1889-1953
Astronomer

Hubble's Law.

Edwin Hubble's discovery that galaxies are constantly moving away from each other changed forever the conception of a stable universe shared by many of his contemporaries and paved the way for the Big Bang theory, the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of the universe.

Background.

Born in Marshfield, Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble studied under astronomers Robert Millikan and G. E. Hale at the University of Chicago. An amateur heavyweight boxer, Hubble was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he studied law and ran track, and earned a B.A. in 1913. He soon decided to return to the study of astronomy and earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1917, just in time to join the army and fight in France in World War I. He rose to the rank of major before being demobilized...