.....

For Einstein Book re bb as pro-religious & Ein vs bb bec like creation

"The Day w/o Yesterday" J Farrell. re Lemaitre, bb EInstein deSittere

etc

p100: Quote of Ein to Lemaitre re bb idea too much like creation.

quoted from Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 8

(1967) 294-7. G McVittie obit notice ofr G Lemaitre.

p193-4: Lemaitre upset that Pope referred to bb theory as supportive

of creation idea bec it'd make Hoyle etc even more suspicious of his

motives.

Gamow pushed Alpher to make theory of bb and pushed Hoyle to write

counter paper re continuous creation (did Hoyle use THAT term!?).

......

.......

Lemaître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology:

from

Thunder's Mouth Press

Sample Chapter Podcast—Available for download.

(4:40; 3.2MB—add to your iPod or mp3 player)

Order book at Amazon.

Thunder’s Mouth Press / October 11, 2005 /

ISBN 1-56025-660-5 / 272 pp./ $24.95

Lemaître convinced Einstein’s generation that the universe was in fact

expanding according to the field equations Einstein himself laid out

in 1917. He is credited with first positing the idea of a temporal and

spatial origin to the cosmos, in a “primeval atom” theory of a

superdense cosmic nucleus from which the universe expanded—what later

became the Big Bang theory. He also developed the "dust" solution,

modifying the work of Karl Schwarzchild, which allowed later

astrophysicists to model black holes. He was in fact the first

physicist to combine training in Einstein’s theory with a rigorous

background in astronomy and astrophysics, allowing him to test, before

anyone else, the true cosmic implications of the general theory of

relativity.

.........................

A Day Without Yesterday': Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang

In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges

Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of

seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein

stood up

applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory

explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” Lemaitre’s

theory, the idea that there was a burst of fireworks which marked the

beginning of time and space on “a day without yesterday”, was a

radical departure from prevailing scientific understandings, though it

has since come to be the most probable explanation for the origin of

the universe.

In the winter of 1998, two separate teams of astronomers in Berkeley,

California, made a similar, startling discovery. They were both

observing supernovae — exploding stars visible over great distances —

to see how fast the universe is expanding. In accordance with

prevailing scientific wisdom, the astronomers expected to find the

rate of expansion to be decreasing, Instead they found it to be

increasing — a discovery which has since “shaken astronomy to its

core” (Astronomy, October 1999).

This discovery would have come as no surprise to Georges Lemaitre

(1894-1966), a Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest who developed

the theory of the Big Bang. Lemaitre described the beginning of the

universe as a burst of fireworks, comparing galaxies to the burning

embers spreading out in a growing sphere from the center of the burst.

He believed this burst of fireworks was the beginning of time, taking

place on “a day without yesterday.”

After decades of struggle, other scientists came to accept the Big

Bang as fact. But while most scientists — including the mathematician

Stephen Hawking — predicted that gravity would eventually slow down

the expansion of the universe and make the universe fall back toward

its center, Lemaitre believed that the universe would keep expanding.

He argued that the Big Bang was a unique event, while other scientists

believed that the universe would shrink to the point of another Big

Bang, and so on. The observations made in Berkeley supported

Lemaitre’s contention that the Big Bang was in fact “a day without

yesterday.”

When Georges Lemaitre was born in Charleroi, Belgium, most scientists

thought that the universe was infinite in age and constant in its

general appearance. The work of Isaac Newton and James C. Maxwell

suggested an eternal universe. When Albert Einstein first published

his theory of relativity in 1916, it seemed to confirm that the

universe had gone on forever, stable and unchanging.

Lemaitre began his own scientific career at the College of Engineering

in Louvain in 1913. He was forced to leave after a year, however, to

serve in the Belgian artillery during World War I. When the war was

over, he entered Maison Saint Rombaut, a seminary of the Archdiocese

of Malines, where, in his leisure time, he read mathematics and

science. After his ordination in 1923, Lemaitre studied math and

science at Cambridge University, where one of his professors, Arthur

Eddington, was the director of the observatory.

For his research at Cambridge, Lemaitre reviewed the general theory of

relativity. As with Einstein’s calculations ten years earlier,

Lemaitre’s calculations showed that the universe had to be either

shrinking or expanding. But while Einstein imagined an unknown force —

a cosmological constant — which kept the world stable, Lemaitre

decided that the universe was expanding. He came to this conclusion

after observing the reddish glow, known as a red shift, surrounding

objects outside of our galaxy. If interpreted as a Doppler effect,

this shift in color meant that the galaxies were moving away from us.

Lemaitre published his calculations and his reasoning in Annales de la

Societe scientifique de Bruxelles in 1927. Few people took notice.

That same year he talked with Einstein in Brussels, but the latter,

unimpressed, said, “Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of

physics is abominable.”

It was Einstein’s own grasp of physics, however, that soon came under

fire. In 1929 Edwin Hubble’s systematic observations of other galaxies

confirmed the red shift. In England the Royal Astronomical Society

gathered to consider this seeming contradiction between visual

observation and the theory of relativity. Sir Arthur Eddington

volunteered to work out a solution. When Lemaitre read of these

proceedings, he sent Eddington a copy of his 1927 paper. The British

astronomer realized that Lemaitre had bridged the gap between

observation and theory. At Eddington’s suggestion, the Royal

Astronomical Society published an English translation of Lemaitre’s

paper in its Monthly Notices of March 1931.

Most scientists who read Lemaitre’s paper accepted that the universe

was expanding, at least in the present era, but they resisted the

implication that the universe had a beginning. They were used to the

idea that time had gone on forever. It seemed illogical that infinite

millions of years had passed before the universe came into existence.

Eddington himself wrote in the English journal Nature that the notion

of a beginning of the world was “repugnant.”

The Belgian priest responded to Eddington with a letter published in

Nature on May 9, 1931. Lemaitre suggested that the world had a

definite beginning in which all its matter and energy were

concentrated at one point:

If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and

time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they

would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum

had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this

suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little

before the beginning of space and time.

In January 1933, both Lemaitre and Einstein traveled to California for

a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein

stood up, applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and

satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

Duncan Aikman covered these seminars for the New York Times Magazine.

An article about Lemaitre appeared on February 19, 1933, and featured

a large photo of Einstein and Lemaitre standing side by side. The

caption read, “They have a profound respect and admiration for each

other.”

For his work, Lemaitre was inducted as a member of the Royal Academy

of Belgium. An international commission awarded him the Francqui

Prize. The archbishop of Malines, Cardinal Josef Van Roey, made

Lemaitre a canon of the cathedral in 1935. The next year Pope Pius XI

inducted Lemaitre into the Pontifical Academy of Science.

Despite this high praise, there were some problems with Lemaitre’s

theory. For one, Lemaitre’s calculated rate of expansion did not work

out. If the universe was expanding at a steady rate, the time it had

taken to cover its radius was too short to allow for the formation of

the stars and planets. Lemaitre solved this problem by expropriating

Einstein’s cosmological constant. Where Einstein had used it in an

attempt to keep the universe at a steady size, Lemaitre used it to

speed up the expansion of the universe over time.

Einstein did not take kindly to Lemaitre’s use of the cosmological

constant. He regarded the constant as the worst mistake of his career,

and he was upset by Lemaitre’s use of his super-galactic fudge factor.

After Arthur Eddington died in 1944, Cambridge University became a

center of opposition to Lemaitre’s theory of the Big Bang. In fact, it

was Fred Hoyle, an astronomer at Cambridge, who sarcastically coined

the term “Big Bang.” Hoyle and others favored an approach to the

history of the universe known as the “Steady State” in which hydrogen

atoms were continuously created and gradually coalesced into gas

clouds, which then formed stars.

But in 1964 there was a significant breakthrough that confirmed some

of Lemaitre’s theories. Workers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey

were tinkering with a radio telescope when they discovered a

frustrating kind of microwave interference. It was equally strong

whether they pointed their telescope at the center of the galaxy or in

the opposite direction. What was more, it always had the same

wavelength and it always conveyed the same source temperature. This

accidental discovery required the passage of several months for its

importance to sink in. Eventually, it won Arno Penzias the Nobel Prize

in physics. This microwave interference came to be recognized as

cosmic background radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang. Lemaitre

received the good news while recovering from a heart attack in the

Hospital Saint Pierre at the University of Louvain. He died in Louvain

in 1966, at the age of seventy-one.

After his death, a consensus built in favor of Lemaitre’s burst of

fireworks. But doubts did persist: Did this event really happen on a

day without yesterday? Perhaps gravity could provide an alternative

explanation. Some theorized that gravity would slow down the expansion

of the universe and make it fall back toward its center, where there

would be a Big Crunch and another Big Bang. The Big Bang, therefore,

was not a unique event which marked the beginning of time but only

part of an infinite sequence of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.

When word of the 1998 Berkeley discovery that the universe is

expanding at an increasing rate first reached Stephen Hawking, he said

it was too preliminary to be taken seriously. Later, he changed his

mind. “I have now had more time to consider the observations, and they

look quite good,” he told Astronomy magazine (October 1999). “This led

me to reconsider my theoretical prejudices.”

Hawking was actually being modest. In the face of the scientific

turmoil caused by the supernovae results, he has adapted very quickly.

But the phrase “theoretical prejudices” makes one think of the

attitudes that hampered scientists seventy years ago. It took a

mathematician who also happened to be a Catholic priest to look at the

evidence with an open mind and create a model that worked.

Is there a paradox in this situation? Lemaitre did not think so.

Duncan Aikman of the New York Times spotlighted Lemaitre’s view in

1933: “‘There is no conflict between religion and science,’ Lemaitre

has been telling audiences over and over again in this country ....His

view is interesting and important not because he is a Catholic priest,

not because he is one of the leading mathematical physicists of our

time, but because he is both.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Midbon, Mark. “‘A Day Without Yesterday’: Georges Lemaitre & the Big

Bang.” Commonweal (March 24, 2000): 18-19.

Published with permission of Commonweal.

THE AUTHOR

Mark Midbon is a senior programmer/analyst at the University of

Wisconsin.

Copyright © 2000 Commonweal