Abstract
ABSTRACT No one now living attended the original lectures by Curtis and Shapley, and the scientific and other worlds in which they moved are connected to ours only by the written record and second-hand stories. Depending on which corners you choose to peer into, those worlds can seem remarkably modern or remarkably ancient. As is often the case for classic dichotomies, the wisdom of hindsight reveals that each of the speakers was right about some things and wrong about others, both in choosing which data to take most seriously and in drawing conclusions from those data. Modern (mostly casual) discussions of the 1920 event leave the impression that Shapley was, on the whole, the winner. But the two men's reactions to Hubble's discovery of Cepheids in the Andromeda galaxy make clear that both felt the issue of existence of external galaxies (on which Curtis had been more nearly correct) was of greater long-term importance than the size of the Milky Way (on which Shapley had been more nearly correct). Shapley is much the better known today and is generally credited in text books with the Copernican task of getting us out of the center of the galaxy. Under modern conditions, he would probably also have gotten most of the press notices. Curtis's repeated theme "More data are needed," is remarkably difficult, then as now, to turn into a headline.
Highlights
The suggestion came originally from George Ellery Hale, whose father had endowed a lecture series for the National Academy of Sciences
The idea was that stars begin bright and red, contracting toward the main sequence until they have used up all their "giant stuff," whatever it was, and move diagonally down the main sequence, living on their "dwarf stuff" for a much longer time, fading out as red or white dwarfs. The debaters were both more or less subscribers to this point of view, and Shapley invokes it as part of the theoretical argument for his distance scale
Jan Oort's discovery of galactic rotation quickly led to a new calibration of distance scales
Summary
The suggestion came originally from George Ellery Hale, whose father had endowed a lecture series for the National Academy of Sciences. G. Abbot, agreed that the 1920 William Ellery Hale lectures would be a discussion on "The Distance Scale of the Universe," with Harlow Shapley of Mt. Wilson Solar Observatory and Heber Doust Curtis of Lick Observatory as the discussants. ^olar astronomer Charles Greeley Abbot, dying on December 17, 1973 at the age of 101, became the last surviving of the major participants in the original Curtis-Shapley lectures. He was middle-named for newspaperman Horace Greeley, the (arguably unfairly) defeated Democratic presidential candidate of 1872. The name seems to have been luckier for its later holders than for the original one
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