This is something I've been wanting to see for a long time :
English and Spanish translations are provided for Fritz Zwicky's seminal article on "The Redshift of Extragalactic Nebulae", published in German in Helvetica Physica Acta in 1933. This paper is usually cited as the first evidence for dark matter ("dunkle Materie", not "missing matter"). Zwicky's conclusion is based on the velocity dispersion of only seven galaxies in the Coma cluster of galaxies. Now, 84 years later, with 1000+ radial velocities measured for Coma cluster members, Coma's velocity dispersion is very close to that found by Zwicky. The translation is as literal as possible, and annotations on the translation of certain terms are given. Doubts on the meaning of the original phrasing are given in square brackets at a few places where they occur.
Sometimes Zwicky is held as an example of a great scientist who was overlooked. But as well as being a cantankerous git (famous for calling his graduate students "spherical bastards" because they were "bastards every which way you looked at them"), it's always seemed to me that his evidence based on just seven galaxies was pretty crappy evidence. This isn't the modern evidence of rotation curves, which have many individual measurements per galaxy : it's the motions of entire galaxies in clusters, so it's based on just seven data points. Modern findings agree with Zwicky, but at the time, seven data points would hardly have been the extraordinary evidence needed to support the extraordinary claim of most of the Universe being invisible. But I look forward to reading the original article for myself.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01693
Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
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