HARLOW SHAPLEY
Preface: Why this Book Matters
“I would often look out my window on the top floor and see two or four at play with the rubber ring on the deck tennis court next to the woods. Bart Bok, Fred Whipple, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Martin Schwartzschild, to name only a few, tried their skill at this game.”
Harlow Shapley was very famous as a scientist. He located the center of the Milky Way galaxy, finding that our solar system is far from the Galactic Center. As Director from 1921 to 1953, Shapley built the Harvard College Observatory into the foremost US graduate school in astronomy and “a mecca” for astronomers from around the world. From 1953 Shapley published that life in the universe would arise on planets in “the liquid water belt” distance from their stars. This standard is applied in the search for extraterrestrial life today.
In September 2018 I made my first visit to Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO), perched on a craggy outcrop of the San Gabriel Mountains a mile above Pasadena, California. At the observatory between 1914 and 1919 my grandfather Harlow Shapley discovered the true shape of Milky Way galaxy and our place in it.
Arriving in Stockholm at night in early December, I was struck by the rows of lights in the windows of the lovely old buildings. It was Advent season, so most windows had sets of white candles – traditional symbols of hope in mid-winter. Gleaming snowy streets wound like trails through dark town. Stockholm is laced with canals whose inky edges were fringed with brightly lit white boats.
