Edwin Hubble: The Athlete, The Lawyer, and The Man Who Expanded the Universe

Before Edwin Hubble arrived at Mount Wilson Observatory, the prevailing scientific view was that the Milky Way constituted the entire universe. In this episode of pplpod, we profile the American astronomer who fundamentally changed our understanding of the cosmos by proving the existence of galaxies beyond our own and discovering that the universe is expanding,.

Join us as we explore the life of a scientific giant who was also a gifted athlete, a soldier, and a reluctant law student.

Topics covered in this episode include:

• From the Court to the Cosmos: Hubble’s early life as a track star and basketball player who led the University of Chicago to a conference title, followed by his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford studying jurisprudence to fulfill a promise to his father,.
• Shattering the Milky Way: How Hubble used the 100-inch Hooker telescope to identify Cepheid variables in "nebulae," proving they were actually distant galaxies like Andromeda,.
• The Expanding Universe: The discovery of the relationship between a galaxy's distance and its velocity—now known as Hubble’s law—and how it forced Albert Einstein to abandon his "cosmological constant",.
• War and Peace: Hubble’s service in the infantry during WWI and his work improving ballistics technology during WWII,.
• Legacy and Controversy: The debate regarding Georges Lemaître's priority in predicting the expanding universe, and Hubble’s lifelong, unsuccessful campaign to make astronomers eligible for the Nobel Prize in Physics,.