The big bang catholic priest

In 1927, an astronomer and a catholic priest called Georges Lemaître proposed that the universe started from a big bang. He published his findings in a scientific paper.

Nobody believed him. It didn’t make sense at that point. When he told Albert Einstein his findings, Einstein didn’t believe him. Einstein famously replied “Your mathematics is correct, but your physics is horrible”.
Ironically, Georges Lemaître got his big bang theory by studying Einstein’s equation. After looking through the equations, Georges concluded “If the universe is expanding, it must have been smaller in the past. In fact, if you go far back enough in time, you’d get to a point where it was unimaginably small.”
He called this point the primeval atom, or cosmic egg that some time exploded.

He proposed that beyond this time, the universe wasn’t existing. There was a point, when the universe was ‘born’.
People didn’t even take him serious.

In fact, in 1929 Edwin Hubble published his own identical findings, and was more widely accepted. Till today, it is called Hubble’s constant instead of Georges’ constant, even though he came up with it first and published it.

Georges Lemaître’s predictions were eventually proven by Hubble himself using a new bigger telescope.

According to wikipedia:
“ By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lemaître’s theory provided a scientific validation for Catholicism. However, Lemaître 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.[20][21] When Lemaître 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.[22] While a devout Roman Catholic, he was against mixing science with religion,[23] though he also was of the opinion that these two fields of human experience were not in conflict.”

Rev. Fr. Georges Lemaître died in 1966, a year before Nigeria started the Nigerian civil war.

#respect ❤

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