Hubble's famous plot, showing the linear relationship between galaxies' distance and radial velocity (from Hubble, 1929)
The name of Edwin Hubble is ubiquitous in modern astronomy. Telescopes, constants, laws, galaxy classification schemes are named after the famed astronomer, considered to be the godfather of modern astronomy. If he were alive today, he would have appeared on The Simpsons, Southpark and Saturday Night Live. But a number of recent papers posted to the Arxiv and presented at conferences are calling into question Hubble’s claim to fame, and even his integrity as a scientist.
At the root of these questions lies the work of a well-known Belgian astronomer, Georges Lemaître. As a semi-Belgian I felt it my duty to look into the story and blog (and thanks to fellow Belgian astronomer Geert Barentsen for the tip).
Hubble published his seminal result showing a linear relationship between the distance to galaxies (or extra-galactic nebulae, as they were still known then) and their radial (i.e. recession) velocities in a 1929 paper in the Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, carrying the title “A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae”. He uses a decade of observations at Mount Wilson Observatory to derive the fundamental relationship empirically. As a result, Hubble is widely credited as the first scientist to show incontrovertibly that the Universe all around us is expanding.
But was he really the first?
In early June, Sydney Van den Bergh, an astronomer based in Victoria, Canada, posted a short note to the Arxiv, recalling a meeting with Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and theoretician based at the Catholic University of Louvain. In 1927, two years earlier than Hubble, Lemaître published a paper in which he demonstrates the expansion of the Universe from both observations and theory. Using published distances and velocities, he derives the constant of proportionality between galaxies’ distance and velocity, the number now known as Hubble’s constant H0.
It was Lemaître’s misfortune that he published his results in the relatively obscure journal Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles, in French. While his work seems to have been known, the significance of the result remained unacknowledged.
In the pre-internet era this was not an uncommon occurrence, as scientists were sometimes simply not aware of each other’s results. But in Lemaître’s case, the plot thickens at this point.
In 1931, his ASSB paper of 1927 was translated into English and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, MNRAS. Bizarrely, the translated version omits several crucial sections of the paper, and in particular fails to include any of Lemaître’s discussion and work using observational data. Footnotes with important comments on these data are also missing. One of the crucial equations of the paper, Equation 24, is missing a term that shows Lemaître’s accurate calculation of the all important constant relating the galaxies’ distance and velocity.
The translation of the paper is otherwise accurate. All the papers in question are available via ADS, so these facts are all a matter of public record.
Van den Bergh suggests that Lemaître’s paper was deliberately mis-translated, thus robbing the Belgian of the credit for his discovery. Another paper to the Arxiv last week, by South African astronomer David Block, pushes these claims further, hints at deliberate censorship and says some unpleasant things about Hubble, of which I’ve no idea if they’re accurate, or indeed if they can ever be demonstrated. Apparently the man wasn’t very good at citing his colleagues – annoying, arrogant, yes, but malignant….? And as we might say in Belgium: Plus ça change.
The editorial offices of MNRAS no longer have the information on who provided the translation of Lemaître’s paper. Historians contacted by Nature were reluctant to be drawn into the story. Hubble’s citation practices may well have been sloppy, they say, but that that was pretty much the standard in the 1920s. By all accounts, the man was a formidable scientist.
But maybe Lemaître is overdue having a telescope named after him? Something for the Europeans to think about perhaps.
Update 28/06
Chasing up some references on this story, I found a letter posted to the Arxiv in April of this year, sent by Michael Way of NASA and Harry Nussbaumer, Emeritus at ETH Zurich to Physics Today. They give a few more interesting tidbits.
A number of today’s professional astronomers and popular authors (e.g. Singh 2005) believe that the entirety of Lemaˆıtre’s 1927 paper (published in French in an otherwise obscure journal) was re-published in English in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) in 1931 (Lemaître 1931) with the help of Eddington. This is also incorrect as the two pages from the 1927 paper that contain Lemaître’s estimates of the Hubble Constant are not in the 1931 MNRAS paper for reasons that have never beenproperly explained. Unfortunately there have been several recent examples of prominent peo-
ple writing in the popular press who continue to promote Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the Universe (for example, see The New York Times, 15 January 2011 Op-Ed by Brian Greene). Not only have the two books mentioned previously discussed the history of the discovery, but others have stated the facts as well (e.g. Peebles 1984).
I inserted the link to the Ny Times piece and I’ve added the additional references to the list below for your reading pleasure.
References
Hubble E (1929). A RELATION BETWEEN DISTANCE AND RADIAL VELOCITY AMONG EXTRA-GALACTIC NEBULAE. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 15 (3), 168-73 PMID: 16577160
G. Lemaître (1927). Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extra-galactiques, Annales de la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles, A47, p. 49-59 [ADS]
G. Lemaître (1931). Expansion of the universe, A homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extra-galactic nebulae MNRAS, 91, 483-490 [ADS]
Sidney van den Bergh (2011). The Curious Case of Lemaitre’s Equation No. 24 arxiv arXiv: 1106.1195v1
David L. Block (2011). A Hubble Eclipse: Lemaitre and Censorship arxiv arXiv: 1106.3928v1
Michael Way & Harry Nussbaumer (2011). The linear redshift-distance relationship: Lemaître beats Hubble by two years. Arxiv: 1104.3031
Peebles, P.J.E. (1984). Impact of Lemaˆıtre’s ideas on modern cosmology”, in The Big Bang and Georges Lemaître, Proceedings of the Symposium Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, October 10-13, 1983 (A85-48726 24-90), p. 23-30
Singh, S. (2005). Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe. Harper Perennial, ISBN-10: 9780007162215
You might be interested to hear that someone did, in fact, point out the Hubble/Lemaître controversy at the Supernova Conference last week in Sydney, and went so far as to shun Hubble and his arrogance in favor if giving credit to Lemaître. Although he made a joke along the lines that Lemaître made a very poor choice as to which journal he chose to originally publish in and subsequently wiped out any chance for the widespread acceptance of his results.
I hadnt heard the MNRAS translation controversy before though! Nice reporting, Doctor Kendrew!
Thanks for this interesting post. Maybe there’s a speculative novel or even historical film in this.
I dunno. We always joke about Hubble’s data being a line drawn through a random cloud, and the Lemaître data looks even worse. I want to see r and chi^2 for each of those lines. My money is on Hubble being the first one to break the 3-sigma threshold and claim a significant discovery.
@astropixie: I was vaguely aware of some Hubble-related controversy but the details of these papers and translation “problems” were complete news to me as well!
@Jim: that was my thought exactly! It’s a pretty intriguing story. There’s a very interesting philosophical backdrop to the debate, with Lemaître being a catholic priest, yet being one of the first to speak openly of the possibility of an expanding Universe – an idea that Hubble apparently struggled with throughout his career.
I am fascinated by a (removed) footnote in Lemaître (1927), pp 56, which says:
“Certains auteurs ont cherché à mettre en évidence la relation entre v et r et n’ont obtenu qu’une très faible corrélation entre ces deux grandeurs.”
Translated:
“Other authors have tried to study the v/r relation and only found a very weak correlation”
Which is true; e.g. in 1924MNRAS..84..747L no less than five v/r diagrams are shown. Several of these show a very weak but positive correlation, and might have inspired Lemaître (who cited this). Perhaps the discovery should be seen as a “community effort” over several years — much like the HR diagram, where papers discussing graphs with Teff/L proxies date back many many years before the works by Hertzsprung and Russell.
Lemaître, however, seems to deserve credit to be the first to compute the “Hubble” constant empirically, and to understand the implications!
Hi there,
perhaps you have seen the contribution by G. Shaviv in today’s preprint server listing: http://de.arxiv.org/abs/1107.0442
with the title: Did Edwin Hubble plagiarize?
He defends Hubble and gives some further historic background. Interesting reading … but of course, also this paper cannot lift the mystery about the strange translation of Lemaitre’s article into English for MNRAS.
Cheers,
Hendrik.
Yes I saw it! From the abstract I gather it lets Hubble off the hook. I plan to read the paper once I emerge from the NeverEnding Meeting.
Here is some research about this debate:
Nature 479, 171–173 (10 November 2011) doi:10.1038/479171a