When was georges lemaitre born

Skip to main content. Reidel Publ. Company, Dordrecht, Holland, p. Godart et M. Heller, eds , Pachart ed. Luminet et A. Un Atome d'Univers. In , he returned to Belgium and became a part-time lecturer and later a full-time professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he remained for the rest of his career. In , he discovered a family of solutions to Einstein 's field equations of relativity that described not a static universe, but an expanding universe as, independently, had the Russian Alexander Friedmann in He spoke, rather vaguely, of some instability being produced by radioactive decay of the primal atom that was sufficient to cause an immense explosion that initiated the expansion of the universe.

The theory later became much better known as the " Big Bang " theory after a sarcastic remark of the English astronomer Fred Hoyle in , and its importance today is arguably due more to the revival and revision it received at the hands of George Gamow in However, by , the theory had become more widely accepted and newspapers around the world began calling him a famous Belgian scientist and describing him as the leader of the new cosmological physics.

He was elected a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in , and remained an active member until his death, accepting the position of president in During the s, he gradually gave up part of his teaching workload at Leuven, and he retired completely in , devoting his time to numerical calculation, as well as keeping up his strong interest in the development of computers and in the problems of language and programming.

He died on 20 June , shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation , which provided further evidence for his own intuitions about the birth of the universe. See the additional sources and recommended reading list below, or check the physics books page for a full list.

Whenever possible, I linked to books with my amazon affiliate code, and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Alexander Friedmann, a Russian mathematician, published a similar solution in German journals in and However, his was a purely theoretical exercise, as he did not have access to the data.

In his universe, the velocity of recession of a galaxy would be proportional to the distance to that galaxy. He used the available astronomical data on galactic distances and redshifts to compute the constant of proportionality.

The Annales of the Scientific Society of Brussels, published in French in Belgium, was simply not on the list of prominent scientific journals, nor was French a dominant language in astronomy.

Two years later, in , the American astronomer Edwin Hubble published a paper in the prominent Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, 14 in which he used the much larger body of data on galactic distances and velocities then available to show empirically that there was a linear relationship between the recessional velocity and distance of a galaxy.

Ironically, the man for whom the fundamental yardstick of cosmic expansion was named never accepted the idea that space was expanding. For decades intrigue swirled around this omission; theories ranged from anti-religious motives to Hubble himself intervening to save his own priority.

In , astronomer Mario Livio solved the mystery after combing the archives of the Royal Astronomical Society, where he discovered a cover letter enclosed with the translated manuscript to the editor of MNRAS.

He knew well that by , when Hubble wrote his paper, there were more data of higher accuracy that established the linear nature of the velocity-distance relationship than he had access to in Further, Hubble had a big personality and was in charge of what was the largest telescope at the time the Mount Wilson inch reflector; as a public figure he easily overshadowed low-key Belgian priest-professor.

By , he had thought through the implications of his model of the cosmos, and realized that the expansion implied a beginning a point in time at which space and all the matter within it was so compressed that the physical laws which govern the behavior of everything might not have applied. That the universe would have a beginning was scientifically unattractive, since it meant that some state of reality might not be accessible to scientific investigation.

And it smacked of religion a kind of scientific version of Genesis. Though the Steady State model was discredited by the discovery of the CMB, astronomers still seek ways to avoid what remains for many a philosophically unpleasant idea that the cosmos might have had a beginning.

An archived early draft of the manuscript includes a final, additional paragraph, crossed out in pen. More intriguing is that much of the second paragraph of the Nature paper echoes very closely the musings of St. Augustine on the nature of time. If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta.

The statement is as much philosophical as it is physical how can one define space or the progression of time, if there is but a single thing that does not interact with anything else? Taking the definition of creature as some thing that interacts with other things in the cosmos, the two ideas are essentially identical and phrased quite similarly.

However, there is no citation of St. It also bears noting that the ideas expressed in those two sentences are not essential to the main idea of the paper: that the expansion of a matter-filled cosmos implies an ultra-dense beginning a finite amount of time ago.

But whatever the reason for the inclusion of these sentences, they provide a striking connection between modern cosmology and 5 th century Catholic theology. Up until World War II, he published a number of important papers that demonstrated again and again his ability to engage observational data with his rigorous solutions to the equations of general relativity.

For example, grappling with the cosmological constant that Einstein disavowed, he proposed in a rigorous mathematical treatment that it might be a kind of vacuum energy, exerting a negative pressure that would accelerate the expansion of the cosmos. This presaged quite closely the idea of dark energy.