Percival Lowell's Last Year

摘要

Percival Lowell was always a controversial figure in the astronomical world. Despite his fame and following with the general public, his ideas and methods were largely rejected by professional astronomers of the day. The Astrophysical Journal, founded by George Ellery Hale and James Keeler, leading American astrophysicists, almost from the first refused to accept his contributions, while in a review of Lowell's 1909 lectures at MIT (published in book form as The Evolution of Worlds), Forest Ray Moulton, a University of Chicago expert on celestial mechanics, referred derisively to the "mysterious 'watcher of the stars' whose scientific theories, like Poe's vision of the raven, 'have taken shape at midnight.'" Similarly, when in 1910 Edward C. Pickering and other astronomers passed through Flagstaff on their way west to the Union for International Cooperation for Solar Research Conference in Pasadena, Pickering invited Lowell to come along. Lowell refused. "No," he told Pickering, "I am an astronomer!" He meant an astronomer in the old sense, someone who actually looked through a telescope, wielded a filar micrometer for accurate measures, and was versed in the methods of classical celestial mechanics. Lowell, especially in the last few years of his life, felt increasingly outside the main thrust of astronomy of his time, which embraced the methods of astrophysics. However, though isolated (in part by choice) and thrown on the defensive, his head, though bloodied, remained unbowed.