The Size of Creation

by Edwin Hubble, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I

The lecture had been given eleven times. The slides lived in a walnut box under the counter of Rudell's Drug Store on the south side of the square in Bolivar, Missouri, between the scales and the ledger of poisons, and there were thirty-two of them, glass, three and a quarter inches by four, each in a paper sleeve with its number written on the corner in Amos Rudell's small upright hand.

Slide 1 was the Moon. Slide 9 was Saturn, drawn, not photographed, because his own photographs of Saturn had come out the size of a grain of rice. Slide 30 was the great nebula in Andromeda, copied from a plate in a book from Chicago, a pale oval with a bright centre, lying across the glass at an angle like a dropped coin. Slide 31 was the caption. He had lettered it himself in India ink in 1914 and had not altered it since:

SPIRAL NEBULAE. WHIRLPOOLS OF GLOWING MATTER WITHIN OUR OWN SYSTEM OF STARS. ROTATION MEASURED BY VAN MAANEN AT MOUNT WILSON.

He had added the van Maanen line in 1917, scratching a clear space in the old emulsion with a razor blade, and the letters of the last line were a little thinner than the others.

The lecture was called The Size of Creation. It was given on the third Saturday of January in the upstairs room of the Odd Fellows hall, because January had the long dark evenings and the Andromeda nebula still stood high in the west after supper. Admission was ten cents. The money went to the library fund. Last year there had been sixty-one people and one dog.

On the last Monday of November 1924 Amos read a paragraph in the Star. It was eleven lines long and it came from New York. A Mr. Hubble of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California had found, on photographs of the spiral nebulae, stars of the kind called Cepheid variables. From their periods he had computed distances. The great nebula in Andromeda was some nine hundred thousand light-years from the earth.

Amos read it at the counter between a prescription for paregoric and one for digitalis. He filled both. He read the paragraph a second time. Then he took a pair of shears from the drawer, cut it out, and put it in the walnut box on top of slide 31.

II

His granddaughter Nell came to the store after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and swept. She was eleven. She found the cutting on the Thursday, because she had been told never to open the slide box and so opened it whenever he went into the back.

"Nine hundred thousand," she said. "How far is that from here?"

"About nine hundred thousand light-years."

"How far is three hundred thousand?"

He had told the Odd Fellows hall eleven times that the whole system of stars, the Milky Way and everything in it, measured three hundred thousand light-years from edge to edge. Professor Shapley at Harvard had measured it with the globular clusters. It was slide 28.

"Three hundred thousand is the size of the Milky Way," Amos said.

Nell looked at the cutting. She looked at the slide box.

"So it's three of them away."

"Give me that," Amos said, and she gave it to him, and he put it back in the box and closed the lid.

That evening he did not go up to the yard behind the house, where the four-inch Clark refractor stood on its iron pier under a canvas hood. He sat at the kitchen table with the lamp and wrote a letter.

He wrote it three times. The first draft ran to two pages and contained the words I have taught for eleven years. He put that one in the stove. The second asked whether the result was considered final. He put that one in the stove also. The third he copied fair and posted on Friday the twenty-eighth:

Dear Sir. I have read a report in the newspaper of your finding variable stars in the Andromeda nebula. I should be obliged if you would send me the period of the principal variable, its apparent magnitude, and the absolute magnitude you assign to it, so that I may work the distance for myself. I am a druggist and an amateur. I enclose a stamped envelope. Respectfully, A. J. Rudell, Bolivar, Mo.

III

December was ordinary. There was influenza in the north of the county and he sold a great deal of aspirin and Dover's powder. It snowed on the ninth and again on the twentieth. The Clark stayed under its hood.

The lecture was announced in the Herald in the first week of January, in the same words as every year: Mr. A. J. Rudell will give his illustrated lecture THE SIZE OF CREATION at the Odd Fellows hall, Saturday 17th, 7 o'clock. Telescope afterwards, weather permitting. Ten cents. Mrs. Garrison at the Herald did not charge him for it. She had heard the lecture four times.

The stamped envelope came back on the tenth of January. Inside it was a single sheet with a printed heading, CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON · MOUNT WILSON OBSERVATORY · PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, and seven typed lines:

Dear Sir: In reply to your inquiry of November 28th. The principal variable in Messier 31 has a period of 31.4 days. Its photographic magnitude ranges between about 18.2 and 19.6; the mean may be taken as 18.3 for your purpose. Shapley's period-luminosity curve gives an absolute magnitude of about −4.0 for this period. The distance which results is of the order of 285,000 parsecs. A fuller account was read at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 1st. Very truly yours, E. P. Hubble.

Amos read the seven lines standing at the counter in his overcoat. Then he took off the overcoat, hung it on its hook, turned the sign on the door to CLOSED although it was a quarter to eleven in the morning, and took a pad of prescription blanks from the drawer.

He did not trust a figure he had not worked. He had said so to the Odd Fellows eleven times, in the part of the lecture about Mr. Lowell's canals on Mars, which were slide 14 and which nobody but Mr. Lowell had been able to see.

On the back of the first blank he wrote the apparent magnitude, 18.3, and under it the absolute magnitude, −4.0, and subtracted. 22.3. That was the modulus: how much fainter the star looked than it truly was. Every five magnitudes was a factor of a hundred in light. Light fell off as the square of the distance. So every five magnitudes was a factor of ten in distance.

He wrote: 22.3 + 5 = 27.3. ÷ 5 = 5.46.

Ten to the power 5.46. He did not have a table of logarithms in the store. He had one at home, in the bookcase, in the bottom shelf. He found that he did not want to go home for it. He worked it by hand on the second blank, from the logarithm of two and the logarithm of three, which he knew, and he got 288,000 and something. He wrote 288,000 parsecs. Against the letter's 285,000 it was near enough. The difference was in the rounding of his magnitude.

On the third blank he multiplied by 3.26 to turn parsecs into light-years. 285,000 by 3.26. He did it twice, once from each end. 929,100.

On the fourth blank he wrote 300,000 and under it 929,100 and drew a line, and divided, and got 3.1.

He sat for a while. A farmer named Lew Sutter tried the door, saw the sign, looked through the glass at Amos sitting at his own counter with a pencil in his hand, and went away again.

He checked the calculation a third time. It was correct. It did not depend on anything he could not follow. It depended on three things: that the star was a Cepheid, which he could not check, because a star of the eighteenth magnitude was some three hundred times too faint for a four-inch glass; that Miss Leavitt's law held, which he had believed since 1912 and had put on slide 27; and that Shapley's curve was right in its zero, which Shapley himself had made.

He put the four prescription blanks into the walnut box with the letter, on top of slide 31, and turned the sign to OPEN.

IV

On the Wednesday Nell asked whether the lecture would be different this year.

"Some of it," Amos said.

"Which bit?"

"Slide 31."

"Are you going to say you were wrong?"

He was cutting a cake of castile soap into quarters with a wire. He finished the cut.

"I'm going to say what was measured."

"That's not the same."

"No," Amos said. "It isn't."

That night he took slide 31 home in its sleeve. He laid it on the kitchen table under the lamp, emulsion side up, and opened the razor blade.

He had planned to scrape off the whole caption and letter it new. He got as far as the first word. The blade went into the gelatine at the S of SPIRAL and a curl of it came up, brittle and brown, eleven years dry. He stopped there. He put the blade down and looked at the glass for a time, and then he took up the India ink and the fine pen and, instead of scraping anything more, he drew a single line through the last three lines of the caption, carefully, so that every word could still be read under it. Underneath, in the margin of clear glass that was left, he lettered small:

M 31. CEPHEID, PERIOD 31.4 DAYS. DISTANCE ABOUT 285,000 PARSECS (930,000 LIGHT-YEARS). HUBBLE, 1925.

He held it to the lamp. The struck line showed black across the old words. The new words were crowded and he had misjudged the spacing at the end, so that 1925 ran into the edge of the frame. He let it stand.

V

It was eleven degrees on Saturday night and clear. Sixty-eight people came up the stairs of the Odd Fellows hall and paid their ten cents to Mrs. Garrison at a card table. Lew Sutter came, and his two boys, and the Methodist minister, Mr. Teale, who came every year and sat at the back and asked a question about Genesis at the end. Nell sat in the front row, which she was not supposed to do.

The lantern was an electric one now, a Bausch & Lomb Balopticon bought in 1921 with the library fund's leave. It hummed. Amos stood beside it with his slide box open on a chair and gave the lecture the way he always gave it. The Moon, slide 1. The planets, slides 2 to 13. Mars and Mr. Lowell's canals, slide 14, and the usual laugh. The Sun, the nearer stars, the way a parallax was taken. Miss Leavitt and her little stars in the Magellanic Cloud, slide 27: the longer the star took to brighten and fade, the brighter it truly was, so that if you timed one you knew its candle-power, and if you knew its candle-power you could tell from its faintness how far it stood. He said this in the same words as every year. Then Shapley and the globular clusters, slide 28, and the size of the Milky Way. Three hundred thousand light-years. He said it in the same voice.

Slide 29 was the Milky Way itself, a long photograph of the star-clouds in Sagittarius. He let it stand a little longer than usual.

Slide 30. The great nebula in Andromeda, pale and tilted on the bedsheet they used for a screen.

"This is the Andromeda nebula," Amos said. "You can see it with your own eyes from Mr. Sutter's south pasture if there's no moon. You will see it tonight in the glass, if you care to. It is the brightest of the spiral nebulae. For eleven years I have told you what it is."

He took out slide 30 and put in slide 31.

The old caption came up on the bedsheet ten feet wide, the struck line through it as thick as a finger, and the new letters underneath, crowded, with the date running off the edge.

Nobody said anything. The Balopticon hummed.

"In 1916," Amos said, "Mr. van Maanen at Mount Wilson measured these spirals and found them turning. If they were turning that fast and were very far away, the outer parts of them would be going faster than light. So they had to be near. Inside our own system. That was the measurement I had. I gave it to you.

"In October of 1923, at the same observatory, with the hundred-inch telescope, Mr. Hubble photographed this nebula night after night and compared the plates, and he found a star in it that brightened and faded, brightened and faded, every thirty-one and four-tenths days. A Cepheid. Miss Leavitt's kind. He wrote to me with the figures, and I worked them myself on the back of four prescription blanks, and they come out." He took the blanks out of the box and held them up, not so that anyone could read them, only so that they could be seen. "Nine hundred and thirty thousand light-years. The whole of the Milky Way is three hundred thousand across. This is three times that distance away, and more."

"So it ain't in ours," said one of the Sutter boys.

"It is not in ours."

"Then van Maanen was wrong," said Lew Sutter.

"One of the two measurements is wrong," Amos said. "They can't both be right. I would rather have the Cepheid. You can time a Cepheid with a clock. Mr. van Maanen's was a matter of a few thousandths of a second of arc, on plates years apart. I have done enough measuring of small things behind that counter to know which of those I would sooner trust." He looked at the slide. "But I have not seen the Cepheid. I am telling you what was measured, and how, and by whom."

"And you were wrong eleven years," Lew Sutter said. He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way he would have said that a fence had been a foot over the line.

"The caption was wrong eleven years. For ten of them nobody on earth could have known it, and for the eleventh only a man in California." Amos left the slide on the screen. "I have not scraped it off. I have put a line through it. If I scraped it off, you would not know what we used to think, and you would not know how we found out."

At the back, Mr. Teale raised his hand. Amos knew what the question would be, because it had been the same question for eleven years, and it came.

"Mr. Rudell. What does it signify? For the Creation, I mean. If there's another such system out there, and it's as big as ours."

The Balopticon hummed. Amos looked at the crowded white letters on the sheet.

"It signifies that the distance is nine hundred and thirty thousand light-years," he said. "That is what I have. If there are other systems besides this one, there will be more Cepheids in them, and someone will time those too. What it signifies beyond the distance, Mr. Teale, I do not know. I would rather leave that to you than make it up."

Mr. Teale considered this, and nodded, and sat back.

Amos took out slide 31 and put in slide 32, which was the Sun setting behind the Bolivar water tower, and which closed the lecture every year.

VI

The four-inch Clark had been carried down the stairs by the two Sutter boys in its wooden case and set up on its tripod on the frozen gravel in front of the hall. The sky was clear to the horizon. The Moon would not rise until after midnight.

Amos found the nebula without a finder. Up from the great square of Pegasus, across the corner star, two stars up the chain and a little to the right. He had found it that way eleven Januaries running. He brought it into the field and centred it and stood back.

They came one at a time, bending, in their coats, their breath going up white past the dew cap. Most of them saw nothing at first, and he told each one what he always told them: not to look straight at it, to look a little to one side and let it come. Then they saw it, a faint grey smear the length of a fingernail paring, brighter in the middle, and they said oh, or is that it, and stood up.

Nell went third. She looked for a long time.

"It's not any bigger," she said.

"No."

Lew Sutter went eleventh, after his boys. He bent to the eyepiece with his hat in his hand and his other hand flat on his knee. He looked for nearly a minute.

"Looks the same as last year," he said.

"It is the same," Amos said.

Lew straightened up and put his hat on and stood aside. There were twenty more people behind him, stamping their feet on the gravel. The earth had turned while Lew looked, and the smear had drifted toward the edge of the field. Amos bent, put his eye to the glass, and turned the slow-motion screw a quarter turn with his thumb until the nebula sat in the centre again, nine hundred and thirty thousand light-years off, and then he stepped back for the next one.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ab Edwinō Hubble per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edwin Hubble, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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