Like a mighty rushing wind
Did you know? The father of the Big Bang theory was a priest.
Monsignor Georges Lemaître (1894 – 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer. He’s one of the father of what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.
Lemaître was a pioneer in applying Einstein’s theory of general relativity to cosmology. At the time Einstein believed in a static universe and had previously expressed his skepticism about Lemaître’s original 1927 paper. A similar solution to Einstein’s equations, suggesting a changing radius to the size of the universe, had been proposed in 1922 by Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, a mathematician, but it is Lemaître, with his proposed mechanism, that made the theory famous for several reasons according to historians.
Both Friedman and Lemaître had found that the universe must be expanding. Lemaître went further than Friedman, since he concluded that an initial “creation-like” event must have occurred. This is the Big Bang theory as we know it today, and this is why he is credited with its discovery.
Einstein at first dismissed Friedman and then (privately) Lemaître out of hand, saying that not all mathematics leads to correct theories. After Hubble’s discovery was published, Einstein quickly and publicly endorsed Lemaître’s theory, helping both the theory and priest get fast recognition.
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