NIH Director Francis Collins on why Christians must reconcile with science

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59. The physicist known as the Father of the Big Bang Theory was a Roman Catholic priest.

Last edited Fri Apr 5, 2019, 05:11 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/scientists_lemaitre.html

Monsignor Georges Lemaître was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, physicist and astronomer. He is usually credited with the first definitive formulation of the idea of an expanding universe and what was to become known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which Lemaître himself called his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” or the “Cosmic Egg”.

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was born on 17 July 1894 at Charleroi, Belgium. After a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school, the Collège du Sacré-Coeur in Charleroi, he began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain) 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 which he received the Military Cross with palms.

After the war, Lemaître studied physics and mathematics, and simultaneously began to prepare for priesthood. He obtained his doctorate in 1920 and was ordained a priest in 1923. That same year, he became a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England, working with Arthur Eddington, who initiated him into modern cosmology, stellar astronomy and numerical analysis. He spent 1924 at Harvard College Observatory in Massachusetts, U.S.A., and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1925, he returned to Belgium and became a part-time lecturer (and later a full-time professor) at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he remained for the rest of his career.

In 1927, he discovered a family of solutions to Einstein's field equations of relativity that described not a static universe, but an expanding universe (as, independently, had the Russian Alexander Friedmann in 1922). The report which would eventually bring him international fame, entitled “A homogeneous universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae” in translation, was published later in 1927 in the little known journal “Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles”. In this report, he presented his new idea of an expanding universe, and also derived the first statement of what would later become known as Hubble’s Law (that the outward speed of distant objects in the universe is proportional to their distance from us), and provided the first observational estimation of the Hubble constant.

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