ABSTRACT
The couples, together with their bachelor friend, met often for the cocktail hour; the men wore suits or sport coats, the women long dresses. Homer, who had endured the unremitting silence of an observatory more nights than Edwin Hubble himself, usually took the lead in conversation. The Greeks, whom Hubble admired and was frequently compared with, both physically and intellectually, would have said that he had been woven into the tapestry of the blessed. Hubble’s preliminary note of 1929 contained the first presentation of actual data, and long months of additional labor of the most arduous kind had steadily confirmed it. Hubble’s chance for one-upmanship had come on the mountain itself and was witnessed secretly by stellar spectroscopist Olin Wilson. Hubble had succeeded in demolishing the last underpinnings of the hierarchical universe that appealed to ancient, medieval, and early modern minds alike.
