Edward Robert Harrison

His final book, Masks of the Universe (2nd ed., 2003), questions current perceptions of reality, asking whether present cosmology, with ordinary matter, dark matter, plus dark energy, is yet only another "mask" obscuring a Universe which will remain perforce forever unknown to humans.

In his early career, Harrison did research at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, at CERN and at the Rutherford High-Energy Laboratory. In 1965, Ted Harrison went to the US as a NAS-NRC Senior Research Associate at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland. In 1966, he became one of the three founders of the Astronomy Program within the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Over the next 30 years, he influenced the revival of the Five College Astronomy Department, linking UMass to Amherst College, Hampshire College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College. He also played a key role in the rise to international prominence of the Five College graduate course in astronomy. At his death, he was emeritus Distinguished University Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UMass, and an adjunct professor at the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona.

Harrison was fascinated with Olbers's paradox (the night sky is dark despite the vast number of stars in the universe). In 1964, he published detailed calculations that solved the paradox by concluding that stars do not generate enough energy to illuminate the entire sky. In 1987, he published a book, Darkness at Night, mulling over the Paradox and its rich history. This book clarified that the lack of energy is not primarily because the universe is expanding, but rather because the stars and galaxies have had only about 15 billion years to radiate, and do not have sufficient energy to keep radiating for much longer. Darkness at Night lays out how Harrison discovered that Edgar Allan Poe's essay Eureka anticipated this conclusion, and that Lord Kelvin had reached a very similar conclusion in a 1901 article ignored for 80 years until Harrison drew attention to it.

Edward R. Harrison (8 January 1919 – 29 January 2007) was a British astronomer and cosmologist, noted for his work about the increase of fluctuations in the expanding universe, for his explanation of Olbers's paradox, and for his books on cosmology for lay readers. He spent much of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Arizona, both in the United States.