Harlow Shapley (November 2, 1885 - October 20, 1972), was a US
astronomer, political activist, participant in the
Shapley-Curtis Debate, and director of the
Harvard College Observatory.
Shapley was born on a hay farm outside of Nashville, Missouri, near the
Ozarks, and was in fact a twin (his brother was named Horace -- both were
named for their paternal and maternal grandfathers respectively).
Shapley was educated and encouraged to learn by his elder sister Lillian.
At the age of 15, he finished his early education at a small business school
in Pittsburgh, Kansas, and took a job as a crime reporter for a newspaper
in Chanute, Kansas. In Chanute, he discovered a Carnegie
library -- one of many libraries around the country established by Andrew
Carnegie. He found he enjoyed history and poetry, and was inspired to further
his education. He returned to high school at a private Presbyterian high
school in Carthage, Missouri, and graduated (valedictorian in a class of
three) in 1907. From there, he went to the University of Missouri
at Columbia. He wanted to study journalism at the school's "new" journalism
department, but found on arrival that the department had yet to open! Needing
a new major, he started thumbing through the course catalogue, and upon
finding he couldn't pronounce "archaeology" tried astronomy instead.
(He really said that in his autobiography! Whether he was kidding or
not, who knows.) He was very
successful at it, working with Frederick Seares, chair of the Astronomy
Department. Shapley graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in 1910, and a
Master's Degree in 1911.
After getting his Master's Degree, Shapley was offered a fellowship to
Princeton University, where the Astronomy Department was then headed by
Henry Norris Russell. At the time, Russell was deeply involved in using
stellar spectra to determine the properties of stars and the orbits of
spectroscopic binary stars. Shapley finished his Doctoral dissertation --
"The Orbits of Eighty-Seven Eclipsing Binaries -- a Summary" -- at Princeton
in 1913 under Russell; after a vacation in Europe where he met many
European astronomers (including Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung of
Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram fame), he was offered a position at the new
Mount Wilson Observatory in 1914. While moving from Princeton
to Los Angeles, he stopped in Kansas City to marry Martha (nee Betz), whom he
met at the University of Missouri and had courted since. (At the time,
Betz was a graduate student of philology, but later studied astronomy and
published several papers on stars and the Sun with her husband and others.)
At Mount Wilson, Shapley worked on color-magnitude
diagrams with Seares (now also at Wilson), but also did independent work on
Cepheid variables and globular clusters. (It is noteworthy that Shapley's
"class" at Mount Wilson also included Adrian van Maanen and
Edwin P. Hubble.) The work on globular clusters (particularly on Cepheids
in clusters) was done at the suggestion of Solon I. Bailey who was doing
similar work at the Harvard College Observatory. During Shapley's time at
Mount Wilson, he used the Cepheid distance scale to determine the distances
to many globular clusters. Then, using the observed distribution of globular
clusters in the sky, Shapley (correctly) determined that our solar system
lies many thousands of light years from the galactic center.
The removal of the solar system from the
center of the galaxy had important philosophical implications; it was not much
different from discovery that the Sun rather than the Earth was at the center
of the solar system, and as such is one of the more important discoveries in
cosmology.
It was this work which Shapley presented at
the Shapley-Curtis Debate in Washington in April of 1920. What is interesting about the Shapley-Curtis debate is that both men were
right and wrong on their one of their two key points. Shapley
(incorrectly) argued that the spiral nebulae were a part of the Milky Way,
but (correctly) argued that our solar system sat in the outer reaches of
a very large galaxy. Curtis (correctly) argued that spiral nebulae were other
"island universes" just like our own galaxy, but got the scale of the
Milky Way and our location in it wrong (he thought we were near the center).
Shapley stated that part of his conviction that spiral nebulae were part of
the galaxy came from van Maanen's detection of visible rotation in
spiral nebulae (see Astrophysical Journal, v81, 336), which convinced
him that the nebulae had to be small, and
thus close by. Van Maanen's observations were later disproven -- galaxies
do rotate, but their periods of rotation are hundreds of millions of
years long, far too long to be detectable by measurement of proper motion.
During Shapley's trip to Washington, he was vetted for the directorship of
the Harvard College Observatory, to which he was appointed in April 1921.
He held the position until his retirement in 1952. Hoffleit notes that
Shapley was the first to truly integrate education into the work of the
Harvard College Observatory, and established a graduate curriculum at
HCO. Shapley also mandated that public education be integrated into
the mission of the Observatory, and lectures and presentations for school
children became a part of the requirements for students in the program.
While at Harvard, Shapley continued his research work, though at a reduced
pace due to his other duties. In particular, he performed many studies of
stars in the Magellanic Clouds using Harvard telescopes in Peru and
(later) South Africa. He also conducted a survey with Adelaide Ames of
1246 bright galaxies using Harvard telescopes. The catalogue, called
A survey of the external galaxies brighter than thirteenth magnitude,
was published in 1932 and is more commonly known as the
Shapley-Ames Catalogue (the catalogue was later revised by
Gerard de Vaucouleurs in Astronomical Journal, 1956, v61, 430, and
again by Allan Sandage and George Tammann in A Revised Shapley-Ames
Catalog of bright galaxies in 1987).
During his time at Harvard (and after his retirement) he was involved in many
of the scientific societies of the time, including the American Astronomical
Society, Sigma Xi, the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, and was also on the committees which helped to found the
National Science Foundation and UNESCO. He was also a member of the then
fledgling Federation of American Scientists. In the 1930's,
Shapley worked to bring refugees from Hitler's Germany to the
United States. During and after the war, Shapley also had friendly relations
with many Soviet scientists. In 1946, Shapley was subpoenaed
by the House Un-American Activities Committee; he had been active in
supporting a challenger to Congressman Joseph Martin of Massachussets, and
(this is Shapley's unsubstantiated opinion here) he and the challenger
(Martha Sharp) were being deliberately harassed by supporters of Martin,
including Mississippi Democrat (and HUAC member) John Rankin. Shapley
appeared before HUAC, accused them of bullying and "Gestapo tactics" and
was found to be in contempt of Congress.
Shapley was later attacked by Joseph McCarthy, who claimed
Shapley was a Communist in the State Department (despite Shapley's having no
connection to the State Department whatsoever). Shapley responded to the
press with
"the Senator succeeded in telling six lies in four sentences, which is
probably the indoor record for mendacity." However, Shapley did
in fact associate with people believed to be communist sympathizers. He was a
friend of Henry A. Wallace, and was invited to the Progressive Party
convention in Philadelphia in 1948. However, Shapley declined to speak at
the convention, and though he supported Wallace personally, he was against
the Progressive Party's pro-Soviet and anti-Marshall Plan stances. Wallace
came in a distant third behind Truman and Dewey. Shapley never regretted his
friendship with Wallace, though he made a point of criticising the Communists
and the slant of the Progressive Party.
In reading Shapley's autobiography, I liked his frank acknowledgment of
some of his own
past scientific mistakes, for example his candor about his hits and misses in
the Great Debate. The ability to acknowledge one's own mistakes is an
important part of science, and one of the harder aspects of the job. However,
as an unfortunate counterexample, Hoffleit notes that Shapley
wrongly sided with Henry Norris Russell in a dispute over the Doctoral
dissertation of Cecilia Payne (later Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin) where Payne
(correctly) determined that the Sun was mostly hydrogen, rather than of
similar composition to the Earth. (The Harvard administration also
refused to award Payne a PhD in 1926 because of her gender,
and her degree was awarded by Radcliffe College instead. But that's another
node.)
Shapley's book ends with a humorous anecdote about encountering
a Harvard dean who told him he would have to give an informal talk in a week's
time. Shapley was upset, and claimed he had nothing new or interesting to
talk about, but the dean was persistent. Shapley said,
"All right. I will do it since I must do it. And the title of my talk can
well be: 'The Scientific Blunders I Have Made.'"
"Oh, no," said the dean. "Not that; it is only to be a one-hour program."
Random factoids: Shapley came from a politically-oriented (Republican to be
precise) family, though he himself would become a liberal Democrat later in
life. His relatives were in fact Abolitionists before and during the
American Civil War, and maintained a station on the underground railroad
in New York. His grandfather ran for Governor of Missouri (and lost)
several times. Shapley's uncle Lloyd Stogell Shapley fought in the navy in
the Spanish American War, and was later the governor of Guam between
April 1926 and July 1929.
Shapley also apparently had a fondness for ants, and spent many of his
daylight hours on Mount Wilson studying them (rather than sleeping, which
he should have been doing). It was a hobby, but he actually published
a few papers on ant behavior, including how their speed is affected by the
ambient temperature.
References:
H. Shapley, Through Rugged Ways to the Stars (Scribner's,1969);
G. Tauber, Man's View of the Universe: a pictorial history(Crown, 1979);
K. Krisciunas, Astronomical Centers of the World
(Cambridge, 1988);
D. Hoffleit, Harlow Shapley and the Harvard Graduate
School (http://www.union.edu/orgs/shapley/hoffleit.html);
Z. Kopal, Obituary of Dr. Harlow Shapley (Nature Magazine, 1972, v240, 429, from
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/shapley_obit.html).
I also made use of the NASA ADS abstract service at
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html