Science: Shift on Shift

The brilliant, whimsical popularizing of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington has made ''the expanding Universe'' almost a household word. But the telescopic observations of a universe which seems to be blowing up like the fragments of an explosive shell have come mainly from Mount Wilson Observatory's brilliant Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble. Beginning in 1928, Hubble and his coworker, Milton LaSalle Humason, showed that the light from the most distant nebulae (clouds of stars) which he could photograph in Mount Wilson's giant telescope was shifted far toward the red end of the spectrum. Such a...

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