They used Cepheid variables to estimate the size of the galaxy and the distance for the globular clusters. But saying that, points to the heart of the war that occurred a century ago in shaping consensus science.
Harlow Shapley was at the heart of shaping consensus science at the time. He literally destroyed careers to further his own. He would only change his position when consensus out ruled him, and then he would move his position to stay in power. He was also instrumental in the attack against Velikovsky, using the tactics that he had developed his whole life.
Note: I harvested the Wiki page to keep the context.
Harlow Shapley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlow_Shapley
He is notable for his groundbreaking 1918 work using Cepheid variables to estimate the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the sun's position within it[1] as well as in 1953 proposing the "Liquid Water Belt" theory, now known as the concept of a habitable zone.[2]
Career
He was born to Willis and Sarah (née Stowell) Shapley[3] on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education. After studying at home and covering crime stories as a newspaper reporter, Shapley returned to complete a six-year high school program in only two years, graduating as class valedictorian.
In 1907, at the age of 22, Harlow Shapley went to study journalism at University of Missouri. When he learned that the opening of the School of Journalism had been postponed for a year, he decided to study the first subject he came across in the course directory. Rejecting Archaeology, which Harlow later explained he couldn't pronounce, Harlow chose the next subject, Astronomy.
Post-graduation, Shapley received a fellowship to Princeton University for graduate work, where he studied under Henry Norris Russell and used the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars (discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) to determine distances to globular clusters. He was instrumental in moving astronomy away from the idea that Cepheids were spectroscopic binaries, and toward the concept that they were pulsators.[4] He was the first to realize that the Milky Way Galaxy was much larger than previously believed, and that the Sun's place in the galaxy was in a nondescript location. This discovery by Shapley is a key part of the Copernican principle, according to which the Earth is not at the center of our Solar System, our galaxy, or our Universe.
Shapley participated in the "Great Debate" with Heber D. Curtis on the nature of nebulae and galaxies and the size of the Universe. The debate took place on April 26, 1920, in the hall of the United States National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. Shapley took the side that spiral nebulae (what are now called galaxies) are inside our Milky Way, while Curtis took the side that the spiral nebulae are 'island universes' far outside our own Milky Way and comparable in size and nature to our own Milky Way. This issue and debate are the start of extragalactic astronomy, while the detailed arguments and data, often with ambiguities, appeared together in 1921.[5] Characteristic issues were whether Adriaan van Maanen had measured rotation in a spiral nebula, the nature and luminosity of the exploding novae and supernovae seen in spiral galaxies, and the size of our own Milky Way. However, Shapley's actual talk and argument given during the Great Debate was completely different from the published paper. Historian Michael Hoskin says "His decision was to treat the National Academy of Sciences to an address so elementary that much of it was necessarily uncontroversial.", with Shapley's motivation being only to impress a delegation from Harvard who were interviewing him for a possible offer as the next Director of Harvard College Observatory.[6] With the default by Shapley, Curtis won the debate. The astronomical issues were soon resolved in favor of Curtis' position when Edwin Hubble discovered Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.
At the time of the debate, Shapley was working at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he had been hired by George Ellery Hale. After the debate, however, he was hired to replace the recently deceased Edward Charles Pickering as director of the Harvard College Observatory.
He is also known to have incorrectly opposed Edwin Hubble's observations that there are additional galaxies in the universe other than the Milky Way. Shapley fiercely critiqued Hubble and regarded his work as junk science. Hubble's findings went on to reshape fundamentally the scientific view of the universe.[7]
He served as director of the HCO from 1921 to 1952. During this time, he hired Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who, in 1925, became the first person to earn a doctorate at Radcliffe College in the field of astronomy for work done at Harvard College Observatory.
He wrote many books on astronomy and the sciences. Among these was Source Book in Astronomy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929—co-written with Helen E. Howarth, also on the staff of the Harvard College Observatory), the first of the publisher's series of source books in the history of the sciences.
From 1941 he was on the original standing committee of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.
He also served on the board of trustees of Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1935-1971.
In the 1940s, Shapley helped found government funded scientific associations, including the National Science Foundation. He is also responsible for the addition of the "S" in UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).
He became President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1947. In his inaugural address he referred to the danger of the "genius maniac" and proposed the elimination of "all primates that show any evidence of signs of genius or even talent".[8] Other global threats he listed were: drugs that suppressed the desire for sex; boredom; world war with weapons of mass destruction; a plague epidemic.[9]
In 1950, Shapley was instrumental in organizing a campaign in academia against the controversial US bestseller book (considered by many as pseudoscience) Worlds in Collision by Russian expatriate psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky.
In 1953, he wrote the "Liquid Water Belt" which gave scientific credence to the ecosphere theory of Hubertus Strughold.[10]
In his 1957 book "Of Stars and Men", Shapley proposed the term Metagalaxies for what are now called superclusters.
In addition to astronomy, Shapley held a lifelong interest in myrmecology, the study of ants.
Institute on Religion in an Age of Science
Shapley attended Institute on Religion in an Age of Science conferences at Star Island and was the editor of the book Science Ponders Religion (1960).[11]
Family
He married Martha Betz in April 1914. She assisted her husband in astronomical research both at Mount Wilson and at Harvard Observatory. She produced numerous articles on eclipsing stars and other astronomical objects. They had one daughter and four sons, one of whom is mathematician and economist Lloyd Shapley, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012.
Honors
Awards
Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1926)[12]
Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society (1933)
Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1933) [13]
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1934)[14]
Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1939)[15]
Franklin Medal (1945)
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society (1950)[16]
Named after him
The crater Shapley on the Moon
Asteroid 1123 Shapleya
Shapley Supercluster
Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships In Astronomy, American Astronomical Society
Quotes
'Some piously record "In the beginning God", but I say "In the beginning hydrogen".'
'Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.'
'When one of our inevitable super-geniuses of the future discovers some new mankind-annihilating device, and this genius is insane, perhaps undetectably insane, he will willingly perish as he murders the rest'.[17]
Sources
Nature - Obituary
References
Bart J. Bok. Harlow Shapely 1885-1972 A Biographical Memoir. National Academy of Sciences
Richard J. Hugget, Geoecology: an evolutionary approach. pg 10
Hockey, Thomas (2009). The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer Publishing. ISBN 978-0-387-31022-0. Retrieved August 22, 2012.
"On the Nature and Cause of Cepheid Variation," Shapley, H., Astrophysical Journal, 40, 448 (1914)
"The Scale of the Universe" Shapley, H. and Curtis, H. D., Bulletin of the National Research Council, 2, 169, p. 171-217 (1921)
"The 'Great Debate': What Really Happened" Hoskin, M., Journal for the History of Astronomy, 7, 169 (1976)
^ Marcia Bartusiak (2010). The Day We Found the Universe. Random House Digital, Inc. pp. x-xi.
"He's anti-genius". Sarasota Herald-Tribune: p. 9. January 9, 1947.
"People: Inside Dopester". Time Magazine. January 6, 1947.
James F. Kasting, How to find a habitable planet. pg 127
"Varieties of Belief" (Review of Science Ponders Religion) by Edmund Fuller, December 18, 1960, New York Times
"Henry Draper Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
"Past Recipients of the Rumford Prize". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
"Winners of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society". Royal Astronomical Society. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
"Past Winners of the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal". Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
"Grants, Prizes and Awards". American Astronomical Society. Archived from the original on 22 December 2010. Retrieved 19 February 2011.
Paul F. Ellis (December 30, 1946). "Most potent killer is believed genius maniac". The Spartanburg Herald: p. 5.
[edit] External links
The Great Debate
Collection of Pieces on The Great Debate
This is the key point about Shapley. Shapley used every dirty trick in the book, during his whole career, to rise to power and control consensus. When he spoke publicly at the "Great Debate" he said one thing, and published completely different texts in the official version. He was not above changing reality to fit the moment.
Why the `Great Debate' Was Important
http://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/cs_why.html
Although the `Great Debate' is important to different people for different reasons, it is a clear example of humanity once again striving to find its place within the cosmic order. In the debate, Shapley and Curtis truly argued over the ``Scale of the Universe," as the debate's title suggests. Curtis argued that the Universe is composed of many galaxies like our own, which had been identified by astronomers of his time as ``spiral nebulae". Shapley argued that these ``spiral nebulae" were just nearby gas clouds, and that the Universe was composed of only one big Galaxy. In Shapley's model, our Sun was far from the center of this Great Universe/Galaxy. In contrast, Curtis placed our Sun near the center of our relatively small Galaxy. Although the fine points of the debate were more numerous and more complicated, each scientist disagreed with the other on these crucial points.
A partial resolution of the debate came in the mid-1920's. Using the 100 inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, then the largest telescope in the world, astronomer Edwin Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) . These stars allowed Hubble to show that the distance to M31 was greater than even Shapley's proposed extent of our Milky Way galaxy. Therefore M31 was a galaxy much like our own. In the 1930s, the further discovery of interstellar absorption combined with an increased understanding of the distances and distribution of globular clusters ultimately led to the acceptance that the size of our Milky Way Galaxy had indeed been seriously underestimated and that the Sun was not close to the center. Therefore, Shapley was proved more correct about the size of our Galaxy and the Sun's location in it, but Curtis was proved correct that our Universe was composed of many more galaxies, and that ``spiral nebulae" were indeed galaxies just like our own.
Another reason the `Great Debate' is important is captured nicely in the book Shu, F., 1982, The Physical Universe, An Introduction to Astronomy, (University Science Books, Mill Valley, California) p. 286: "The Shapley-Curtis debate makes interesting reading even today. It is important, not only as a historical document, but also as a glimpse into the reasoning processes of eminent scientists engaged in a great controversy for which the evidence on both sides is fragmentary and partly faulty. This debate illustrates forcefully how tricky it is to pick one's way through the treacherous ground that characterizes research at the frontiers of science."
Return to 75th Anniversary Astronomical Debate Home Page
This link has a links to articles and books that everybody needs to read to understand what happened a century ago, and the mindset that exists in science today.
The Shapley - Curtis Debate in 1920
http://apod.nasa.gov/diamond_jubilee/debate20.html
