The Scale of the Universe: A Curtain-Raiser in Four ACTS and Four Morals

This concise and highly selective introduction to the distance-scale debate, from antiquity to Hubble's paper of 1924 on the distance to M31, provides some key quotations and references. The first section describes the early Greek determinations of the distances of the sun and moon. The second part discusses the distances to the stars, from Copernicus to Huygens. Section 3 skips to the early twentieth-century ideas on the scale of the Milky Way, especially the work of Shapley. The final section describes how Hubble's discovery of distances to galaxies was first announced. (SECTION: A Debate on The Scale of the Universe)