Why did the discoverer of the expansion of the world miss the Nobel Prize?

According to RCO News Agency, Edwin Hubble was born on this day, November 20, 1889 in Missouri, USA. A boy with various talents who was interested in science, literature, languages ​​and even law. Hubble was so bright in his youth that he received a Rhodes scholarship and studied law at Oxford, but the passion he had for looking at the stars since childhood did not leave him.

After years of wandering between different disciplines, he finally found his true path; The way that led him from behind the law desks to the highest peaks of the Mount Wilson Observatory and turned him into one of the most influential figures in the history of science. A man who not only changed our understanding of the universe, but also rewrote the meaning of “universe” forever.

As a teenager, Hubble was more famous for his athletic prowess than his scientific achievements. He excelled in baseball and football in high school. Hubble was not only successful in these two areas, but also led the University of Chicago basketball team to its first major championship in 1907.

Hubble’s educational journey began with a Bachelor of Science degree, which he completed in 1910. During his student days, he worked as an assistant in the laboratory of Robert Millikan, the Nobel laureate and the discoverer of the quantity of fundamental charge.

Hubble received his law degree from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, demonstrating his diverse intellectual abilities. He also spent some time learning Spanish. However, his passion for science and astronomy overcame his other interests.

In the 1920s, Hubble used a powerful 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California to observe distant galaxies.

All galaxies were seen in red. Optically, red is a low frequency color. Hubble concluded that galaxies are moving away from us, so their wavelengths are stretched.

Our universe was not static as Albert Einstein imagined, but an expanding universe as Hubble observed. This led to the emergence of the concept of the “Big Bang Theory”.

Edwin Hubble’s remarkable contributions to the field of astronomy did not win him the Nobel Prize, and there are several reasons for this.

• First, at the time of Hubble’s discovery in 1929, the Nobel Prize in Physics was not awarded to work done in astronomy. Hubble spent the latter part of his career trying to see astronomy as a part of physics.
• Second, Hubble’s work was truly groundbreaking, changing our view of the universe, and the Nobel Committee may not have fully understood its long-term implications right away.
• Thirdly, Hubble’s work was mostly observational in nature and not supported by theory and experiment. This work depended on Hubble’s own interpretation of the redshift data. Therefore, it was probably for these reasons that this great astronomer missed the Nobel Prize.

Hubble’s work was key evidence in support of the idea of ​​an expanding universe, and now Hubble has a lunar impact crater and an asteroid named after it.

His legacy was further cemented when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and captured stunning images of distant nebulae, galaxies and other amazing cosmic phenomena.

Hubble died of a heart attack in 1953.

Edwin Hubble not only pushed the boundaries of human knowledge, but taught man how small and yet how magnificent his place in the universe is. He may never have held a Nobel statue in his hands, but the expanding universe he revealed to us was the greatest gift a scientist could give to future generations. Today, Hubble’s name still shines, both on the surface of the moon, on the expanse of the sky, and in the depths of space with the telescope that has made the world clearer for us; A proof that some figures, even without medals and official appreciation, remain forever in the history of science.

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