Before the adults we call our children arrive with their children in tow
for Thanksgiving,
we take our morning walk down the lane of oaks and hemlocks, mist
a smell of rain by nightfall—underfoot,
the crunch of leathery leaves released by yesterday’s big wind.
You’re ahead of me, striding into the arch of oaks that opens onto the fields
and stone walls of the road—
as a V of geese honk a path overhead, and you stop—
in an instant, without thought, raising your arms toward sky, your hands
flapping from the wrists,
and I can read in the echo your body makes of these wild geese going
where they must,
such joy, such wordless unity and delight, you are once again the child
who knows by instinct, by birthright,
just to be is a blessing. In a fictional present, I write the moment down.
You embodied it.
"Moment" by Margaret Gibson, from Broken Cup. © Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It was 90 years ago today, in 1924, that astronomer Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of the first galaxy outside our Milky Way.
Hubble had studied law at Oxford, following his dying father's wishes, but returned to the United States in 1913 with no real drive to continue in the legal profession. He went to graduate school to study astronomy instead, and finished his doctoral dissertation just before he enlisted to serve in the First World War. His dissertation was on nebulae: cloud-like formations in space.
After the war, George Ellery Hale invited Hubble to join the staff of the Mount Wilson observatory in California; there he would work with their new 100-inch Hooker Telescope, the largest telescope in the world at that time. Hubble agreed to come to Mount Wilson to continue his work on nebulae.
Hubble was studying the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae, which he thought at first were star clusters in our galaxy, the Milky Way. At that time, most astronomers believed that the Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy in the universe. As Hubble looked closely at Andromeda, he discovered that one of its stars was what's known as a Cepheid variable: a kind of star that was very bright and pulsed at regular intervals. Cepheid variables can serve as a "yardstick" to mathematically calculate distances in the universe. Hubble calculated the Cepheid to be almost a million light years away, which would place it well outside the farthest stars in the Milky Way. He speculated that Andromeda was not a nebula at all, but another entire galaxy separate from our own. Further discoveries of dozens of additional Cepheids reinforced his findings that ours was just one of many galaxies in the universe.
The New York Times was the first to publish Hubble's findings; he didn't present a formal paper to the American Astronomical Society until the following January. The newspaper reported that "the results are striking in their confirmation of the view that these spiral nebulae are distant stellar systems."
Hubble was only 35 when he made the discovery that expanded the known boundaries of the universe. He opened the door for the discovery of many galaxies outside of our own — and discovered 23 of them himself. He was also the first to suggest that the universe is expanding. His peers scoffed at the idea, but Stephen Hawking has since called it "one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century." Hubble's work set the stage for the future development of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. He lobbied for many years to make astronomy a branch of physics rather than a separate area of study, so that astronomers such as himself could be recognized for the Nobel Prize in physics. The Nobel Committee eventually agreed that astrophysicists were eligible for the prize, but Hubble had died by this time, and his work was never recognized by the Committee. In 1990, a new telescope was launched; built to orbit the Earth and take photographs and measurements deep into the reaches of the universe, it was called the Hubble Space Telescope.
It's the birthday of pop philosopher, historian, and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht (books by this author), born in Long Island in 1965. Hecht holds a Ph.D. in the history of science, a subject that fascinates her — and simultaneously convinces her that art trumps scholarship. She inhabits each world — teaching, studying, and publishing both poetry and historical, analytical nonfiction — but ultimately pledges allegiance, she says, to poetry. "If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous," she said in an interview with the Center for Inquiry. "And so as a historian, I write poetry. I'm profoundly committed to art as the answer. Indeed, I don't put science really as the way I get to any of my answers; it's just helpful. It's poetry that I look to. It's the clatter of recognition. Everybody has different ways, but I attest that poetry works pretty well."
Her nonfiction books include Doubt: A History (2003), The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France (2003), The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong (2007), Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (2013).