He is a highway in Missouri, a middle school in Illinois, a crater on the Moon, and the most famous telescope ever built. He is also the author of a sentence he never wrote.

Edwin Hubble began as a small-town athlete who could not spell, promised his dying father he would study law, taught Spanish to Indiana teenagers, and coached a high school basketball team before he ever pointed a serious telescope at the sky. Within five years of arriving at Mount Wilson he had doubled the known size of the universe, and within ten he had produced the measurement that made the expanding cosmos the standard picture of reality. Almost every number he published was wrong. The relationship those numbers described has survived a century.

This is the story of how that happened, and of the discipline that made it possible: Hubble's lifelong refusal to confuse what his instruments recorded with what everybody wanted the recording to mean. He called the velocities he found "apparent." He left the interpretation to others. He was wrong about several important things, and this book does not excuse him for any of them. But the habit of mind he practiced without ever naming it is the one modern science most often forgets, and the reason the constant that carries his name is, right now, the subject of the loudest disagreement in cosmology.

A biography of a man who looked, wrote down what he saw, and declined to explain it. Written without a single equation.