The cosmic egg & the big bang

- Fr. Georges Lemaître and Albert Einstein

Science idiot that I am, I'm always agog when I come upon interesting (and understandable :-) science info ... tonight it was to be found in an episode of The Universe (which had a few talking headisms from John Polkinghorne), on the proposal of the Big Bang theory, by none other than a Catholic priest, Fr. Georges Lemaître.

Father Georges Henri Joseph Éduard Lemaître (July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer. Fr. (later Msgr.) Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, although he called it his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.

His idea of a cosmic egg, explosion/creation event, and an expanding universe (btw, Soviet Aleksandr Friedmann, had come to the same conclusion independently, a few years earlier), was doubted, even though Edwin Hubble released his velocity-distance relation that strongly supported an expanding universe, in part because Einstein had instead proposed a static universe, and another scientist, Fred Hoyle from Cambridge, soon after came up with what he called the Steady state theory, which became popular. But long story short, Einstein did change his mind about the big bang, and Fr. Lemaître's theory was accepted when in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered, with a new microwave receiver owned by Bell Laboratories, the cosmic background radiation theorized to be left over from a big bang creation event.

In retrospect, it's thought that one hindrance to the acceptance of Fr. Lemaître's theory was that he was a priest and that his idea supported religious creationism. While his fellow scientists were skeptical of him, the Pope was quite pleased with him, and had Fr. Lemaître named prelate (Monsignor) in 1960, as well as surprising him with an appointment to sit on a commission investigating the subject of birth control at Vatican II (what?!!). Now, like many Jesuit scientists, he even has a lunar impact crater named after him :-)

You can read more about this in the article, A Day Without Yesterday': Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang


- A graphical representation of the expansion of the universe with the inflationary epoch represented as the dramatic expansion of the metric seen on the left (Wikipedia)