Before proving the universe expands, Edwin Hubble studied law and coached basketball
Edwin Hubble showed that many so-called nebulae were galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, and in 1929 confirmed that distant galaxies recede faster. Yet he first trained in law to honour his dying father, then taught Spanish and coached basketball at an Indiana high school before turning to astronomy.
Hubble was born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri, son of an insurance executive, and moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in 1900. As a youngster he was better known for sport than study, though his grades were good in everything but spelling. At one 1906 high school meet he took seven first places and a third, and in 1907 he helped the University of Chicago win its first Big Ten basketball title.
At Chicago he concentrated on mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, finishing a science degree by 1910 and spending a year assisting the physicist Robert Millikan. As a Rhodes Scholar he then passed three years at The Queen's College, Oxford, reading jurisprudence, a promise to his father, and added literature and Spanish. He was still at Oxford when his father died that winter of 1913.
Back in the Midwest to look after his mother and siblings in Louisville, he had no appetite for practising law. Instead he taught physics, mathematics and Spanish at New Albany High School in Indiana and coached its boys' basketball team. After a year a former Chicago professor helped him into graduate astronomy at Yerkes Observatory, where he used a 40-inch refractor built by George Ellery Hale and earned a doctorate in 1921 with a thesis on faint nebulae.
His great achievements relied on a relationship Henrietta Swan Leavitt had found in 1908: a Cepheid variable star's brightness tracks its pulsation period, making it a yardstick for distance. Vesto Slipher had earlier noticed that light from many nebulae was strongly red-shifted. Hubble's 1929 confirmation that recession speed rises with distance, now Hubble's law, implies an expanding universe, although Georges Lemaître had suggested it two years before. The Hubble Space Telescope carries his name. He died on September 28, 1953.
Source: Edwin Hubble
