Red Shift

Narrator:

Throughout the universe, the galaxies are distancing themselves

from one another, rushing apart at phenomenal speeds, signaling

their departure by a shift in the red end of their light spectra.

Edwin Hubble measured the red shiftt in 1929 and thus rendered

impossible the idea of a static universe.

Rainer Maria Rilke, having died in 1926 of leukemia in a sanatorium near

Monireax, did not know about the red shift or about Hubble's discovery.

Yet in his Eighth Elegy, Rilke personalized a phenomenon of universal

significance, intuiting something of extraordinary magnitude. He

concludes his Elegy with the following lines:

Who has twisted us around this way so that

no matter what we do, we are in the posture

of someone going away? Like someone upon

the farthest hill who is shown his whole valley,

one more time, he turns, stops, lingers --,

so we live and forever take our leave.

Wer hat uns also umgedreht, daß wir,

was wir auch tun, in jener Haltung sind

von einem, welcher fortgeht? Wie er auf

dem letzten Hügel, der ihm ganz sein Tal

noch einmal zeigt, sich wendet, anhält, weilt —,

so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied.

*How the red shift is measured: The sound of a train whistle as

it approaches us not only becomes louder but higher and higher in pitch.

Conversely, as it moves away from us, it becomes lower in pitch. This is

the Doppler Effect and it applies to light-emitting sources as well as sound.

As light-emitting sources, such as celestial bodies, move away from the

observer there is a lengthening of the wavelengths at the red end of the

spectrum. The amount of lengthening, or red shift, is proportional to the

distance from the observation paint. From these measurements was born

the paradigm of the expanding universe and the Big Bang.