Lemaître, Georges Édouard (1894–1966)
Belgian cosmologist and priest who was the original proponent of what later
became known as the Big Bang theory. Trained
as a civil engineer, he served as an artillery officer with the Belgian
army during World War I, then, in 1923, he entered a seminary, where he
was ordained a priest. From 1923 to 1924 he visited the University of Cambridge
to study solar physics and there met Arthur Eddington;
he then spent two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where
he was influenced by the ideas of Edwin Hubble
and Harlow Shapley regarding the likelihood
of an expanding universe. In 1927 he returned to Belgium and was made professor
of astrophysics at the University of Louvain. In 1933 he published his Discussion
on the Evolution of the Universe, in which he suggested that the universe
stemmed from what he called a "primeval atom." This incredibly dense initial
form, he argued, contained all the material for the universe in a sphere
about 30 times larger than the Sun. Its explosion sent matter flying all
directions and resulted ultimately in the expansion of the galaxies that
we see today. The significance of his theory lay not so much in its affirmation
of the expansion of the universe as in its presumption of an initial event
to start the expansion. In 1946, Lemaître published his Hypothesis of
the Primal Atom – the same year in which George Gamow
and his colleagues began to develop the nuclear physics of the Big Bang.
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