and Lyman Spitzer had proposed the theory, but Rudolph Minkowski, a colleague and respected member of the astronomy community, publicly declaimed it. 
    Baade bet Minkowski $1,000 that Cygnus A was a colliding galaxy, and although Minkowski insisted on lowering the stakes to a bottle of whiskey, he accepted the wager. Several months later, with spectroscopic observations pointing to a collision, Minkowski asked Baade, “What brand?” Minkowski gave a small bottle, which he himself drank the next time he visited Baade’s house. The passage of time has justified Minkowski’s “reclaiming” his whiskey: Cygnus A is, in fact, not a merging galaxy but a single one bisected by a dust lane. Even so, evidence for other