Georges Lemaître
Belgian astrophysicist and Catholic priest (1894-1966) · Belgium · Scientists · Died at 71
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Something wrong?He was a Belgian priest who first argued the universe is expanding and proposed what he called the "hypothesis of the primeval atom" - the seed of what we now call the Big Bang.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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In their own words 4
, I was interested in truth from the point of view of salvation just as much as in truth from the point of view of scientific certainty.
There is no conflict between science and religion.
We want a fireworks theory of evolution. The last two thousand million years are slow evolution: they are the smoke and ashes of bright but very rapid fireworks.
Awards
About this person
Georges Lemaître studied engineering, math, physics, and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained a priest in 1923. His cardinal mentor encouraged the science, sending him to work with Arthur Eddington at Cambridge and then to Harvard and MIT. Back at Louvain as a professor from 1927, Lemaître connected the recession of galaxies to Einstein's field equations, producing the first formulation of Big Bang theory. In the 1930s he pioneered computer use in physics and showed with Manuel Sandoval Vallarta that cosmic rays carry electric charge. He also argued for a positive cosmological constant to reconcile the universe's inferred age with the ages of the oldest stars. Pope John XXIII made him a monsignor in 1960 and president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a post he held until his death in 1966.
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