Abstract
THE Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford will be delivered during the Michaelmas Term by Dr. Edwin Hubble, of the Mount Wilson Observatory. They will be given at 5 p.m. on October 29, November 12 and November 26 in the Milner Hall of Rhodes House, Oxford. The lectures will bear the general title of “The Observational Approach to Cosmology”, and will deal in turn with the observational characteristics of that region of the universe accessible to telescopes now in operation, secondly with empirical tests of the physical nature of the spectroscopic ‘red-shift’, and finally in the third lecture with the possible models of the universe which follow from the previously established interpretation of ‘red-shift’. Dr. Hubble, who is himself a former Rhodes scholar, is well known in England. As a result of his discovery of Cepheid variables in the extra galactic nebulae, and his determination of their periods, nebulae such as those in Andromeda were first definitely revealed as systems of stars comparable in dimensions with the huge galactic system of which our sun is a part. Working out from the nearer of these objects, and using his own determinations of their apparent luminosities, Hubble was enabled by statistical methods to find the distances of these objects in a volume of space of 300 million light years radius; from these distances and the velocity determinations of Slipher and Humason, he first established in 1929 the existence of a linear relation between distance and velocity (assuming the observed spectroscopic ‘red-shift’ to be due to Doppler effect).
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Rhodes Memorial Lectures: Dr. E. Hubble. Nature 138, 679 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138679b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138679b0