How a Priest Discovered the Greatest Theory of All Time

The most profound discovery of our

time

is that our universe had a beginning and is expanding. However, the person responsible for this discovery is practically unknown. And there is a reason for this, which will become clear. Georges Lemaître was a Belgian

priest

who theorized that the expansion of the universe began with the explosion of a single particle at a defined point in

time

faster than the speed of light. The Big Bang

theory

is accepted by almost all current astronomers. But back in the 1930s, the belief that the entire observable universe began with an explosion was considered absurd.

Even Albert Einstein found it crazy. So how did Lemaître come up with this

theory

? Let's go back to the beginning. Lemaître was born in Charleroi, Belgium, in 1894 to a wealthy and devoutly Catholic family. He knew what he wanted to be when he was nine years old: a

priest

and a scientist at the same time. He grew up in a coal mining region and, at his father's insistence, studied civil mining engineering at the Catholic research university in the Belgian city of Leuven, but his studies were interrupted when Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. He left the university to fight as an artillery officer and received the Belgian Croix de Guerre for bravery on the battlefield.

At that time he was already thinking about the origin of the universe in the context of his Christian faith. He wrote to a friend while in the trenches of war: "I have understood the 'Fiat Lux' as the reason for the universe." “Fiat mira” in Latin means “let there be light,” in reference to the third verse of the Book of Genesis: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” After the war, he continued his education, but switched to mathematics and physics, graduating in 1920. He then went to seminary and was ordained a priest three years later.

During this time, he became fascinated by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity: how gravity can warp space and time, which I talked about in a previous video. Lemaître then did postgraduate work at the University of Cambridge with the famous English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, who had confirmed Einstein's theory when he saw how gravity deflected light from a star traveling close to the sun. Eddington gave Lemaître a glowing recommendation, after which he spent time at Harvard and was then accepted into a doctoral program at MIT. It was a good time to be in the US if you were a scientist because of recent discoveries that shook people's understanding of the universe.

Until then, the Milky Way, which includes our solar system, was thought to be the entire universe. But more powerful telescopes showed that this was not true. American astronomer Edwin Hubble announced that he had evidence that the Milky Way was one of the many galaxies in the universe. He observed that Andromeda, which was shaped like a spiral, was actually a galaxy. Another American astronomer, Vesto Slipher, noticed that Andromeda was bluer in color, while other galaxies were redder. Slipher knew that Andromeda was approaching us because if the light comes towards you, the waves become more flattened, making the light bluer.

If it moves away from you, it stretches, making the light waves appear redder. Light from distant galaxies that appeared to shift more towards the red end of the color spectrum suggested that they were moving further and further away from Earth. The belief was that galaxies receded in a static universe. However, Lemaître interpreted this redshift differently. He concluded that galaxies were not moving away from each other in a static universe, but that the universe itself was expanding, which then spread the light waves. Here's another way to look at it. He imagines that this globe is the universe.

And the dots are the galaxies. As the balloon expands, the separation between the points also expands. And from the perspective of each individual point or galaxy, it appears that the others are moving further and further away from it. An expanding universe completely shattered the notion that the universe was static, which is what Einstein firmly believed. But an immutable universe was problematic for his own theory of relativity. If gravity were the only active force in a static universe, the universe would collapse. To solve this problem, Einstein added a cosmological constant, presumably a form of matter or energy that opposes gravity.

On the other hand, Lemaître's expanding universe would satisfy Einstein's theory of relativity. Still, Einstein was not convinced. He refused to believe in an expanding universe. Lemaître recalled Einstein telling him: "Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious." It would take Einstein a long time to recover. He eventually abandoned his cosmological constant, calling it the "biggest mistake" of his life. Lemaître returned to Europe in 1925 to take up a teaching position at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he had been a student. In 1927 he published his defense of an expanding universe in French in a Belgian scientific journal.

It was not so. Nobody really paid attention to him. It wasn't until two years later, when Hubble published his own findings about an expanding universe, that the world realized the distance of galaxies and also built on his work. de Slipher, who had measured redshifts, plotted the distance of galaxies and their velocities on this classic graph and showed that more distant galaxies were moving away from us faster than galaxies that were closer and it made sense if the universe was expanding. This became known as Hubble's law. He came to the same conclusion as Lemaître. However, Lemaître did not receive the attention and praise given to Hubble because Lemaître had published his findings in French in an obscure Belgian magazine that was not widely read outside his own country.

His mentor Eddington is said to have helped arrange an English translation two years after the publication of Hubble's work, in 1931. However, the article omitted crucial paragraphs from Lemaître describing Hubble's law. It turns out that Lemaître decided to leave this out. He reasoned that Hubble's calculations had already improved over his previous work. Apparently, he did not bother to prove that he had devised the expansion theory before Hubble. He was a humble man who didn't care if Hubble got the glory. Instead, Lemaître continued his research and published a new paper in 1931 in which he argued that if the universe was expanding then it also had a beginning.

He proposed this in his primitive atom hypothesis. A primitive atom was a single particle. He maintained that the universe began with the explosion of this single particle that gave rise to our entire cosmos and concluded that a creation-like event had occurred. Researchers date the event to more than 13.8 billion years ago. He didn't call it Big Bang. Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle coined the term during a talk broadcast on the BBC. Hoyle actually thought the theory was nonsense. Many scientists were skeptical, including Einstein. However, in 1933, when Lemaître and Einstein traveled together to attend a series of seminars in California, and Lemaître had time to explain his theory in detail, Einstein is reported to have said: “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of the creation so far. that I have ever heard.” Lemaître was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 for his prediction of the expanding universe.

Two years later, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of the primitive atom. He didn't win either. The strongest evidence supporting the Big Bang was

discovered

by accident a decade later, in 1964, by American scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson working for Bell Laboratories, the research and development arm of what is now Nokia. They were puzzled by a strange signal noise picked up by this antenna and tried to figure out what it was. They even removed some pigeons that were nesting there. That's when they stumbled upon cosmic microwave background radiation. The ancient light is believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang.

Lemaître lived to see the moment of its discovery. His ideas were finally vindicated. He died two years later, in 1966, of leukemia at the age of 71. Despite not being as well known as his scientific colleagues, he is finally gaining more recognition. In 2018, Hubble's law was changed to the Hubble-Lemaître law. Lemaître may have helped unlock the secrets of the universe. However, the more we learn, the stranger it becomes. Scientists thought the expansion of the universe would gradually slow down over time as gravity slowed. But, surprisingly, they

discovered

the opposite. It turns out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Some mysterious force is pulling our universe apart. And we don't know why. Don't forget to subscribe and like.