Who Discovered the Expanding Universe?

Gribbin John , In the beginning: The birth of the living universe (Boston, 1993), 19.

Encyclopaedia Brittanica online, article on “Hubble, Edwin Powell”.

Kuhn Karl F. , In quest of the universe (St Paul, 1991), 490.

Brush Stephen G. , “Is the Earth too old? The impact of geochronology on cosmology, 1929–1952”, in The age of the Earth: From 4004 BC to AD 2002, ed. by Lewis C. L. E. Knell S. J. (London, 2001), 157–75, p. 62.

Merton Robert K. , The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations (Chicago, 1973), 300. See also Stigler Stephen M. , “Stigler's law of eponymy”, in Science and social structure: A festschrift for Robert K. Merton , ed. by Gieryn Thomas (Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, xxxix (1980)), 147–58, and Beaver D. , “Reflections on the natural history of eponymy and scientific law”, Social studies of science, vi (1976), 89–98.

The literature on discoveries is extensive. It includes Blackwell Richard J. , Discovery in the physical sciences (Notre Dame, 1969), Nickles Thomas (ed.), Scientific discovery, logic, and rationality (Dordrecht, 1980), and Grmek Mirko D. Cohen Robert S. Cimino Guido (eds), On scientific discovery (Dordrecht, 1981). For astronomical discoveries, see Harwit Martin , Cosmic discovery: The search, scope & heritage of astronomy (New York, 1981).

The distinction between ‘law’ and ‘relationship’ is important if not necessarily unambiguous. On different types of laws of nature and laws of science, see Laws of nature: Essays on the philosophical, scientific and historical dimensions, ed. by Weinert Friedel (Berlin, 1995).

Kuhn Thomas S. , “Historical structure of scientific discovery”, Science, cxxxvi (1962), 760–4. Reprinted in Kuhn T. S. , The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change (Chicago, 1977), 165–77.

Schaffer Simon , “Scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy”, Social studies of science, xvi (1986), 387–420, p. 401.

For a modification of Schaffer's historiographical thesis of the “end of natural philosophy”, see Alborn Timothy L. , “The ‘end of natural philosophy’ revisited: Varieties of scientific discovery”, Nuncius, iii/2 (1988), 227–52.

Hanson Norwood Russell , Patterns of discovery: An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of science (Cambridge, 1958).

Brannigan Augustin , The social basis of scientific discoveries (Cambridge, 1981), 77.

On the difficulties of an intellectual history of discovery, illustrated by the discovery history of pulsars, see Woolgar S. W. , “Writing an intellectual history of scientific development: The use of discovery accounts”, Social studies of science, vi (1976), 395–422.

Berendzen Richard Hart Richard Seeley Daniel , Man discovers the galaxies (New York, 1976); Smith Robert , The expanding universe: Astronomy's ‘great debate’ 1900–1931 (Cambridge, 1982); Kerzberg Pierre , The invented universe: The Einstein–de Sitter controversy (1916–1917) and the rise of relativistic cosmology (Oxford, 1992); Ellis George F. R. , “The expanding universe: A history of cosmology from 1917 to 1960”, in Einstein and the history of general relativity, ed. by Howard Don Stachel John (Boston, 1988), 367–431.

Calinon Auguste , “Les espaces géometriques”, Revue philosophiques de la France et de l'étranger, xxvii (1889), 588–95.

Capek Milič , Bergson and modern physics (Dordrecht, 1971), 380.

Hoyle Fred , Home is where the wind blows: Chapters from a cosmologist's life (Mill Valley, Calif., 1996), 277: “Slipher, working at the Lowell Observatory, had a weaker organization behind him than Hubble had at Mount Wilson, and it is regrettable that such inconsequential issues can have an effect on how priorities are accorded in science.” On Slipher, see Smith Robert W. , “Red shifts and gold medals 1901–1954”, in The explorers of Mars Hill: A centennial history of Lowell Observatory 1894 to 1994, ed. by Lowell William (West Kennebunk, Maine, 1994), 43–66.

Harwit , Cosmic discovery (ref. 6), 135–6.

Peebles P. J. E. , “Impact of Lemaître's ideas on modern cosmology”, in The big bang and Georges Lemaître, ed. by Berger André (Dordrecht, 1984), 23–30.

Peebles P. J. E. , Principles of physical cosmology (Princeton, 1993) includes an insightful account of the origin of the expanding universe (pp. 77–82) that contradicts his musing that “Physical scientists have a healthy attitude toward the history of their subject: By and large we ignore it” (op. cit. (ref. 19), 23).

Zel'dovich Yakov B. Novikov Igor D. , Relativistic astrophysics. II: The structure and evolution of the universe (Chicago, 1983), pp. 121 and xxxiii. Russian original published in 1975.

Tropp Eduard A. Frenkel Viktor Ya. Chernin Arthur D. , Alexander A. Friedmann: The man who made the universe expand (Cambridge, 1993), 223 and 237.

These points are made in Robert W. Smith's review of the book, published in the Journal for the history of astronomy, xxv (1994), 144–6.

Friedmann was not only used politically, to emphasize the greatness of Soviet science, but also to legitimate cosmology as a field of science after many years of ideological suppression. See Kragh Helge , Cosmology and controversy: The historical development of two theories of the universe (Princeton, 1997), 259–68, and Haley John Edward , “The confrontation of dialectical materialism with modern cosmological theories in Soviet Russia”, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1980.

On commemorations in science and their histories, see Commemorative practices in science: Historical perspectives on the politics of collective memory, ed. by Abir-Am Pnina G. Elliott Clark A. , Osiris, xiv (1999).

Zel'dovich Yakov B. , “The theory of the expanding universe as originated by A. A. Fridman”, Soviet physics uspekhi, vi/4 (1964), 475–94, p. 476. Russian original of July 1963. The minimum number of assumptions are the isotropy and homogeneity of the universe (that is, the cosmological principle).

Friedmann Alexander , “Über die Krümmung des Raumes”, Zeitschrift für Physik, x (1922), 377–86, p. 377.

Fock Vladimir A. , “The researches of A. A. Fridman on the Einstein theory of gravitation”, Soviet physics uspekhi, vi/4 (1964), 473–4. See also Kragh , Cosmology and controversy (ref. 24), 22–27.

Lemaître Georges , “Rencontres avec A. Einstein”, Revue des questions scientifiques, cxxix (1958), 129–32.

Lemaître to De Sitter, published in Jean-Pierre Luminet, Alexandre Friedmann. Georges Lemaître. Essai de cosmologie (Paris, 1997), 304–5. Undated draft of letter to Eddington of about March 1930, in which his conversation with Einstein is dated “two years ago”. Both letters are located in the Archive Lemaître, Catholic University of Louvain. The reference is to Lemaître, “La grandeur de l'espace”, Revue des questions scientifiques, xv (1929), 189–216, where he mentioned on p. 216 Friedmann's paper of 1922 (but not his 1924 paper), which “includes several of the ideas and results contained in my memoir [of 1927]”.

Review of Couderc Paul , L'expansion de l'univers (Paris, 1950), in Annales d'astrophysique, xiii (1950), 344–5. Couderc accepted Lemaître's criticism and incorporated it in the English translation that appeared two years later as The expansion of the universe (London, 1952). See also Lambert Dominique , Un atome d'univers: La vie et l'oeuvre de Georges Lemaître (Brussels, 2000), 101.

Lemaître G. , “L'expansion de l'univers”, Revue des questions scientifiques, cxxxviii (1967), 153–62.

Lemaître G. , “Note on de Sitter's universe”, Journal of mathematical physics, iv (1925), 188–92.

Heller Michael , “Questions to infallible oracle”, in Physics of the expanding universe. Lecture notes in physics, no. 109, ed. by Demianski M. (Berlin, 1979), 199–210, p. 201. Heller's documentation was a private information from Odon Godart, Lemaître's long-time collaborator. Godart may well have been told so by Lemaître, who may have forgotten that Hubble was not, in fact, present in Washington D.C. when Henry Norris Russell read his paper. In the book review mentioned above, Lemaître wrote that “I had visited Slipher and Hubble, and listened in Washington to the latter giving, in 1925, his memorable address on the distance to the Andromeda nebula”.

Lemaître G. , “Un univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extra-galactiques”, Annales de sociétés scientifique de Bruxelles, xlvii (1927), 49–56. On Eddington's instigation, the paper was translated into English as “A homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius”, Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, xci (1931), 483–90. It is this paper, rather than the French original, that is reproduced in most later English-language versions. Notice that in the reproduction in A source book in astronomy and astrophysics 1900–1975 , ed. by Lang Kenneth R. Gingerich Owen (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 845–48, there is a misprint in equation (3) where the Greek ρ (total energy density) should be a Latin p (radiation pressure). The same error appears in the version given in Cosmological constants: Papers in modern cosmology, ed. by Bernstein Jeremy Feinberg Gerald (New York, 1986), 94.

Olby Robert C. , “Rediscovery as an historical concept”, in New trends in the history of science, ed. by Visser R. P. W. (Amsterdam, 1989), 197–208, p. 199.

Kragh Helge , “The beginning of the world: Georges Lemaître and the expanding universe”, Centaurus, xxx (1987), 114–39. Lambert , Un atome d'univers (ref. 31), 93–109.

Lemaître's manuscript, dated 24 April 1927, is reproduced in Mgr. Georges Lemaître: Savant et croyant, ed. by Stoffel Jean-François (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1996), 41–55. See also Blanchard Alain , “Lemaître's contributions to the emergence of physical cosmology”, in Historical development of modern cosmology, ed. by Martinez Vicent J. (San Francisco, 2001), 237–44.

For a clear and concise account, see Ellis George F. R. , “Innovation, resistance and change: The transition to the expanding universe”, in Modern cosmology in retrospect, ed. by Bertotti Bruno (Cambridge, 1990), 97–113. This article contains references to the primary papers. See also Goenner Hubert , “Weyl's contributions to cosmology”, in Hermann Weyl's Raum-Zeit-Materie and a general introduction to his scientific work, ed. by Scholz Erhard (Basel, 2001), 105–37.

See the survey in Arabatzis Theodore , “On the inextracability of the context of discovery and the context of justification”, in Revisiting discovery and justification, ed. by Schickore Jutta Steinle Friedrich (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Preprint 211, 2002), 111–23.

Christianson Gale E. , Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the nebulae (New York, 1995). Smith Robert W. , “Edwin P. Hubble and the transformation of cosmology”, Physics today, xliii (1990), April issue, 52–58.

Humason Milton , oral history interview with Bert Shapiro, 1977, American Institute of Physics Collections.

Hubble Edwin P. , “A relation between distances and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xv (1929), 168–73, p. 173. Reprinted in Lang Gingerich (eds), Source book (ref. 35), 726–8. On the different interpretations of the De Sitter effect in the 1920s, see North John , The measure of the universe: A history of modern cosmology (Oxford, 1965), 92–104.

Hubble Edwin P. , “The exploration of space”, Harper's magazine, clviii (1929), 732–8, p. 738.

Hubble Edwin P. Humason Milton , “The velocity–distance relation among extra-galactic nebulae”, Astrophysical journal, lxxiv (1931), 43–80. See also Smith , The expanding universe (ref. 14), 183–93.

Hubble , “A relation between distances and radial velocity” (ref. 43), 173.

Shapley Harlow , “Note on the velocities and magnitudes of external galaxies”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xv (1929), 565–70.

Hubble to Shapley, 15 May 1929, Harvard Archives.

Humason Milton , “The large radial velocity of N.G.C.7619”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xv (1929), 167–8.

Hubble Humason , “The velocity–distance relation” (ref. 45), 80.

Hubble to De Sitter, 23 September 1931, Hubble Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Smith , Expanding universe (ref. 14), 192.

North J. D. , “The early years”, 11–32, p. 27, and Osterbrock Donald , “The observational approach to cosmology: U.S. observatories pre-World War II”, 247–90, p. 280, both in Bertotti (ed.), Modern cosmology in retrospect (ref. 39).

Hetherington Norriss S. , “Philosophical values and observation in Edwin Hubble's choice of a model of the universe”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, xiii (1982), 41–67; idem, “Hubble's cosmology”, American scientist, lxxviii (1990), 142–51.

Hubble Edwin P. , The realm of the nebulae (New York, 1936), 122.

Ibid. As late as 1953, in his George Darwin Lecture delivered to the Royal Astronomical Society a few months before his death, Hubble concluded that “it is important that the [Hubble] law be formulated as an empirical relation between observed data”: Hubble , “The law of redshifts”, Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, cxiii (1953), 658–66, p. 658.

Mayall to Hubble, 16 March 1937, Hubble Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Hubble's paper is included in Harlow Shapley's collection of important astronomical works, where the sentence reads: “… may represent the de Sitter effect [expanding universe]”, which is clearly problematic from an historical point of view. See Source book in astronomy 1900–1950, ed. by Shapley H. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 334.

Tolman R. C. , “On the astronomical implications of the de Sitter line element for the universe”, Astrophysical journal, lixx (1929), 245–74, p. 246. Smith, in his Expanding universe, 199, incorrectly states that Tolman termed the correlation Hubble's relationship. The first scientist who wrote of “Hubble's relation” may have been Fritz Zwicky, in a paper submitted in August 1929: Zwicky , “On the red shift of spectral lines through interstellar space”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xv (1929), 773–9.

Hubble to De Sitter, 21 August 1930, Hubble Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Hubble , The realm of the nebulae (ref. 54), 113.

Hubble , The realm of the nebulae (ref. 54), 105, and Hubble to Slipher, 6 March 1953, Lowell Observatory Archives.

See ref. 58.

de Sitter W. , [contribution to] “Discussion on the evolution of the universe”, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1931, 573–610, p. 584.

Eddington Arthur S. , The expanding universe (Cambridge, 1933), 10.

Ibid., 46 and 47.

Tolman R. C. , Relativity, thermodynamics and cosmology (New York, 1987), a reprint of the work first published in 1934, 359 and 362.

Milne Edward A. , “World structure and the expansion of the universe”, Nature, cxxx (1932), 9–10, p. 9.

Einstein Albert , The meaning of relativity (Princeton, 1945), 112 and 128. R denotes the cosmic scale factor and R′ = dR/dt.

Dirac Paul A. M. , “A new basis for cosmology”, Proceedings of the Royal Society, cccxxxiii (1938), 199–208, 202 and 205. The next time that “Hubble's constant” appeared in print may have been in Hermann Bondi, “Review of cosmology”, Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, cviii (1948), 104–20. Symptomatically, perhaps, in 1949 Robertson did refer to Hubble's constant, but in quotation marks only. Six years later, the quotation marks were dropped. Robertson Howard P. , “On the present state of relativistic cosmology”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, xciii (1949), 527–31, and “The theoretical aspects of the nebular redshift”, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, lxvii (1955), 82–98.

The first case of “Hubble's law” that we have encountered appears in Gamow George , The creation of the universe (New York, 1952), 37, and in Couderc, The expansion of the universe (ref. 31), 108, 110, 215, 221. As mentioned, Lemaître used the term in 1950, in his review of Couderc's book.

Sciama Dennis W. , The unity of the universe (London, 1959). See also McVittie George C. , Fact and theory in cosmology (London, 1961), where the author preferred to use “Hubble parameter” rather than “Hubble constant” (p. 111), and Bondi Hermann Bonnor William B. Lyttleton Raymond A. Whitrow Gerald J. , Rival theories of cosmology (Oxford, 1960), where we can read of “Hubble's Law” on pp. 34, 39, 47, and 58.

Couderc Paul , The wider universe (London, 1960), 93 (our emphasis).

Bonnor William , The mystery of the expanding universe (New York, 1964), 50–53.

Humason Milton , Obituary notice of Edwin Hubble, Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, cxiv (1954), 291–95, p. 293.

Ibid., 294.

Adams Walter , “Obituary. Dr. Edwin P. Hubble”, The observatory, lxxiv (1954), 32–35.

Robertson H. P. , “Edwin Powell Hubble 1889–1953”, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, lxvi (1954), 120–5.

Robertson , “The theoretical aspects” (ref. 69), 89.

Sandage Allan R. , “The red shift”, in The universe, ed. by Piel G. (New York, 1956), 89–98, p. 92. In a much later paper, written on the occasion of the centennial of Hubble's birth, Sandage carefully avoided assigning the discovery of the expanding universe to Hubble and merely noted that the linear redshift–distance relation of 1929 “lead [sic] to the notion of the expanding universe”: Sandage, “Edwin Hubble 1889–1953”, Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, lxxxiii (1989), 351–62, p. 353.

David Bergamini and the editors of life, The universe (New York, 1962), 154.

Hoyle Fred , The nature of the universe (Oxford, 1950), 120; Couderc , The expansion of the universe (ref. 31), 89, 93, 112, 179; Schatzman Evry , The origin and evolution of the universe (London, 1966; translation of the French original of 1957), 189.

Merton Robert , “The Matthew effect in science”, Science, clix, issue of 5 January 1968, 56–63, reprinted in Merton , The sociology of science (ref. 5), 439–59. Merton , “The Matthew effect in science, II: Cumulative advantage and the symbolism of intellectual property”, Isis, lxxix (1988), 606–23.

Kuhn Thomas S. , The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1970), 138.

Ibid., 138 and 139. Similar views are expressed in Brush Stephen , “Should the history of science be rated X?”, Science, clxxxiii (1974), 1164–72, and Whitaker M. A. B. , “History and quasi-history in physics education”, Physics education, xiv (1979), 108–12, 239–42. See also Reingold Nathan , “Science, scientists, and historians of science”, History of science, xix (1981), 274–83.

Merton Robert , “Priorities in scientific discovery”, American sociological review, xxii (1957), 635–59. Reprinted in Merton, The sociology of science (ref. 5), 286–324.

Stigler , “Stigler's law” (ref. 5).