Dec. 30, 1924: Hubble Reveals we are not the center of anything

[Ichingcarpenter]

Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that the spiral nebula Andromeda is actually a galaxy and that Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe.

He trained the powerful new 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson in Southern California on spiral nebulae. These fuzzy patches of light in the sky were generally thought to be clouds of gas or dust within our galaxy, which was presumed to include everything in the universe except the Magellanic Clouds. Some nebulae seemed to contain a few stars, but nothing like the multitudes of the Milky Way.

Hubble not only found a number of stars in Andromeda, he found Cepheid variable stars. These stars vary from bright to dim, and a very smart Harvard computationist named Henrietta Leavitt had discovered in 1912 that you could measure distance with them. Given the brightness of the star and its period — the length of time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again — you could determine how far away it is.

Hubble used Leavitt’s formula to calculate that Andromeda was approximately 860,000 light years away. That’s more than eight times the distance to the farthest stars in the Milky Way. This conclusively proved that the nebulae are separate star systems and that our galaxy is not the universe.

Cosmic though it was, the news did not make the front page of The New York Times.

[conscious evolution]

1. The trouble with Hubble

That was the name of a show I did at the local planetarium when I was a teen.
Very few people know how he expanded our perception of how large the universe really is.

[Peace Patriot]

2. An absolutely staggering, world-shattering, astounding, mind-boggling discovery

--maybe the most important discovery ever--comparable to, but possibly even exceeding, human use of fire in importance. The first--fire--brought eventual mastery of the physical world and "civilization." The other--that there is not just one, not just two, not just a few, but ZILLIONS of GALAXIES, each with hundreds of thousands of suns--stretching out to unimaginable distances, and all of it seeming to expand, with each bit of it swirling on the skin of a humungous, unimaginably big balloon--brings...humility?

The Greek gods knew all about us and our "hubris." Or, the human minds who projected the Greek gods, figured it out--that one day we would need humility.

In our highly developed mastery of fire, we are incinerating Planet Earth, our only known home--the bounteous matrix from which we evolved. We fire up our engines. We fire up our ovens, our incinerators, our smelters. We fire up our war machines. And we are killing the planet with all this combustible material. Time to look "out there" and ask ourselves some questions: Of all the new planets that are being discovered everywhere we look, where is there a planet that we could flee to, when this one dies? So far, there isn't one--and even if there was, we couldn't get there any time soon and not many of us could go. And what of our compulsion to "conquer" Nature? Don't we need to take a more humble view, that we are OF Nature, and dependent ON Nature, and, for all our cleverness, really don't understand the most basic principles of Nature--such as abundance and variety, and fabulously intricate webs of life?

It's a lot to take in, in one century--from being the center of the universe to our entire planet being one teensy bit of wet dust on an unimaginably vast Cosmic Ball, and from being "masters of Nature" to seeing the pathetic product of our cleverness: a dead earth.

I was born halfway through this human journey, and still I don't get it--why I shouldn't be able to drive my car anywhere I wish, and have as many paper napkins as I can use and throw away, and give as many gifts as I can afford, all machine-coated in plastic that we have nowhere to throw away? It's a lot to take in. It's a lot to learn. Looking "out there" through Hubble's eyes helps. Endless worlds--which the restless among us itch to explore, and which we may be destined to explore--but really, right now, we have nowhere else to go. We MUST save this planet. Can our cleverness, combined with humility, accomplish that? Maybe yes, maybe no. Our fate as a race hangs in the balance. It's been quite a ride, this last century. I hope the current one brings us to our senses, puts our "hubris" to rest, at last, and yields the ferocious collective effort that will be needed to save ourselves and the remaining critters whom we haven't yet exterminated, and our matrix of life, for I do believe that, if we manage this great task, we will journey to the stars and that Nature means us to.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. American exceptionalism

American exceptionalism (def. "exceptionalism") refers to the theory that the United States occupies a special niche among the nations of the world in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, political and religious institutions and unique origins.

Oh, the world revolves around the US...... same story, different times

[Frosty1]

4. The web of life

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."
Chief Seattle

http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/seattle.htm

[wroberts189]

5. Monty python - universe song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY

[Frosty1]

6. Love it

:rofl:

[flamin lib]

7. Not so!!! I can prove it. I put a pushpin in my globe in the city

where I live and measured all the way around the globe back to my pushpin. Then I measured all the way around in a different direction and it was the same! No matter which way I measured the distance was exactly the same so I deduced that MY city is the center of the world!

Now if we measure to the edge of space in any direction the distance in infinity. No matter which way you measure the distance is still infinity. Ergo, Earth is the center of the universe.

So there.