Grist: Southern Californias Mount Wilson is a lonesome, hostile peak - prone to sudden rock falls, sometimes ringed by wildfire - that nevertheless has attracted some of the greatest minds in modern science.
George Ellery Hale, one of the godfathers of astrophysics, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904 and divined that sunspots were magnetic. His acolyte Edwin Hubble used a huge telescope, dragged up by mule train, to prove the universe was expanding. Even Albert Einstein made a pilgrimage in...