When Einstein heard of Hubble's discovery, he was elated. More than a decade earlier, his new general theory of relativity had told him that the universe must either be expanding or contracting, yet astronomers had told him it was doing neither. Against his better judgment, Einstein had uglied up his elegant equations with an extra factor he called the cosmological term — a sort of antigravity force that kept the universe from collapsing in on itself.

But suddenly, the cosmological term was unnecessary. Einstein's instincts had been right, after all. His great blunder had been to doubt himself, and in 1931, during a visit to Caltech, the great and grateful physicist traveled to the top of Mount Wilson to see the telescope and thank Hubble personally for delivering him from folly.

With the greatest scientific superstar of the age paying him homage, Hubble became a popular superstar in his own right. His 1936 book on his discoveries, "The Realm of the Nebulae", cemented his public reputation. Tourists and Hollywood luminaries alike would drive up the mountain to marvel at the observatory where Hubble had discovered the universe, and he and his wife Grace were embraced by the elite of California society.

Hubble's last great contribution to astronomy was a central role in the design and construction of the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain. Four times as powerful as the Hooker, the Hale would be the largest telescope on Earth for four decades. It would have been even longer, but its completion was interrupted by World War II. So was Hubble's career. The ex-major signed on as head of ballistics at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. (At one point the eminent astronomer spent an afternoon test-firing bazookas, at great personal risk, to pinpoint a design flaw.)

Hubble finally got his hands on the Hale when it went into service in 1949. It was too late; he had suffered a major heart attack, and he never fully regained the stamina it took to spend all night in a freezing-cold observatory. No imaginable discovery, however, could have added to his reputation.

The only recognition that eluded him was a Nobel Prize — and not for lack of effort on his part. He tried everything. In the late 1940s he even hired a publicity agent to promote his cause. Alas, there was no prize for astronomy, and by the time the Nobel committee decided astronomy could be viewed as a branch of physics, it was too late. Insiders say Hubble was on the verge of winning when he died, in 1953.

Hubble would have been consoled by the fact that his name adorns the Hubble Space Telescope, which probes the cosmos to depths he could not have imagined but would have fully appreciated. Whatever marvels the Hubble telescope reveals, they're all played out on the stage Edwin Hubble first glimpsed from a lonely mountaintop in California.

TIME senior writer Michael D. Lemonick is the author of Other Worlds: The Search for Life in the Universe

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Feb. 9, 1948

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