Word: humason
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Working with short, amiable spectrograph expert Milton Humason, Hubble studied the light of the distant nebulae. In every case he found a "red shift."* The farther off a nebula was, the faster it appeared to be rushing away, and the enormous speeds (thousands of miles per second) were new, strange and startling to astronomers...
...While Humason's spectrographs gradually improved, Hubble theorized until he came to a momentous conclusion: that the speed of recession of the nebulae is directly proportionate to their distance. This meant that each of the large units of matter in the universe (nebulae) is moving away from every other unit. The Milky Way galaxy (the earth's local nebula) is not the only center of the explosion. Every other nebula is equally an explosion center...
...grades of scientists-from semi-mystic philosophers to earthy materialists-into counterattack. Some critics could not believe that the nebulae move at such breakneck speed. Einstein's Relativity (supreme law of physics) says that nothing can move faster than light (186,000 miles per second). But Hubble and Humason have clocked a nebula about 250 million light-years away that seems to be moving at 26,000 miles per second, more than one-eighth the speed of light. They have glimpsed nebulae twice as far away. If the nebulae continue, on & on into space, they will eventually exceed...
...Abbe Georges Lemaitre, have contributed. *One cause for coolness: a studio, planning a movie about the stars, hired a Mount Wilson astronomer as consultant. He was happy with his easy $200 a month until he discovered that the studio had also hired an astrologer-at $1,500. *Humason alone is pessimistic. Thinking of his mercury-spoiled spectrographs, he says gloomily: "You don't know southern California." *The first thing the great eye reflected when set on edge was a row of pin-up girls on the wall of the optical shop...
Ashfield, tucked in the Massachusetts hills, has only two churches, but even they are more than the town (pop. 900) can afford. Last October it found a way: one shepherd for its two flocks. Philip Humason Steinmetz, rock-hewn rector of tiny, white-framed St. John's Episcopal Church, took over as minister also of the Congregational Church that, with its Greek Revival portico and bell tower, dominates Ashfield's elm-bordered main street...