by Xen

Created on: May 01, 2010   Last Updated: May 03, 2010

Edwin Hubble, the namesake of the telescope and discoverer of the constant, told people he practiced law in Kentucky when he was actually a high school teacher (though duly certified by the bar). He pretended at Britishness (with the orotund and sometimes unintelligible accent and Inverness cape) for the rest of his life after spending a little time abroad as a Rhodes scholar, to the continual frustrations of his friends and colleagues.

He was quick to assure people that he performed near constant acts of heroism, rescuing drowning children, rescuing men in wartime, and besting pugilists. He was precisely the sort of fellow who would one-up your every story in a bar, even though most every would be constructed on the spot.

The remarkable thing is that there was no cause. Edwin Hubble was stellar (if you will pardon the pun) well before he began looking heavenward. Reportedly, in one high school meet, he took the gold in seven separate events and bronze in a third.

He was a charming athlete-scholar and, according to William H. Cropper in Great Physicists, "handsome almost to a fault" and referred to by people who had just met him as "an Adonis". He grew up in material comfort and distinction.

There was positively no cause to ever overcompensate, yet he did even after it was pretty well made clear that he had profoundly affected the way we think about the universe by proving the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way. Why?

Pop psychology would suggest that no one overcompensates but from insecurity, to puff up when faced with a threat or unspoken doubt. And, certainly, Hubble appropriately compensated for whatever inadequacy he may have found within himself, no matter how invisible it must have been to his peers (who were more than aware that he was a stubborn, self-centered, arrogant liar, but not an inadequate one).

The most common insult one can find about Hubble is that he was an egomaniac, entirely because he saw little reason not to at the very least embroider the truth, if he wasn't refashioning it entirely to impress Hollywood starlets or astrophysicists.

Exaggerators are prevalent in most everyone's life. In fact, I hazard the guess that we all have a bit of this in ourselves, so much increasing our fidgeting when someone around us is unfurling a whopper.

I used to feel it my duty to poke holes in their stories, not out of any real sense of cruelty or animosity as that I recall mortification when my childhood fibs were dashed in the schoolyard and

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