Georges Lemaître's Big Pyrotechnics

Jumping forward a little in the history of physics comes the name Georges Lemaitre. Georges Lemaitre was a catholic priest that you would perhaps know best for that well known explosion: the Big Bang.

Georges Lemaitre at work at the second holiest place for him, a black board.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Georges was born in Charleroi, Belgium, in 1894. Growing up he was interested in both science and theology, but before he had a chance to act on either of these things, he and the rest of Europe were greatly inconvenienced by the first world war. After serving as an artillery officer and witness to the first poison gas attack in history, Georges got himself ordained and studied theoretical physics abroad, eventually obtaining his PHD in america from MIT no less. He continued to be both priest and professor the rest of his life even serving as president of the pontifical academy of sciences from 1960-1966.

The work that made Georges famous occurred in 1927 when he published a paper on solutions of systems of general relativity for expanding universes. Meaning he went to the drawing board, said "huh, wonder what happens if the universe is expanding" worked with general relativity a bit, and came up with a good idea of what was going on. What he concluded was of course, that if the universe was expanding, then rewinding the clock meant that at some point in the past the universe ad been smaller, going back even further meant that at some point the universe had been even smaller, and if you kept going back, at some point the universe had been a speck of infinitely small size and incredibly density and energy. This revelation was ignored. Supposedly he was told by no less than Einstein that his math was perfect, but his physics was terrible.

This was up until another (astro)physicist/astronomer going by the name of Edwin Hubble (yeah the guy they named the telescope after), proved conclusively through extensive examination of distant galaxies that they were indeed all flying apart at a speed proportional to their distance.

This was enormous. Lemaitre had in essence discovered the beginning of time! What's more he in essence had created an incredibly valid theory that meshed with both sides of his personality, it worked for him theologically (indeed perhaps theology inspired him to think of a beginning of time in the first place) and it fit Hubble's observations accordingly. Interestingly enough though, when pope Pious XII tried to call this proof of the catholic faith, Lemaitre tried to separate the religious and scientific portents of the theory, working with theologies instead of validating them.