calling it “the greatest blunder of my life.” The universe was indeed expanding.
Science Rock Star
This dramatic mea culpa by Einstein, who was perhaps the most famous man in the world, drew even more attention to Hubble and the striking depictions of the immense universe coming from the astronomers atop the 5,715-foot Mount Wilson. Breathless newspaper headlines screamed about the gargantuan distances and the millions of new worlds Hubble was discovering. He began to lecture on science to standing-room-only crowds of five thousand people, and he, too, became one of the most famous men in the world for redefining our ideas about our origins.
Decades later, the Hubble Space Telescope would be named in his honor, but, in the 1930s, Hubble’s work captured the public interest like that of few scientists before him. He became one of the first great popularizers of science with his traveling and speaking, even delivering, as part of a scientific lecture series, a ten-minute national radio address heard by millions during the intermission of a New York Philharmonic broadcast. He and his wife Grace were the special guests of director Frank Capra at the March 4, 1937, Academy Awards ceremony, where Capra, the academy’s president that year, won best director for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Hubble became the toast of Hollywood, and a long line of actors and directors made the journey up Mount Wilson to peer through the lens of his telescope.
Unlike the admiration that his papers produced, this activity engendered the wrath of his fellow scientists, who scorned him as an arrogant egotist and shameless self-promoter. His protégé, Allan Sandage, discoverer of quasars and further mapper of the universe, said that Hubble “didn’t talk to other astronomers very much, but he was certainly not arrogant when he was in the company of other people.” Regardless of his temperament, he had the talent to back up his celebrity. And, in part because of the press coverage, the transparency of his work, and his popular speaking, the public felt in on his discoveries, embracing them rather than becoming suspicious.
Among the many celebrities who came to visit Hubble on the mountain was Aimee Semple McPherson. Milt Humason, who was a famous womanizer, told Sandage that, in 1926, during a month-long disappearance in which McPherson claimed to have been kidnapped, tortured, and held for ransom in Mexico, the attractive radio evangelist had actually been up on Mount Wilson, enjoying Humason’s special attentions in the Kapteyn Cottage. If true, this would seem an example of the phenomenon of preachers and politicians who attempt to impose rules on society in areas in which they themselves have weaknesses, perhaps seeking to control their own overpowering and unacceptable urges.
Hubble maintained a tolerant but skeptical relationship toward all religions. But according to Sandage (a Democrat), when it came to politics Hubble was a staunch Republican who colluded with other Republican scientists to schedule known Democrats for telescope time on Election Day to prevent them from voting.
In 1951, Pope Pius XII gave a momentous speech in which he addressed Hubble’s work and the big bang theory, stating that the big bang proved the existence of God by showing there was a moment of creation, which meant there must be a creator. A friend of Hubble’s read the text of the pope’s speech in the Los Angeles Times and wrote to him,
I am used to seeing you earn new and even higher distinctions; but till I read this morning’s paper I had not dreamed that the Pope would have to fall back on you for proof of the existence of God. This ought to qualify you, in due course, for sainthood.
Hubble, heralded by scientists as the greatest astronomer since Galileo, and loved by the public and the press for his indefatigable popularization of astronomy, had managed to bring the relationship between science and the Roman Catholic Church full circle.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—William Butler Yeats, 1919
An Intellectual Weapon
Science took an important leap in public consciousness during World War II, when it transformed from an exploration of nature into a means to win the war for democracy and against the tyranny that had overtaken Germany, Italy, and Japan. Radar and the atomic bomb were both Allied inventions that had major impacts on the war’s outcome, as did sonar, synthetic rubber, the proximity fuse, the mass production of antibiotics, and other key wartime innovations, with many of the efforts led by emigrants from an increasingly antiscience Third Reich.
The war didn’t start out that way, though. In fact, during the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was an early adopter of the latest science and technology, which he used to great political advantage. He forbade smoking around him because German scientists had shown a link between smoking and lung cancer. He based his politics of white supremacy on ideas he appropriated from early research into genetics. He barnstormed twenty-one cities by airplane—the first politician to use an airplane to campaign on that level—in his 1932 race for president against Paul von Hindenburg, an effort the campaign called “Hitler über Deutschland.” The Nazi Party mounted gramophones—at the time a relative novelty—on vehicles, using the public’s attraction to them to broadcast a uniform political message. Hitler lost the presidential election, but won enough support to be named chancellor in 1933. That year, the Third Reich introduced another weapon with which to spread mass Nazi ideology: the Volksempfänger, or “people’s receiver,” which was offered to the public at low cost and with great success. It had no international shortwave bands, only domestic, which the Nazis filled with propaganda and patriotic music. The world’s first regular television broadcast was instituted in Germany beginning in March 1935, with similar goals, and the Third Reich pioneered the use of the classroom filmstrip to inculcate uniform Nazi ideas about politics and racial pseudoscience in students. In short, Hitler placed science and technology in service of politics, leveraging its new power in ways no one had before.
As Hitler’s minister for armaments, Albert Speer, recounted at his trial in Nuremberg after the war,
Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought.
Science and technology were employed as tools to spread authoritarian ideology and whip up extreme partisanship and nationalism. The German suspicion of government-conducted science, and the desire of citizens to have greater control over it, is likely a reaction to this misuse of science for ideological ends, and motivates European—and particularly German—attitudes toward science to this day.
Germany also made great strides in mechanized warfare and developed key technological advancements to the submarine and the ballistic missile. But the intolerance of the Nazi regime, and the elevation of authoritarian ideology and propaganda over knowledge and science, began to backfire. Berlin may have become a scientific and cultural capital in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but the Nazis considered the city’s artistic and scientific cross-pollination degenerate. As they elevated rhetoric and ideology over science and tolerance, Germany’s intellectuals began to either conform to Nazi authoritarianism or flee. Within a decade, German scientific and technological progress ground to a halt as the Third Reich lost many of its most creative minds to the United Kingdom and the United States.
Presiding over the American science war effort was Edwin Hubble’s boss, Vannevar Bush, an engineer and