dunk—to back up that guess. In 1908 there was as yet no way to measure the distance out to Andromeda directly.
As a result, Fath didn't promote his conclusion, perhaps because he was still a lowly graduate student and not in a position of authority to overturn the nebula-as-new-solar-system belief. Or perhaps because Lick Observatory director W. W. Campbell, a careful and conservative man of science, instructed him to downplay his speculations. Whatever the reason, Fath took a particularly cautious tone in the close of his official report. He said that his interpretation “stands or falls” on the question of determining a true distance to a spiral.
The response to Fath's report was like the sound of one hand clapping. Aside from a few outliers, hardly anyone else cared. Fath was soon offered a post at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he did some follow-up work for a number of years but arrived at no breakthroughs. He eventually settled into a teaching job at Carleton College in Minnesota.
And that's where the matter stood until a man, whom Keeler had once rejected for a Lick graduate fellowship, took over the Crossley reflector in 1910 and continued the groundbreaking work of both Keeler and Fath. And in doing so, Heber Curtis challenged the conventional wisdom with single-minded determination. With great industry and zeal, he took on the problem of the spiral nebulae and made it his own.
Such Is the Progress of
Astronomy in the Wild and Wooly West
A s Lick Observatory entered its third decade, life on Mount Hamilton continued to be a rustic adventure. Residents hiked the mountain trails, staged amateur theatricals, and read aloud around the roaring fireplace on frosty evenings. As long as the weather was favorable, the telescopes were scheduled for use nearly every night of the year. The lone exception was Christmas Eve, when operations were shut down for the holiday and the graduate students would sneak quietly into the cavernous dome to hang their stockings on the gear of the giant telescope.
There was a new addition to the observatory grounds, a tennis court, where, on Saturday afternoons, as one onlooker described it, “a spectacular performance is kept up, consisting of wild up-bursts of tennis balls, a la Roman candle, followed by hot chases down the canyons.” A molasses jug served as the loving cup for the annual Fourth of July tournament.
Those wanting to go into town often hitched a ride with one of the lucky few, such as Heber Curtis, who owned a car. The astronomer would load people into his Mitchell automobile, nicknamed Elizabeth, making sure to stash a bag of flaxseed in the trunk, so he could pour the seeds into the radiator whenever it started leaking. Pictures of Curtis in his later years, taken after an illness, typically depict a small and stern-looking man. But while he was at Lick, the students knew him as a “wonderfully kind, jolly person, always smiling, always happy.” His genial composure was only broken when he had to sneeze, a feat once described as “remarkable.”
By the 1910s the island-universe theory, dormant for many years, was slowly reemerging among a select group of scientists in both the United States and Europe. These astronomers were specifying that the spirals' sizes and the brightness of their novae only made sense if they were milky ways at great distance. The highly respected English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was captivated by the vast breadth of this idea; it engaged his theoretical fantasies. “If the spiral nebulae are within the stellar system [the Milky Way], we have no notion what their nature may be. That hypothesis leads to a full stop,” he noted. “If, however, it is assumed that these nebulae are external to the stellar system, that they are in fact systems co-equal with our own, we have at least an hypothesis which can be followed up… [It] opens up to our imagination a truly magnificent vista of system beyond system … in which the
As a result, Fath didn't promote his conclusion, perhaps because he was still a lowly graduate student and not in a position of authority to overturn the nebula-as-new-solar-system belief. Or perhaps because Lick Observatory director W. W. Campbell, a careful and conservative man of science, instructed him to downplay his speculations. Whatever the reason, Fath took a particularly cautious tone in the close of his official report. He said that his interpretation “stands or falls” on the question of determining a true distance to a spiral.
The response to Fath's report was like the sound of one hand clapping. Aside from a few outliers, hardly anyone else cared. Fath was soon offered a post at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he did some follow-up work for a number of years but arrived at no breakthroughs. He eventually settled into a teaching job at Carleton College in Minnesota.
And that's where the matter stood until a man, whom Keeler had once rejected for a Lick graduate fellowship, took over the Crossley reflector in 1910 and continued the groundbreaking work of both Keeler and Fath. And in doing so, Heber Curtis challenged the conventional wisdom with single-minded determination. With great industry and zeal, he took on the problem of the spiral nebulae and made it his own.
Such Is the Progress of
Astronomy in the Wild and Wooly West
A s Lick Observatory entered its third decade, life on Mount Hamilton continued to be a rustic adventure. Residents hiked the mountain trails, staged amateur theatricals, and read aloud around the roaring fireplace on frosty evenings. As long as the weather was favorable, the telescopes were scheduled for use nearly every night of the year. The lone exception was Christmas Eve, when operations were shut down for the holiday and the graduate students would sneak quietly into the cavernous dome to hang their stockings on the gear of the giant telescope.
There was a new addition to the observatory grounds, a tennis court, where, on Saturday afternoons, as one onlooker described it, “a spectacular performance is kept up, consisting of wild up-bursts of tennis balls, a la Roman candle, followed by hot chases down the canyons.” A molasses jug served as the loving cup for the annual Fourth of July tournament.
Those wanting to go into town often hitched a ride with one of the lucky few, such as Heber Curtis, who owned a car. The astronomer would load people into his Mitchell automobile, nicknamed Elizabeth, making sure to stash a bag of flaxseed in the trunk, so he could pour the seeds into the radiator whenever it started leaking. Pictures of Curtis in his later years, taken after an illness, typically depict a small and stern-looking man. But while he was at Lick, the students knew him as a “wonderfully kind, jolly person, always smiling, always happy.” His genial composure was only broken when he had to sneeze, a feat once described as “remarkable.”
By the 1910s the island-universe theory, dormant for many years, was slowly reemerging among a select group of scientists in both the United States and Europe. These astronomers were specifying that the spirals' sizes and the brightness of their novae only made sense if they were milky ways at great distance. The highly respected English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was captivated by the vast breadth of this idea; it engaged his theoretical fantasies. “If the spiral nebulae are within the stellar system [the Milky Way], we have no notion what their nature may be. That hypothesis leads to a full stop,” he noted. “If, however, it is assumed that these nebulae are external to the stellar system, that they are in fact systems co-equal with our own, we have at least an hypothesis which can be followed up… [It] opens up to our imagination a truly magnificent vista of system beyond system … in which the
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