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He asked Slipher for the data so as to include them in a book on relativity, and, in 1922, Slipher sent him a table of nebular velocities. By 1929 Hubble had pulled Slipher’s observations together with those of a few other astronomers (and his own) and come to a remarkable conclusion. If you take the galaxies moving away from Earth, and plot their speeds against their distance from Earth, you find that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. If one receding galaxy is twice as far from Earth as another, it will be moving twice as fast.

In the 1770s, the chemists Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley inferred the existence of oxygen through experimental results that defied all the theories of the time. Through several decades, plenty of people noticed the strange jigsaw-piece similarity between the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa, but it wasn’t until 1915 that someone pointed out it could be more than a coincidence. Alfred Wegener’s insightful observation led to our theory of plate tectonics and continental drift; it is an observation that, at a stroke, did away with the “stamp-collecting” nature of geologic science and gave it a unifying theory that opened up billions of years of Earth’s history for inspection.

A media storm followed. Riess eloquently told the CNN audience that the universe’s expansion was accelerating, the cosmos was literally blowing itself apart—and Einstein’s cosmological constant was back, pushing on the fabric of the universe. Kirshner came out with a rather un-Shakespearean sound bite, reported on February 27 in the Washington Post. “This is nutty-sounding,” he admitted. ” Not that they were happy about it even then. The team leader, Brian Schmidt, probably put it best. ” Nevertheless, the LBNL came out with the same conclusions shortly afterward.