![]() ![]() Eddington at once called the attention of other cosmologists to Lemaître’s 1927 paper and arranged for the publication of an English translation. It was at this point that Lemaître drew Eddington’s attention to his earlier work, in which he had derived and explained the relation between the distance and the recession velocity of galaxies. Wilson in California, had shown that the distant galaxies all appeared to be receding from us at speeds proportional to their distances. Furthermore, Edwin Hubble, using the world’s largest telescope at Mt. In contrast, Lemaître attacked the problem of cosmology from a thoroughly physical point of view, and realized that his solution predicted the expansion of the real universe of galaxies that observations were only then beginning to suggest.īy 1930, other cosmologists, including Eddington, Willem de Sitter, and Einstein, had concluded that the static (non-evolving) models of the universe they had worked on for many years were unsatisfactory. But Friedmann was principally interested in the mathematics of a range of idealized solutions (including expanding and contracting universes) and did not pursue the possibility that one of them might actually describe the physical universe. His solution had, in fact, already been derived without his knowledge by the Russian Alexander Friedmann in 1922. In 1927, Lemaître published in Belgium a virtually unnoticed paper that provided a compelling solution to the equations of General Relativity for the case of an expanding universe. Lemaître’s religious interests remained as important to him as science throughout his life, and he served as President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1960 until his death in 1966. He was a devoted teacher who enjoyed the company of students, but he preferred to work alone. In 1925, at age 31, Lemaître accepted a professorship at the Catholic University of Louvain, near Brussels, a position he retained through World War II (when he was injured in the accidental bombing of his home by U.S. ![]() in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The following year, he pursued his scientific studies with the distinguished English astronomer Arthur Eddington, who regarded him as “a very brilliant student, wonderfully quick and clear-sighted, and of great mathematical ability.” Lemaître then went on to America, where he visited most of the major centers of astronomical research. After the war, Lemaître studied theoretical physics, and in 1923 was ordained as an abbé. As a young man he was attracted to both science and theology, but World War I interrupted his studies (he served as an artillery officer and witnessed the first poison gas attack in history). Lemaître was born in 1894 in Charleroi, Belgium. That the entire observable universe of galaxies began with a bang seemed preposterous. Many astronomers at the time were still uncomfortable with the idea that the universe is expanding. The theory, accepted by nearly all astronomers today, was a radical departure from scientific orthodoxy in the 1930s. This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest. Photo courtesy of AIP Emilio Segré Visual Archives, Dorothy Davis Locanthi Collection. Georges Lemaître, (1894-1966), Belgian cosmologist, Catholic priest, and father of the Big Bang theory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |