Ask anyone in the world to name a telescope, and odds are good the answer will be "Hubble." But not as many people know that the most famous telescope of all time is named after Edwin Powell Hubble, an American astronomer who profoundly changed mankind's understanding of our cosmos almost a century ago. He was an amateur athlete, turned school teacher, turned lawyer, turned astronomer. As luck would have it, Hubble's stint as astronomer coincided with the completion of what was at the time the largest telescope in the world at the Mt. Wilson Observatory.
When Hubble first began his tenure at Mt Wilson, the universe was thought to be perhaps several hundred thousand light years across, consisting mostly of the Milky Way Galaxy, and eternal, what astronomers refer to as steady state. Within just a few years, Edwin Hubble found evidence that the universe was billions of light years across. Even more amazing, he discovered the universe was expanding and, if run backwards in time, that expansion implied a beginning: The Big Bang. It's only fitting that the first space telescope would be named after Hubble. And this week the astronomical world can breathe a sigh of relief that the crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis appears to have successfully extended the Hubble Telescope's operational life for years more.
The breathtaking results returned by Mr. Hubble's Space telescope speak for themselves. The device has been so critical to space science that one astronomer told me that we can almost refer to the field in terms of Before and After the HST. And as an epitaph to Edwin Hubble, who discovered the violent birth of the universe, data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope may foretell how the universe, at least as we know it, will end in violent death.
- Deny, Baby, Deny, from The Energy Grid:
By not acknowledging two facts that have been widely known for more a long time. First, sooner or later we're going to run out of organic fossil fuels. Second, returning all that carbon to the atmosphere several orders of magnitude faster than it was removed will produce profound changes to the biosphere.
- It began with a weird migraine headache on Tuesday and proceeded into full blown cough, fever, and chills. Whatever it was, it knocked me flat on my ass for three days straight. During which time I got to ponder, in between bouts of delirium and fitful sleep, the idiotic nature of our incredibly fucked up healthcare system: get sick, lose your job, lose your healthcare -- the system self selects for young and/or healthy premium payers and gives employers the power of life and death over labor. Anyone who says that's just a coincidence is either a big fat liar or dumber than a carrot.
- A 47 million year-old primate fossil with diagnostic traits suggesting it may be a common ancestor to monkeys, apes, and hominids has been found. Why bother with paleo-anthropologists, when this is obviously something to be settled on Hardball between host Chris Matthews and anyone of dozens of conservatives' barking out creationist bullshit like a trained seal.
