First Look

Man's greatest and most farseeing eye opened for the first time this week--and saw nothing new. The great 200-in. telescope at Mt. Palomar, weighing 500 tons, swung as smooth as silk on its massive bearings. The astronomers, deliberately avoiding objects of great interest, pointed it at arbitrary spots in the sky, just trying it out. The telescope, they explained, needed a good bit of delicate adjustment before it was ready to take worthwhile pictures.

But it did take pictures of random stars; and the astronomers, though they kept their mouths shut, seemed more starry-eyed than usual after the big telescope's initial performance. The man to whom the moment meant most may have been Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, whose specialty is space. Years ago, using the 100-in. telescope on Mt. Wilson, he had explored the known frontiers of the universe. He found a baffling mystery: the distant nebulae (clouds containing billions of stars) seemed to be rushing away from the earth at enormous speed, as if the whole universe were convulsed by one vast explosion.

Why this should be happening (or if it really is happening) Dr. Hubble does not know. The 100-in. telescope could not see far enough to give him the data he needed. The new 200-incher may show Hubble and his fellow men (who live on an earth that is only a speck of dust in one of the nebulae) whether the universe is "exploding"--or doing something quite different.

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