General Relativity 100 - Nothing - No Way

It goes with out saying that, if the constants are not constant, we need no longer strain ourselves to interpret the redshift as due to a velocity of recession, or, for that matter, strive to interpret anything else on the cosmic scale.
Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, Third edition, p. 225

 If there is one thing that the Oracle of Ottawa remembers about high school is that nothing - no way can ever go faster than the speed of light. Because the General Theory of Relativity said so! We all were even blessed at Arnprior District High School with certain science and physics teachers that could work in the general theory to most any problem, with out blinking an eye! The one example that comes to mind is; we detonate one ton of trinitrotoluene , how much of the mass of the TNT was directly converted into energy? And of course after an impressive flurry of chalk and dust and something about E equals MC squared we were told that it was some small piddling number that an engineering type wouldn't give the time of day to.

Galaxy UDFy 38135539 (inside red circle)

All the Oracle of Ottawa can remember thinking of the demonstration is that thank God we do not have to reinvent the light bulb, electricity, radio and the internal combustion engine using the general theory! All these things just happen to work fine without the general theory and gratefully all were invented before the general theory came out in 1915. And even before 1915 the Curies were working their magic discovering radioactivity, every time I read that story I can just picture that glow in their lab. Weird, no general theory was required... I often thought a lot recently, would nuclear weapons have been developed without the general theory? Are you sure about that?

Stanislaw Ulam, the father of the Super, in his book Adventures of a Mathematician never mentioned the general theory once if I correctly remember. Sometimes in passing one can only conclude that the general theory was more a hindrance than a help in the last 100 years.

But as the tribute books to the 100th anniversary of the general theory are still sitting on the bookshelves unsold, the fine cracks in the theory are starting to appear. The most powerful of them is that certain galaxies are being measured by the Hubble Space telescope and the ESA VLT as having z values greater than 1.4, which would mean that the galaxy is receding at a speed greater than the speed of light! Not only are they receding at slightly faster than the speed of light, they are receding at an impossible speed with z values greater than 8.0! And this value is being attached to more than just one recently observed galaxy.

The only reason that the Oracle of Ottawa is going on about this is that it is the first tell into how we can break the light barrier. We will do it the same way that space-time is expanding between far off galaxies. There is a possible very simple explanation for this. In closing the Oracle of Ottawa must mention the very weird coincidence of the Hubble z value of 1.4 for an object receding greater than the speed of light and that the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses that determines whether a collapsing star will be a white dwarf if under 1.4 solar masses, and a 'black hole' if over 1.4 solar masses. Very strange that...

Harlow Shapley - King Of The Galaxies

Modern cosmologists have more powerful tools and much more information at their disposal than did the pioneers of cosmology, and yet they are still far from a consensus on the nature and origin of the universe.
Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, p. 227

There is the well documented story that Harlow Shapley picked astronomy out of the university catalog simply because he could not pronounce archeology! All one can conclude that it was a very bad day for archeology. Instead of knowing where we are in our own galaxy of the Milky Way, we could quiet possibly have had the Ark of the Covenant hanging by piano wire in the Smithsonian, with the Ten Commandments as a side exhibit! But fate choose astronomy and Harrison Ford never had to get a real job. 

Harlow Shapley

It was just this morning that I finished reading his book Galaxies, third edition 1975, and Dear Reader it was a page turner from front to back. I bought the book in a used book store, knowing that it was a classic. But once I got into it, I soon came to the conclusion that it was all much more than that. Old Harlow had quiet the cosmological bent to his nature and he was beholden to no standard model save and except the Hubble redshift, and even that only up to a point.

Globular Cluster NGC 6397

And as you read on you come across some very interesting names, such as Halton Arp and Vera Rubin. Haltan Arp found that Quasers come from the center of galaxies. And Vera Rubin discovered the galaxy rotation problem, which led to the deferent  and epicycle that the bangers created and called Dark Matter! Harlow Shapely had a great knack for the correct theory and for great talent. These stories are still unfolding and are not yet "in and done", but the writing is on the wall so to speak.

 Another thing that I got from reading Harlow Shapley is that interest in globular clusters, which Halton Arp worked on early in his career. There are still a ton of unanswered questions on that topic even at the time of this writing. Among the details lies a great and dramatic truth, I am certain. He also made a very great long shot observation in passing regarding the possibility that if the universe is large enough, distant galaxies could actually be receding faster than the speed of light! But I will cover that in another post at a future time.

There is some great legacy footage on Harlow Shapley on You Tube. The first is an actual interview clip. Which I simply must include in this post. And it is pretty cosmological.
 

 The second awesome piece of archive footage is a recent lecture on Harlow Shapley by one of his long ago students! And it is fascinating, I watched it right through enthralled. The reason Harlow Shapley looms so large on the horizon of astronomical history is that he was one of the last great astronomers before the big science of today, that is complete with talking points but somewhat short on substance.