Episode Details

Edwin Hubble was a high school basketball coach, a Rhodes Scholar who studied law at Oxford, and a decorated World War I officer before he ever looked through a telescope professionally. Then he proved that galaxies exist beyond the Milky Way, discovered that the universe is expanding, and fundamentally changed humanity's understanding of its place in the cosmos — achievements so monumental that NASA named its most famous telescope after him.

This episode traces Hubble from his athletic Midwest childhood through the Mount Wilson Observatory observations that doubled the known universe, the expansion discovery that shocked Einstein, and the Nobel Prize he was denied because astronomy was not yet considered physics.

• Hubble's athletic career, Rhodes Scholarship, and the unlikely path to professional astronomy
• The Andromeda observation that proved galaxies exist beyond our own Milky Way
• Hubble's Law — the discovery that the universe is expanding and everything is moving apart
• Einstein's reaction, the telescope that bears his name, and the Nobel he never received