is not for you.”
      • That opening line got the message across that this isn’t your typical assassin move and hooked me right away.
  • So that’s why I recommend you watch The Killer

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Edwin HUBBLE the man.
    • Born on the Ozarks (November 20, 1889 [about 10 years after Einstein] in Marshfield Missouri, raised in a suburb of Chicago.
    • He was the Son of an insurance exec, so a rich kid with a silver spoon in his mouth.
    • He was Athletic as all hell, good looking, and he knew it.
      • His colleagues said he was too good looking for his own good and it got him into trouble.
    • Won 7 gold medals in 1 track meet.
      • He won seven first places and a third place in a single high school track and field meet in 1906. That year he also set the state high school record for the high jump in Illinois. Another of his personal interests was dry-fly fishing, and he practiced amateur boxing as well.
    • He said that along with being devilishly good-looking, wealthy, and absurdly athletic, he constantly boasted about all of his astonishing acts of valor and manliness that he did all the time.
      • He said he saved many lives of men on the battlefields of France in WW1
      • He said he saved several lives from drowning as he was such a good swimmer.
      • He said he had a habbit of knocking out world-class boxers in exhibition matches…
      • This was all malarky. LOL He made it all up.
      • Edwin Hubble had a massive ego.
    • One of the funniest parts about him from the book I read (A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson), said Had a fake British accent that wasn’t quite British lol. Like he wanted to sound almost knightly, but it was like an American’s idea of a British accent.
      • He somehow picked it up (or fabricated) the accent in college when he was still a teenager… and unlike most ppl who pick up douchey full-of-ourselves traits when we are younger… Hubble never left the fake British accent behind LOL
    • He said he spent the 1910s studying law in Kentucky to become a distinguished lawyer… but he was actually a high school teacher in Albany Indiana lol.
      • Not that there is anything wrong with being a high school teacher, on the contrary, teachers shape the world’s youth and future generations on how to see the world. I have the utmost respect for teachers…
      • But its the fact that he lied about it that cracks me up.
      • As if Lawyers have better reputations that teachers
    • Although I said he lied about saving many lives in WW1, it is true he served in the Great War.
      • Shipped to France 1 month before ww1 armistice. Saw no action so the whole “saved men from the battlefield” thing was poppy cock.
  • Hubble the Astronomer
    • Went to Mt. WILSON observatory near LA in 1919.
    • In 1919, Hubble was offered a staff position at the Carnegie Institution for Science‘s Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, by George Ellery Hale, the founder and director of the observatory. Hubble remained on staff at Mount Wilson until his death in 1953. Shortly before his death, Hubble became the first astronomer to use the newly completed giant 200-inch (5.1 m) reflector Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California.
    • We now know there are 140 Billion galaxies.
      • BUT, At this time when Hubble started astronomy in 1919, we only knew of 1 galaxy… our own Milky Way.
    • Everything else astronomers saw was thought to be a puff of gas on the periphery (what they called a Nebula) or part of the Milky Way itself…
    • Hubble proved all that to be wrong.
    • For the next decade he set out to answer 2 big questions:
      • 1 How old is the universe?
      • 2 how big is it?
      • He had to figure out how far other galaxies were and how fast they were traveling away. He measured their light compared to known stars’ distance.
  • Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as “nebulae” were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
    • In 1923 he discovered galaxies thought to be a puff of gas by previous astronomers.
    • He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable‘s luminosity and pulsation period for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.
    • This Cepheid variable luminosity and pulsation period scaling was discovered in 1908 by a one Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a female astronomer.
      • He had the help of a female astronomer. You see Female astronomers were required to work under male astronomers… unfortunate how sexist that rule was at the time, but had an unexpected benefit. The female mind was able to interpret the cosmos in ways that males just didn’t seem to grasp.
    • Leavitt helped Hubble measure distance with these Cepheid stars.
      • Stars that pulse like these are rare, but we have a rather well-known one: Polaris. They are red giants, old stars that burn their Helium ion fuel in a way that pulses from dim to bright. This reliable pulsing was a measurement tool used by Hubble to guage distance in the void of space to date the universe. It was a relative measurement, but the best way to age the universe.
      • This is (a summarized version) of how he figured out how far away the galaxies were, and how old the observable universe is.
  • Hubble provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from Earth, a property now known as Hubble’s law, although it had been proposed two years earlier by Georges Lemaître.
    • The Hubble law implies that the universe is expanding.A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher (yes… that was his real name… another Badass name) had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities…
    • What the heck does that mean?
    • In 1924 he wrote a paper about Nebulas and how vast the Universe must be with that amount of galaxies out there.
    • Then discovered they were all moving away from us… and their distance and speed was proportional.. the farther they were, the faster they were going away from us… Trippy stuff huh?
    • This blew ppls minds!!!
      • And Hubble, he was sort of known for not knowing the gravity of his discoveries or much about fields outside his own. By 1924, Einstein’s theory of relativity was world-famous… yet Hubble hadn’t heard a peep about it LOL
  • But like I said, the fact that there are so many other galaxies out there started to make big news.
    • The stuff in telescopes that people thought were unremarkable smudges or clouds turned out to be entire galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each of them!
      • When big brain scientists think about the future of our species, I’m talking thousands or millions of years in the future with tons of exciting new technologies… they still don’t think Humanity will ever be able to journey beyond our own Galaxy… its just too damn big!
      • And before Hubble we thought, “well damn, 100 billions stars, a space so vast that even Science Fiction writers don’t dare to venture beyond… thats enough. Makes sense that the Milky Way is all there is…”
      • Then Hubble comes along with proof that “no… the Milky way ain’t all there is… in fact… there are A LOT more galaxies out there.” It was the greatest discovery.
    • And then he was able to to say how far away they were AND that they were exponentially moving faster away from us… meaning… the universe was expanding…
      • This implied the universe had a beginning… which is huge on its own, but then everyone’s next thought was… “wait… so there is probably and end too!”
  • Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic Priest, theoretical physicist, mathmetician, astronomer, and professor of physics was the one who theorized that galaxies were moving away from each other and that the universe was expanding, even before Hubble was able to actually observe it.
    • He was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by an expanding universe,[2] which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He first derived “Hubble’s law”, now called the Hubble–Lemaître law by the IAU, and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article. Lemaître also proposed the “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the universe, calling it the “hypothesis of the primeval atom“, and later calling it “the beginning of the world”
    • He combined Hubble’s discoveries with Einsteins’ theory of relativity to suggest the universe was at one point a single point (singularity) that suddenly expanded to make the known universe (what we now call the big bang)… but his idea wasn’t accepted by the public as we do today, as the big bang.
  • That is until many decades later when a couple of grad students in Phoenix Arizona were trying to listen to cosmic noise with a radio telescope, but kept picking up an annoying hum…
    • In 1964, when Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias initially heard those astonishing radio signals that would lead to the first confirmed proof for the Big Bang Theory, they wondered if they had made a mistake. Was the signal actually radio noise from nearby New York City? Was it the after-effects of a nuclear bomb test that had been conducted over the Pacific several years earlier? Could it be a signal from the Van Allen belts, those giant rings of charged radiation circling the Earth?   
      • Or maybe, the hissing sound was the result of a defect in their instrument?
    • They thought it was a leak in their equipment. So they duck taped and cleaned everything ad.nauseum… They even re-constructed part of the radio telescope… but still the noise persisted.
      • At one point, new suspects emerged. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued.   
    • They eventually realized the sound they heard was the cosmic after shock of rhe big bang. It was energy that traveled from the beginning of time as we know it and through all that time and distance decayed into radiation.
      • After a year of experiments, the scientists concluded that they’d detected the cosmic background radiation, an echo of the universe at a very early moment after its birth.
      • “We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else,” notes Dr. Wilson. “When an experiment goes wrong, it’s usually the best thing. The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. This was really the start of modern cosmology.” In fact, Wilson and Penzias were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for determining that the hiss they were hearing wasn’t pigeon poop at all, but the faint whisper of the Big Bang, or the after glow that astronomers call the cosmic microwave background.
  • This background radiation from the Big Bang isn’t EVERYWHERE like some omnipresent radiation thing, but you’ve surely encountered it many times in your life.
    • The gray static our TVs used to display in between channels… that’s your TV picking up the big bang radiation (or at least 10% of that static is from the big bang).
      • “What’s in TV today?… oh not much… just the creation of everything”
    • As I was listening to Bill Bryson’s “A Brief History of Nearly Everything”, it started this part with Hubbles backstory.
      • As the book talked about what arrogant, egotistical, dishonest doucher he was, I thought “why the hell did we name one of the greatest space telescopes (Hubble Telescope) after this guy!?!?”
      • But it makes sense. He was human… like the rest of us and that doesn’t change what he contributed to our knowledge of this reality
  • A side story, a little fun fact I found on Wikipedia that I did not know about Hubble:
    • Hubble also worked as a civilian for U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II as the Chief of the External Ballistics Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory during which he directed a large volume of research in exterior ballistics which increased the effective firepower of bombs and projectiles. His work was facilitated by his personal development of several items of equipment for the instrumentation used in exterior ballistics, the most outstanding development being the high-speed clock camera, which made possible the study of the characteristics of bombs and low-velocity projectiles in flight. The results of his studies were credited with greatly improving the design, performance, and military effectiveness of bombs and rockets. For his work there, he received the Legion of Merit award.

CREDIT: