Georges Lematre

Georges Henri Joseph douard Lematre (French: [ lmt] ( listen); 17 July 1894 20
June 1966) was a Belgian priest,astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of
Leuven.[1] He proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin
Hubble.[2][3] He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first
estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before
Hubble's article.[4][5][6][7] Lematre also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the
origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of theprimeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".[8]

Early life

According to the Big Bang theory, theuniverse emerged from an extremely dense and hot state
(singularity). Space itself has been expanding ever since, carryinggalaxies with it, like raisins in a rising loaf of
bread. The graphic scheme above is an artist's conception illustrating the expansion of a portion of a flat
universe.

After a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school (Collge du Sacr-Coeur, Charleroi),

Lematre began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven at the age of 17. In
1914, he interrupted his studies to serve as an artillery officer in the Belgian army for the duration
of World War I. At the end of hostilities, he received the Belgian War Cross with palms.
After the war, he studied physics and mathematics, and began to prepare for
the diocesan priesthood, not for the Jesuits.[9] He obtained his doctorate in 1920 with a thesis
entitled l'Approximation des fonctions de plusieurs variables relles (Approximation of functions of
several real variables), written under the direction of Charles de la Valle-Poussin. He
was ordained a priest in 1923.
In 1923, he became a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Cambridge, spending a
year at St Edmund's House (now St Edmund's College, Cambridge). He worked with Arthur
Eddington who initiated him into modern cosmology, stellar astronomy, andnumerical analysis. He
spent the following year at Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Harlow
Shapley, who had just gained a name for his work on nebulae, and at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he registered for the doctorate in sciences.

Career
In 1925, on his return to Belgium, he became a part-time lecturer at the Catholic University of
Leuven. He then began the report which would bring him international fame, published in 1927 in
the Annales de la Socit Scientifique de Bruxelles (Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels),
under the title "Un Univers homogne de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de
la vitesse radiale des nbuleuses extragalactiques" ("A homogeneous Universe of constant mass
and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae"). [10] In this report, he
presented his new idea of an expanding universe (he also derivedHubble's law and provided the first
observational estimation of the Hubble constant[11]) but not yet that of the primeval atom. Instead, the
initial state was taken as Einstein's own finite-size static universe model. The paper had little impact
because the journal in which it was published was not widely read by astronomers outside Belgium ;
Lematre translated his article into English in 1931 with the help of Arthur Eddington but the part of it
pertaining to the estimation of the "Hubble constant" is not translated in the 1931 paper, for reasons
that have never been properly explained. [12]
At this time, Einstein, while not taking exception to the mathematics of Lematre's theory, refused to
accept the idea of an expanding universe; Lematre recalled him commenting "Vos calculs sont

corrects, mais votre physique est abominable"[13] ("Your calculations are correct, but your physics is
atrocious.") The same year, Lematre returned to MIT to present his doctoral thesis on The
gravitational field in a fluid sphere of uniform invariant density according to the theory of relativity.
Upon obtaining the PhD, he was namedordinary professor at the Catholic University of Leuven.
In 1930, Eddington published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society a long
commentary on Lematre's 1927 article, in which he described the latter as a "brilliant solution" to the
outstanding problems of cosmology.[14] The original paper was published in an abbreviated English
translation in 1931, along with a sequel by Lematre responding to Eddington's comments.
[15]

Lematre was then invited to London in order to take part in a meeting of the British Association on

the relation between the physical universe and spirituality. There he proposed that the universe
expanded from an initial point, which he called the "Primeval Atom" and developed in a report
published in Nature.[16] Lematre himself also described his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at
the moment of the creation"; it became better known as the "Big Bang theory," a pejorative term
coined during a BBC radio broadcast by Fred Hoyle who was an obstinate proponent of the steady
state universe, even until his death in 2001.
This proposal met with skepticism from his fellow scientists at the time. Eddington found Lematre's
notion unpleasant. Einstein found it suspect because he deemed it unjustifiable from a physical point
of view. On the other hand, Einstein encouraged Lematre to look into the possibility of models of
non-isotropic expansion, so it is clear he was not altogether dismissive of the concept. He also
appreciated Lematre's argument that a static-Einstein model of the universe could not be sustained
infinitely into the past.
In January 1933, Lematre and Einstein, who had met on several occasionsin 1927 in Brussels, at
the time of a Solvay Conference, in 1932 in Belgium, at the time of a cycle of conferences in
Brussels and lastly in 1935 at Princetontraveled together to the U.S. state of California for a series
of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and is supposed to
have said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever
listened."[17] However, there is disagreement over the reporting of this quote in the newspapers of the
time, and it may be that Einstein was not actually referring to the theory as a whole but to Lematre's
proposal that cosmic rays may in fact be the leftover artifacts of the initial "explosion". Later research
on cosmic rays by Robert Millikan would undercut this proposal, however.
In 1933, when he resumed his theory of the expanding universe and published a more detailed
version in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, Lematre would achieve his greatest glory.
Newspapers around the world called him a famous Belgian scientist and described him as the leader
of the new cosmological physics.
In 1936, he was elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He took an active role there,
becoming its president in March 1960 and remaining so until his death. During Vatican II he was

asked to serve on the first special commission to examine the question of contraception. However,
as he could not travel to Rome because of his health (he had suffered a heart attack in December
1964), Lematre demurred, expressing his surprise that he was even chosen, at the time telling a
Dominican colleague, P. Henri de Riedmatten, that he thought it was dangerous for a mathematician
to venture outside of his speciality.[18] He was also named prelate (Monsignor) in 1960 by Pope John
XXIII.
In 1941, he was elected member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.[citation needed]
In 1946, he published his book on L'Hypothse de l'Atome Primitif (The Primeval Atom Hypothesis).
It would be translated into Spanish in the same year and into English in 1950. [citation needed]
By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lematre's theory provided a scientific validation
for Catholicism. However, Lematre resented the Pope's proclamation, stating that the theory was
neutral and there was neither a connection nor a contradiction between his religion and his theory. [19]
[20]

When Lematre and Daniel O'Connell, the Pope's science advisor, tried to persuade the Pope not

to mention Creationism publicly anymore, the Pope agreed. He persuaded the Pope to stop making
proclamations about cosmology.[21]While a devout Roman Catholic, he was against mixing science
with religion,[22] though he also was of the opinion that these two fields of human experience were not
in conflict.[23]
During the 1950s, he gradually gave up part of his teaching workload, ending it completely with
his mritat in 1964.
At the end of his life, he was devoted more and more to numerical calculation. He was in fact a
remarkable algebraicist and arithmetical calculator. Since 1930, he used the most powerful
calculating machines of the time, the Mercedes. In 1958 he was introduced to the
University's Burroughs E 101, its first electronic computer. Lematre maintained a strong interest in
the development of computers and, even more, in the problems of language and computer
programming.
He died on 20 June 1966, shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave
background radiation, which provided further evidence for his proposal about the birth of the
universe.
In 2005, Lematre was voted to the 61st place of De Grootste Belg ("The Greatest Belgian"),
a Flemish television program on the VRT. In the same year he was voted to the 78th place by the
audience of the Les plus grands Belges ("The Greatest Belgians"), a television show of the RTBF.

Work
Lematre was a pioneer in applying Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity to cosmology. In a
1927 article, which preceded Edwin Hubble's landmark article by two years, Lematre derived what

became known as Hubble's law and proposed it as a generic phenomenon in relativistic cosmology.
Lematre also estimated the numerical value of theHubble constant. However, the data used by
Lematre did not allow him to prove that there was an actual linear relation, which Hubble did two
years later.
Einstein was skeptical of this paper. When Lematre approached Einstein at the 1927 Solvay
Conference, the latter pointed out that Alexander Friedmann had proposed a similar solution to
Einstein's equations in 1922, implying that the radius of the universe increased over time. (Einstein
had also criticized Friedmann's calculations, but withdrew his comments.) In 1931, his annus
mirabilis,[24] Lematre published an article in Nature setting out his theory of the "primeval atom."
Friedmann was handicapped by living and working in the USSR, and died in 1925, soon after
inventing the FriedmannLematreRobertsonWalker metric. Because Lematre spent his entire
career in Europe, his scientific work is not as well known in the United States as that of Hubble or
Einstein, both well known in the U.S. by virtue of residing there. Nevertheless, Lematre's theory
changed the course of cosmology. This was because Lematre:

Was well acquainted with the work of astronomers, and designed his theory to have testable
implications and to be in accord with observations of the time, in particular to explain the
observed redshift of galaxies and the linear relation between distances and velocities;

Proposed his theory at an opportune time, since Edwin Hubble would soon publish
his velocity-distance relation that strongly supported an expanding universe and, consequently,
the Big Bang theory;

Had studied under Arthur Eddington, who made sure that Lematre got a hearing in the
scientific community.

Both Friedmann and Lematre proposed relativistic cosmologies featuring an expanding universe.
However, Lematre was the first to propose that the expansion explains theredshift of galaxies. He
further concluded that an initial "creation-like" event must have occurred. In the 1980s, Alan
Guth and Andrei Linde modified this theory by adding to it a period of inflation.
Einstein at first dismissed Friedmann, and then (privately) Lematre, out of hand, saying that not all
mathematics lead to correct theories. After Hubble's discovery was published, Einstein quickly and
publicly endorsed Lematre's theory, helping both the theory and its proposer get fast recognition. [25]
Lematre was also an early adopter of computers for cosmological calculations. He introduced the
first computer to his university (a Burroughs E101) in 1958 and was one of the inventors of the Fast
Fourier transform algorithm.[26]
In 1933, Lematre found an important inhomogeneous solution of Einstein's field
equations describing a spherical dust cloud, the LematreTolman metric.

In 1931, Lemaitre was the first scientist to propose the expansion of the universe was actually
accelerating which was confirmed observationally in the 1990s through observations of very distant
Type IA supernova with the Hubble Space Telescope. [27]
In 1948 Lematre published[28] a polished mathematical essay "Quaternions et espace elliptique"
which clarified an obscure space. William Kingdon Clifford had cryptically described elliptic space in
1873 at a time when versors were too common to mention. Lematre developed the theory of
quaternions from first principles so that his essay can stand on its own, but he recalled the Erlangen
program in geometry while developing the metric geometry of elliptic space. H. S. M. Coxeter,
another contributor to elliptic geometry, summarized [29] Lematre's work for Mathematical Reviews.

Honours
On 17 March 1934, Lematre received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction,
from King Lopold III. His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Valle-Poussin
and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international jury were
Eddington, Langevin and Thophile de Donder. Another distinction that the Belgian government
reserves for exceptional scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial prize for applied
sciences for the period 19331942.[citation needed]
In 1953, he was given the inaugural Eddington Medal awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society.[30]
[31]

Namesakes

The lunar crater Lematre

Lematre coordinates

Lematre observers in the Schwarzschild vacuum Frame fields in general relativity

Minor planet 1565 Lematre

The fifth Automated Transfer Vehicle, Georges Lematre ATV

Norwegian indie electronic band Lemaitre

Bibliography[edit]

G. Lematre, Discussion sur l'volution de l'univers, 1933

G. Lematre, L'Hypothse de l'atome primitif, 1946

G. Lematre, The Primeval Atom - an Essay on Cosmogony, D. Van Nostrand Co, 1950.

"The Primeval Atom," in Munitz, Milton K., ed., Theories of the Universe, The Free
Press, 1957.

Lematre, G. (1931). "The Evolution of the Universe: Discussion". Nature 128 (3234): 699
701. Bibcode:1931Natur.128..704L. doi:10.1038/128704a0.

Lematre, G. (1927). "Un univers homogne de masse constante et de rayon croissant

rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nbuleuses extragalactiques". Annals of the Scientific
Society of Brussels (in French) 47A: 41.
(Translated in: "A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Growing Radius
Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae". Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society 91: 483490.
1931. Bibcode:1931MNRAS..91..483L. doi:10.1093/mnras/91.5.483.)

G. Lematre (1931-05-09). "The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum
Theory". Nature 127 (3210). Bibcode:1931Natur.127..706L.doi:10.1038/127706b0.
Retrieved 2012-02-28.

Georges Lematre
Belgian astronomer

Born
July 17, 1894
Charleroi, Belgium
Died
June 20, 1966
Leuven, Belgium

Georges Lematre, (born July 17, 1894, Charleroi, Belgiumdied June 20,
1966, Leuven), Belgian astronomer and cosmologist who formulated the modern bigbang theory, which holds that the universe began in a cataclysmic explosion of a small,
primeval super-atom.
A civil engineer, Lematre served as an artillery officer in the Belgian Army during World
War I. After the war he entered a seminary and in 1923 was ordained a priest. He
studied at the University of Cambridges solar physicslaboratory (192324) and then at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge (192527), where he became
acquainted with the findings of the American astronomers Edwin P. Hubble and Harlow
Shapley on the expanding universe. In 1927, the year he became professor
of astrophysics at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), he proposed his big-bang
theory, which explained the recession of the galaxies within the framework of Albert

Einsteins theory of general relativity. Although expanding models of the universe had
been considered earlier, notably by the Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter, Lematres
theory, as modified by George Gamow, has become the leading theory of cosmology.
Lematre also did research on cosmic rays and on the three-body problem, which
concerns the mathematical description of the motion of three mutually attracting bodies
in space. His works includeDiscussion sur lvolution de lunivers (1933; Discussion on
the Evolution of the Universe) andLHypothse de latome primitif (1946; The Primeval
Atom: An Essay on Cosmogony).

BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGES LEMAITRE

(1894-1966)
born July 17, 1894, Charleroi,
Belgium.
died June 20, 1966.

Georges-Henri Lemaitre (1894-1966) showed that religion and science -- or

at least physics -- did not have to be incompatible. LeMaitre, born in
Belgium, was a monsignor in the Catholic church.
Both a priest and a cosmologist, Georges Lemaitre, perhaps not
unexpectedly, spent much of his career studying the origin of the universe.
After a stint as an artillery officer in the Belgian army during World War
I, he entered a seminary and was ordained a priest in the early 1920s.
Shortly after, however, his interest in astronomy brought him to
Cambridge University in England and then to the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. While there, he became captivated by the new idea of an
expanding universe. He reasoned that if the universe was expanding now,
then the further you go in the past, the universes contents must have been
closer together. He envisioned that at some point in the distant past, all the
matter in the universe was crushed into a single object he called the
primeval atom. This primeval atom then exploded, with all its constituent
parts rushing away. His basic idea has become the most widely accepted
model for how the universe originated, what we today call theBig Bang.
He was fascinated by physics and studied Einstein's
laws of gravitation, published in 1915. He deduced that
if Einstein's theory were true (and there had been good

evidence for it since 1919), it meant the universe must

be expanding.

In 1927, the year he got his PhD from MIT, Lemaitre

proposed this theory, in which he stated that the
expanding universe was the same in all directions -- the
same laws applied, and its composition was the same -but it was not static. He had no data to prove this, so
many scientists ignored it. (Another scientist, Soviet
Aleksandr Friedmann, had come to the same conclusion
independently, a few years earlier.) Even Einstein was
reluctant to endorse this extension of his theory of
general relativity. In 1929 at the Mt. Wilson Observatory
in California, Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies
were moving away at high speeds. He was, like most
people, unaware of Lemaitre's 1927 theory. But
Lemaitre used Hubble's dramatic discovery as evidence
for his theory. It was easy. If you imagined the galaxies
rushing away from us as a movie, just run the movie
backwards. After a certain time, all those galaxies will
rush together. Lemaitre put forth the idea that there
was once a primordial atom which had contained all the
matter in the universe. The other support Lemaitre
used was the idea of entropy, which states that
everything is moving towards greater and greater

disorder. Others took notice and named his theory "BIG

BANG."
In the meantime, in 1925, Lemaitre took a position as a part time lecturer
at the Universite' Catholique de Louvain (UCL). It was here he began
down the path towards the thesis that would bring him to the attention of
the world. In 1927, he accepted a full time position at UCL and released his
work entitled: Un Univers homoge`ne de masse constante et de rayon
croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des ne'buleuses
extragalactiques (A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing
radius accounting for the radial velocity (radial velocity: Velocity along the
line of sight toward or away from the observer) of extragalactic nebulae).
This paper explained the expanding universe in a new way, and within the
framework of the General Theory of relativity. Initially, many scientists,
including Albert Einstein, himself, were skeptical. However, further studies
by Edwin Hubble, seemed to prove the theory. Initially called the "Big
Bang Theory" by its critics, the name eventually stuck. Even Einstein was
won over, standing and applauding at a Lemaitre seminar, saying "This is
the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have
ever listened."
Lemaitres theory didnt immediately win a lot of converts. Einstein, for
one, remained unconvinced. It wasnt until Edwin Hubble discovered that
almost every galaxy was rushing away from Earth and that the farther
away the galaxy, the faster it was recedingthat Einstein came around.
Although Lemaitres conception of the Big Bang was prophetic in many
ways, his idea about the initial state of the universe is almost the polar
opposite of what we think today.
Instead of a complex initial structure that broke apart to form the
universes basic constituents, scientists now believe that the universe
started out very simple and then grew more complex as it evolved. That
idea first came from the Russian-born American physicist George
Gamov in the 1940s. Working with his student Ralph Alpher, he envisioned
the universe beginning with an extraordinarily hot Big Bang. As the
universe expanded, this superhot primordial soup of protons, neutrons,
electrons, and radiation grew steadily cooler, and the constituents began
fusing into heavier elements. Helium formed first, followed by all of the
heavier elements, with the process wrapping up within about half an hour.

Lemaitre's ideas opened more questions, many of which forced physics and
astronomy together: What was that primordial atom like? Why would it
explode? He pursued the topic for some time, even suggesting that there
ought to be some form of background radiation in the universe, left over
from the initial explosion of that primordial atom. He became more
interested in the philosophical ramifications of his theory, which were
many. Others took up the big bang theory, and for several years there were
strong debates between those supporting it and those who favored a
"steady state" theory of the universe, in which the universe was eternal
and unchanging. This argument ended when Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson found evidence of cosmic background radiation, which Lemaitre
and other theorists had determined would be the residue of the big bang's
explosion many billions of years ago.
Georges-Henri Lemaitre continued to advance science
throughout his life. He studied cosmic rays and worked
on the three-body problem. His published works
includeDiscussion sur l'e'volution de l'univers (1933;
Discussion on the Evolution of the Universe)
and L'Hypothe`se de l'atome primitif (1946;
Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom). On March 17,
1934, he received the Francqui Prize, the highest
Belgian scientific distinction, from King Le'opold III, for
his work on the expanding universe. In 1941, he was
elected member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and
Arts of Belgium. In 1941, he was elected member of the
Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium. In
1950, he was given the decennial prize for applied
sciences for the period 1933-1942. In 1953 he received
the very first Eddington Medal award of the Royal
Astronomical Society. In 1953 he was given the very
first Eddington Medal award of the Royal Astronomical
Society. During the 1950s, he gradually gave up part of
his teaching workload, ending it completely with his
emeriture in 1964.
In 1936, he was elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He
took an active role there, became the president in March 1960 and

remaining so until his death.

At the outset of the Second Vatican Council, he was bemused to find
himself appointed by the Pope to sit on a commission investigating the
subject of birth control. He was also named prelate (Monsignor) in 1960 by
Pope John XXIII.
At the end of his life, he was devoted more and more to numerical
calculation. He was in fact a remarkable algebraicist and arithmetical
calculator. Since 1930, he used the most powerful calculating machines of
the time like the Mercedes. In 1958, he introduced at the University a
Burroughs E 101, the University's first electronic computer. Fr. Lemai^tre
kept a strong interest in the development of computers and, even more, in
the problems of language and programming. With age, this interest grew
until it absorbed him almost completely.
He died on June 20, 1966 shortly after having learned of the discovery of
cosmic microwave background radiation, proof of his intuitions about the
birth of the Universe.