Harlow Shapley (November 2, 1885 – October 20, 1972) was an American astronomer, who served as head of the Harvard College Observatory from 1921–1952, and political activist during the New Deal and Fair Deal.

Shapley used Cepheid variable stars to estimate the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sun's position within it. In 1953 he proposed his "liquid water belt" theory, a concept now known as a habitable zone.

Background

Shapley was born on a farm five miles outside Nashville, Missouri, to Willis and Sarah (née Stowell) Shapley. He went to school in Jasper, Missouri, but not beyond elementary school. He worked as a journalist after studying at home and covering crime stories as a newspaper reporter for the Daily Sun in Chanute, Kansas, and intermittently for the Times of Joplin, Missouri.

Early years

After graduation, Shapley received a fellowship to Princeton University for graduate work, where he studied under Henry Norris Russell and used the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars (discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) to determine distances to globular clusters. He was instrumental in moving astronomy away from the idea that Cepheids were spectroscopic binaries, and toward the concept that they were pulsators.

He realized that the Milky Way Galaxy was far larger than previously believed, and that the Sun's place in the galaxy was in a nondescript location. This discovery supports the Copernican principle, according to which the Earth is not at the center of the Solar System, the Milky Way galaxy, or the Universe.

The Great Debate of 1920

Shapley participated in the "Great Debate" with Heber D. Curtis on the nature of nebulae and galaxies and the size of the Universe. The debate took place on April 26, 1920, in the hall of the United States National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. Shapley took the side that spiral nebulae (what are now called galaxies) are inside the Milky Way, while Curtis took the side that the spiral nebulae are "island universes" far outside the Milky Way and comparable in size and nature to the Milky Way. This issue and debate are the start of extragalactic astronomy, while the detailed arguments and data, often with ambiguities, appeared together in 1921.

Characteristic issues were whether Adriaan van Maanen had measured rotation in a spiral nebula, the nature and luminosity of the exploding novae and supernovae seen in spiral galaxies, and the size of the Milky Way. However, Shapley's actual talk and argument given during the Great Debate were completely different from the published paper. Historian Michael Hoskin says "His decision was to treat the National Academy of Sciences to an address so elementary that much of it was necessarily uncontroversial", with Shapley's motivation being only to impress a delegation from Harvard who were interviewing him for a possible offer as the next Director of Harvard College Observatory. With the default by Shapley, Curtis won the debate. The astronomical issues were soon resolved in favor of Curtis' position when Edwin Hubble discovered Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. Hubble's findings went on to fundamentally reshape the scientific view of the universe.

Despite having earlier argued strongly against the idea of galaxies other than the Milky Way, Shapley went on to make significant progress in the research of the distribution of galaxies, working between 1925 and 1932. In this time period, with the Harvard College Observatory, he worked to map 76,000 galaxies. One of the first astronomers to believe in the existence of galaxy superclusters, Shapley later discovered a large and distant example, which was later named the Shapley Supercluster. He estimated the distance to this supercluster at 231 Mpc, which is within 15% of the currently accepted value.

Harvard College Observatory

He served as director of the HCO from 1921 to 1952. During this time, he hired Cecilia Payne, who, in 1925, became the first person to earn a doctorate at Radcliffe College in the field of astronomy, for work done at Harvard College Observatory.

From 1941 he was on the original standing committee of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles. He also served on the board of trustees of Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1935 to 1971.

Activism

In the 1940s, Shapley helped found government funded scientific associations, including the National Science Foundation. He shares credit with British biochemist Joseph Needham for the addition of the "S" in UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

A few weeks later, in early 1947, Shapley became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). At the time, the AAAS's choice appeared to be a "rebuke" of HCUA and a positive championing of scientists.

In March 1949, Shapley chaired the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. It was sponsored by the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions. Arch-conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., authored a 1951 book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," wherein, in the eve of McCarthyism, he attacked liberalism at Yale and academia in general. In the book, Buckley cited Shapley's participation and averred that event was "Communist-inspired" and "Russian-dominated." As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Personal life

Shapley married Martha Betz (1890–1981) in April 1914, whom he had met in Missouri. She assisted her husband in astronomical research both at Mount Wilson and at Harvard Observatory. She wrote numerous articles on eclipsing stars and other astronomical objects.

They had one daughter, editor and writer Mildred Shapley Matthews; and four sons. These included Lloyd Shapley, a mathematician and economist who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2012, His eldest granddaughter, June Lorraine Matthews, became a physicist.

Although Shapley was an agnostic, he was greatly interested in religion.

Shapley died in a nursing home in Boulder, Colorado on October 20, 1972, shortly before his 87th birthday.

  • Elected Member of the American Philosophical Society (1922)
  • Elected Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1924)
  • Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1926)
  • Prix Jules Janssen of the Société astronomique de France (French Astronomical Society) (1933)
  • Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1933)
  • Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1934)
  • Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1939)
  • Janssen Medal from the French Academy of Sciences (1940)
  • Pius XI Medal (1941)
  • Franklin Medal (1945)
  • Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society (1950)

Legacy

thumb|upright=1.25|[[Shapley Supercluster map]]

Named after him are:

  • The crater Shapley on the Moon
  • Asteroid 1123 Shapleya
  • Shapley Supercluster
  • Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships In Astronomy, American Astronomical Society

Before the anti-communist phrase "Better Dead Than Red" became popular during McCarthyism in the 1950s, Shapley said in a 1947 speech entitled "Peace or Pieces" that "A slave world is not worth preserving. Better be lifeless like the cold moon, or primitively vegetal like desolate Mars, than be a planet populated by social robots."

In his 1957 book Of Stars and Men, Shapley proposed the term Metagalaxies for what are now called superclusters.

Shapley attended Institute on Religion in an Age of Science conferences at Star Island and was the editor of the book Science Ponders Religion (1960).

Books

Papers

See also

  • Habitable zone
  • Milky Way Galaxy
  • National Science Foundation
  • RR Lyrae
  • UNESCO

References

Further reading

  • Harlow Shapley Project
  • Nature – Obituary
  • The Great Debate
  • Collection of Pieces on The Great Debate
  • at antwiki.org