This is probably as good a place as any to link this (very) belated New York Times memoriam to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a groundbreaking pioneer in astronomy during the early 20th Century. I can't find it right now, but I referenced her and her fellow "computers" somewhere in the book thread, and I have a biography of her in my reading queue titled
Miss Leavitt's StarsAs most of you know, one of the most important tools we have for measuring intermediate astronomical distances are
Cephid variable stars which exhibit a strong correlation between the period of their varying brightness and their intrinsic, absolute luminosity. When Edwin Hubble figured out that the universe was expanding, his insight wasn't based only on his own work but relied largely on observational data compiled by other people.
Whether Hubble unduly minimized the contributions of others to his discovery is debatable, but he did recommend Levitt for the Nobel Prize.
The portrait that emerged from her discovery, called Leavitt’s Law, showed that the universe was hundreds of times bigger than astronomers had imagined.
Overlooked No More: Henrietta Leavitt, Who Unraveled Mysteries of the Stars
P.S. The widespread mis-belief that Einstein somehow predicted the accelerating expansion of the universe with his "cosmological constant" is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Einstein was disturbed because he realized that in the absence of other factors, the gravitational attraction of all the mass in the universe would lead to its eventual collapse so he added a made-up term to his equations to show an unchanging, steady-state universe simply to conform to the popular belief of the day. His characterization of the constant as the biggest blunder of his life is accurate, and his constant has jack-all to do with the current ΛCDM model of the universe.
Author
