American Decades
The Red Shift: Discovering an Expanding Universe
Clouds in the Heavens.
In the early 1920s Vesto M. Slipher, an astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, was examining spiral-shaped nebulae in the night sky. According to contemporary scientific opinion these nebulae were cloudy patches of light caused by gases, but Slipher came to the conclusion that they were entire, separate galaxies like the Milky Way.
BIRD PSYCHOLOGIST
Among the most significant ornithological studies of the 1920s was the work of a child psychologist, Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974), who had a master's degree in psychology and wrote articles on that subject at the same time she was studying birds. Nice's consuming interest was the observation of behavior, whether in her five daughters (the "research subjects" of her writings on psychology) or birds.
By 1920 Nice had decided she preferred bird-watching to people-watching and...
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1920's Science and Technology
