The Day We Found the Universe Quotes

“Hubble was lucky in a way. The Hubble Space Telescope could easily have been given another name had certain events turned out differently: if someone had not prematurely died (Keeler), if someone else had not taken a promotion (Curtis), or if another (Shapley) was not mulishly wedded to a flawed vision of the cosmos. The discovery of the modern universe is a story filled with trials, errors, serendipitous breaks, battles of wills, missed opportunities, herculean measurements, and brilliant insights. In other words, it is science writ large.”
― Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe

“An immense continent of rock known as the North American plate slide inexorably over an oceanic slab of Earth's crust moving eastward. At the tectonic juncture, where the two gargantuan plates smashed together, the ocean floor plunged downward, the tremendous compression forging massive blocks of shale and sandstone. In due course some of this material lifted upward from its depths, relentlessly rising toward the sky to form the Diablo Mountain Range -- two hundred miles of peaks and vales stretching from the San Francisco Bay southward along California's coastline. As if readying for a performance, nature sculpted the landscape that, millions of years later, offered astronomers a unique observing platform for their studies of the cosmos. Situated on the eastern edge of the Pacific, this lofty terrain became the perfect vantage point from which to make the first great discoveries in twentieth-century astronomy.”
― Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe

“But Slipher felt he needed to acquire an even better spectrum to peg the exact speed. It was an endeavor, he told Lowell, that “would doubtless impress all these observers as a quite hopeless undertaking, and maybe it is, but I want [to] make an attempt.”
― Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe